Wintersim 2016 has held a Ph.D. Colloquium sponsored by ACM SIGSIM and INFORMS-Sim. The Colloquium has given an opportunity to showcase the research work of 18 PhD students, that are within one year of their graduation, during two presentation sessions and a poster session.

The presentation sessions have been introduced by an influential keynote speech given by Prof. Gabriel Wainer on "Discrete-Event Modeling and Simulation Methodologies: Past, Present and Future".

PhD students that were also main authors of a contributed paper accepted in a regular track competed for the Best PhD Paper Awards. ACM SIGSIM has awarded a prize for the best paper in the “Computational and Model Representation Techniques in Modeling and Simulation”, INFORMS-Sim has awarded a prize for the best paper in the “Advanced Applications of Simulation and Optimization”.

The members of the PhD Colloquium Committee that selected the best papers were Andrea D’Ambrogio (chair - University of Rome Tor Vergata), Esfandyar Mazhari (FedEx Services Corporation), Emily Lada (SAS Institute) and Anastasia Anagnostou (Brunel University London).

The ACM SISGIM award has been given Tom Warnke (University of Rostock, Germany) for the paper entitled "Population-based CTMCs and Agent-based Models”, authored by Tom Warnke, Oliver Reinhardt and Adelinde M. Uhrmacher.

The INFORMS-SIM award has been given to Sara Shashaani (Purdue University, USA), for the paper entitled "ASTRO-DF: Adaptive Sampling Trust-Region Optimization Algorithms, Heuristics and Numerical Experience", authored by Sara Shashaani, Susan R. Hunter and Raghu Pasupathy.