The EUPRERA PhD Award for Excellent Doctoral Thesis is awarded every two years to honor Europe's best dissertation in the fields of public relations, corporate communication, and communication management. A committee of 15 professors was involved in reviewing the submissions and selecting the winning dissertation.

In his dissertation (completed 2023 at University of Leipzig, Germany), Jens examined whether the image of CEOs or party leaders, employees or party members, celebrity testimonials or social media influencers transfered to their respective organisations. Drawing on basic research in cognitive psychology, the work developed and tested a dual process model of image transfer that distinguishes between affective and cognitive, explicit and implicit, and controlled and automatic image transfers. Among other things, implicit and automatic image transfers could be demonstrated for the first time.