Ms. Maria Martha Garcia Diaz has been appreciated for her BA thesis entitled "The Race for Influence in Central America: China v. The United States". Her dissertation, prepared under the supervision of Dr. Małgorzata Kołaczek, received recognition for it’s quality and innovative research ideas.

In her work Ms. Garcia Diaz offered a comparative analysis on how Washington’s zero-sum game and Beijing’s win-win approaches towards the Central American isthmus region differ from each other. She discovered that from a socio-economic and political perspective, China has conducted better strategies in the region in recent years, which has led to the United States’ slow decrease of its long-lasting hegemony and influence.