A PhD student from Syracuse, N.Y. is desperate to retrieve the research notes he says were stolen from his car in Montreal, and is offering $5,000 to anyone who returns them.

Neil Kohan was visiting his wife’s relatives in the city and was planning to work on his dissertation during his spare moments.

But he lost all the notes he had compiled over the last two years when his car was broken into, in broad daylight on Saturday.

The vehicle’s window was smashed and three backpacks were missing. One contained his laptop, his lab notebook, and a thumb drive onto which he had backed up all his material.

Without those notes, Kohan can’t finish his dissertation and may not be able to graduate, leaving him devastated.

"I'm kind of living in the third person right now,” he told CTV Montreal. “This is like an all-time low. I'm not... not too good.”

Kohan had been planning to submit his dissertation for defence in the spring. But with all his work gone, he will likely have to head back to the lab to redo experiments, delaying his graduation.

Montreal police say surveillance cameras recorded the vehicle break-in and they have a good description of the suspected thief.

"They looked at the images and they saw that a suspect was approaching the car, a white man in his 30s with a beard, and he approached the car and left rapidly with the belongings that were inside the car," SPVM officer Manuel Couture told CTV Montreal.

Kohan has since returned to the neighbourhood where the car was broken into, to put up reward signs.

“(I’m) hoping that I could get someone to come offer it (the backpack) up, no questions asked," said Kohan.

He is offering $5,000 for the return of his research and the other items.

Kohan can be reached via email at cloismeg@gmail.com