EUA Council for Doctoral Education

Chair of the EUA-CDE Steering Committee. Professor Kanjuo Mrčela was  Head of the Doctoral School of the University of Ljubljana (UL), Slovenia from 2015 to 2021. She was Vice-Dean for postgraduate studies at the Faculty of Social Sciences, UL (2007-2011). Professor Kanjuo Mrčela teaches sociology of work and economic sociology at the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Ljubljana.

Professor Martine Rahier was granted a professorship by the Swiss National Science Foundation in 1988 and became a Professor of Entomology and Animal Ecology at the University of Neuchâtel in 1994. She served as rector of the University of Neuchâtel from 2008 to 2016. She was a member of the Rectors’ Conference of Swiss Universities (2008-2016) and president (2013-2015) of the “swissuniversities”. She has been member of the German Accreditation Council since 2013, Vice-President of European University Association since 2015 and a member of the Council of the Agency for Quality Assurance and Accreditation Austria since 2017.

Professor Barbara Dooley is Dean of Graduate Studies and Deputy Registrar at University College Dublin. She provides support to the Registrar and Deputy President on enhancing the student experience and ensuring the delivery of the university strategy in education. As Dean of Graduate Studies, Professor Dooley works with her team to align UCD’s structured PhD with the National Framework for Doctoral Education to ensure that robust quality assurance is integral to UCD’s doctoral education.

Paolo Biscari is Full Professor in Condensed Matter Physics at the Department of Physics of the Polytechnic University of Milan. He earned his doctorate in Physics in 1993 at Pisa, at the Scuola Normale Superiore. In recent years, his professional life of Paolo Biscari has focused on doctoral education and the organization of doctoral studies. In 2008 he contributed to create, and then became the Head of, the Doctoral Programme in Mathematical Models and Methods in Engineering. He then moved to the Doctoral School, the administrative body which coordinates the research of all the Polytechnic University of Milan doctoral candidates. He has been a member of the Steering Committee and, since January 2016, he serves the Doctoral School as Dean. In 2017 he also became an elected member of the Academic Senate, the political body addressing the strategies of Polytechnic University of Milan.

Research Director of the Doctoral School at Tampere University (2011-), the second biggest university in Finland. She received her PhD in social science from Loughborough University, UK in 2001, and is adjunct professor in the University of Helsinki. Her areas of expertise include social science methodology, ageism, and inclusion and exclusion in working life. She has been strongly engaged with doctoral education on local, national and international levels for the past 15 years, most recently with the EU-funded DocEnhance project. As head of the university-level doctoral school in Tampere, she works closely with the 23 doctoral programmes, teaches methodology, and collaborates with other doctoral schools in Finland and internationally.

Professor Andrei Terian-Dan is Vice-Rector for Research, Innovation and Internationalisation at the Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu, Romania (2020–). As of 2016, he is a member of the National Council for Attesting Academic Titles, Degrees, and Certificates (CNATDCU), the accreditation body for doctoral studies in Romania. His area of expertise includes the history of modern Romanian literature, cultural theory, comparative and world literature. He is Principal Investigator of the ERC Consolidator Grant TRANSHIROL (“A Transnational History of Romanian Literature”).

Irma Grdzelidze is Head of Quality Assurance Service at Ivane Javakhishvili Tbilisi State University, the first and the biggest university of Georgia. Dr. Grdzelidze is an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences. She is the founder and the chair of Quality Assurance Thematic Working Group of Georgia. Dr. Grdzelidze is a member of Advisory Board for Georgian NQF. Since 2015, she has been active as a Higher Education Reform Expert in the EU-funded SPHERE initiative.

Professor for German and Culture Studies at Universidade Católica Portuguesa (UCP) in Lisbon, Vice-Rector for Research and Innovation and Director of CADOS, Católica Doctoral School. Between 2016 and 2019 he served as a Vice-Dean of the Faculty for Human Sciences at UCP. He was Director of the Research Centre for Communication and Culture (CECC) at UCP from 2012 to 2020. His research focuses on the intersection of Cognition and Culture and on the literary representation of the Idea of Europe. Bringing together doctoral education, research excellence and the dynamics of innovation is a landmark of his academic interests.

Pro-Rector of the University of Oslo for the period 2021-2025.

Åse Gornitzka was appointed Professor of political science at the University of Oslo in 2011. Previously, she was Professor at the Institute of administration and organizational science at the University of Bergen in 2014-2016. Åse Gornitzka was Vice-Rector for Research and Internationalization at UiO from 2017-2021.

Karin van Wingerde holds a chair in Corporate Crime and Governance at Erasmus School of Law, Erasmus University Rotterdam, the Netherlands. She earned her doctorate in Criminology in 2012 at Erasmus School of Law. Her research is situated at the intersection of regulation, governance, and compliance and addresses the interplay between various public, private, and hybrid modes of governance and corporate, white-collar, and organized crime and harm. Between 2014 and 2019 she was Dean of Education of the doctoral programme at Erasmus School of Law. Since 2021 she is Director of Erasmus Graduate School of Law.