Yassine El Maazouz received the Prix du stage de recherche (Research internship award) from the École polytechnique in Paris.

He earned this distinction for his work on statistics of multivariate Gaussian distributions on local fields and their tropicalization under the supervision of Professor Bernd Sturmfels of the Nonlinear Algebra group during his summer internship at the MPI MiS. He investigated various classic statistical problems in this tropicalized setting and formed connections to the theory of buildings (more specifically Bruhat-Tits buildings). He also tropicalized Gaussian distributions in lower dimensions, formulated a conjecture to generalize the procedure for higher dimensions and came up with an algorithm to compute these tropicalizations.