The journal is pleased to bring back the tradition of publishing the abstracts of the winners of the TSL Best Dissertation Award. The 2025 dissertation prize committee was chaired by Hai Wang. The other committee members were Jelmer Pier van der Gaast, Sophie Parragh, Tal Raviv, and Joan Walker. Funding: Fabian Akkerman conducted his research in the project DynaPlex: Deep Reinforcement Learning for Data-Driven Logistics, made possible by TKI Dinalog and funded by the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Climate Policy (EZK) of the Netherlands. Bo Lin was supported by City of Toronto Transportation Services and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada [NSERC Alliance Grant ALLRP 561212-20].