Michał Czuba, M.Sc. from the Department of Artificial Intelligence received the Jan Mozrzymas scholarship for outstanding achievements in interdisciplinary research. He is one of nine nine people from Wrocław University of Science and Technology who became this year's laureates of the Student Scholarship Program. The awards were presented during the Science Day celebrations in Wrocław. Congratulations!

Michał Czuba is pursuing his doctoral thesis "On spreading phenomena and influence maximisation in multilayer networks" under the supervision of Prof. Piotr Bródka from the Department of Artificial Intelligence and Dr. Katarzyna Musiał (University of Technology Sydney). The work focuses on two issues: maximizing impact and dissemination processes.

– I look at both of them in the context of multilayer networks, i.e., a graph model – explains Michał Czuba. – The model does not only identify nodes and connections between them, but also groups them into layers reflecting different types of relationships, such as users being friends on various social media platforms.

Maximizing impact, on the other hand, involves finding a subset of nodes (known as a seed set) that allows the spread of a phenomenon (e.g., information) to the largest possible area of the network, starting the propagation from this subset.

– Propagation processes, on the other hand are a problem of modelling phenomena that spread through networks in a way that is most consistent with reality – explains the scholarship winner. – Take as an example the spread of a virus, which has a completely different dynamic than the spread of political opinions, he further explains.

The application research in this area has a potential to limit the spread of misinformation or to analyse the development of epidemics, which is particularly relevant at present and was also relevant during the past COVID-19 pandemic.

Michał Czuba is pursuing his doctorate with significant involvement from the University of Technology Sydney, where he was on a quarterly scientific internship.

In July 2025, together with Mateusz Stolarski, also from our Faculty, they received the Best Posters Award at the NetSci conference. The winning poster showed their research findings on using graph neural networks to detect key users in a network from the perspective of the social influence propagation process.

For outstanding achievements

The Student Scholarship Program is an initiative of the Mayor of Wrocław and is run by the Wrocław Academic Centre. Applications submitted by doctoral students from Wrocław universities (in eight categories) are evaluated by committees including recognized authorities associated with the Wrocław scientific community. The amount of the scholarship is PLN 2,000 per month, and it is paid to the awarded students for a maximum of nine months.

This year, most of the 24 scholarships, as many as nine, went to scientists from WUST.

The laureates are:

• Olga Kaczmarczyk and Radosław Szymon (the Max Born scholarship for outstanding achievements in the field of physical and chemical sciences),
• Michał Czuba from our Faculty and Mateusz Napiórkowski (the Jan Mozrzymas scholarship for outstanding achievements in interdisciplinary research),
• Jacek Wszoła and Sylwester Piątek (the Hugon Steinhaus scholarship for outstanding achievements in mathematical sciences),
• Mikołaj Krakowski, Dominika Rapacz-Kinas, and Paweł Urbański (the Marian Suski Scholarship for outstanding achievements in the field of engineering and technical sciences).

The scholarship committees also awarded honorary recognitions in each category. Five of them are representatives of our university:

• Martyna Nizioł (the Max Born scholarship),
• Marta Hendler (the Jan Mozrzymas scholarship),
• Hubert Woszczek (the Hugon Steinhaus scholarship),
• Seweryn Malazdrewicz, Maciej Roszak (the Marian Suski scholarship).