Thematic Doctoral Programme

A Thematic Doctoral Programme is created where a group of doctoral supervisors from distinct disciplines work together to create a coherent shared experience for their doctoral students, establishing a programme of advanced education, training and research focused on an identified theme. Students in a thematic programme can benefit from an enhanced sense of community and strengthen their individual research through a sharing of seminar series/journal clubs and other modules. These programmes may be especially useful as a vehicle to build a cohort of experts in new and emerging fields of research.

In the case of inter-institutional thematic programmes, a student may also gain experience of working with colleagues based at another third level institution or an external agency such as a research institute while collaborating on a specific research area. In certain cases, a Thematic Doctoral Programme allows a student to be exposed to a variety of distinct elements within a research area prior to deciding where the main focus of their own research will be.

An example of a thematic PhD Programme closely linked to the Michael Smurfit Graduate School of Business is the Thematic PhD Programme in the area Complex Systems and Computational Social Science Research details of which may be found at : http://geary.ucd.ie/cscs/