CIVIS representatives have begun to lay the foundations to harmonize the Doctoral programmes of its eight universities during a two-day meeting held at Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (UAM) on December 12th and 13th 2019.
Over the two working days, teams from the universities of Aix-Marseille, Athens, Brussels, Bucharest, Madrid, Rome and Stockholm shared in detail the organization and regulation of their own Doctoral Programs, and analyzed strategies to strengthen their collaboration and establish joint projects at this educational level within the CIVIS framework. At the end of the meeting, the participants agreed on a series of conclusions and promote actions in order to move forward on this point.
Among the priorities identified by CIVIS representatives are the promotion of international mobility of doctoral students within the alliance and facilitating the development of co-directed thesis. In addition, they identified activities which may be of interest to doctoral students of the eight universities that make up the alliance, such as the Research Symposium for Doctoral Students in Health Sciences and Biomedicine to be held at UAM on 22 May 2020. Finally, it has been agreed to strengthen communication related to Doctoral Programmes and other possible areas of interest have been identified, such as the organisation of Summer Schools.
This meeting is another step in the development of the CIVIS project, particularly in relation to the objective of promoting educational and research excellence programs. One of the goals of the CIVIS alliance is that 20% of their doctoral thesis receive the European Doctorate label by 2022.