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 at the Politecnico di Milano’s Department of Physics, in the field of Condensed Matter Physics. He earned his doctorate in Physics in 1993 at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa. In recent years, his professional life has focused on doctoral education and the organisation of doctoral studies. In 2008 he contributed to the creation of a doctoral programme in mathematical models and methods in engineering. He then moved to the Doctoral School, the administrative body which coordinates the research of over 1500 doctoral candidates. He has been a member of the Steering Committee since 2018 and he served as Dean of the Doctoral School between 2016 and 2021. In 2023 he was appointed Vice-Rector for Talent Development. In this role he is responsible for all actions related to boosting early-stage researchers’ careers.

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 an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences  at Ivane Javakhishvili Tbilisi State University. Dr. Grdzelidze is the founder of Quality Assurance Thematic Working Group of Georgia. She is a member of the Advisory Board for Georgian NQF. She has been a Higher Education Reform Expert in the EU-funded SPHERE initiative  since 2015 and an expert for DAAD Bologna Hub Peer support since 2020. Between 2018 and 2023 she served as  Head of Quality Assurance Service at Tbilisi State University. 

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.

Åse Gornitzka is Pro-Rector at the University of Oslo for 2021-2015. From 2017 to 2021 she was Vice-Rector for Research and Internationalization.  She is Professor at the Department of Political Science at University of Oslo, specializing in public administration. Gornitzka holds a doctoral degree in Public Administration from the University of Twente, the Netherlands. She has been researcher at NIFU and Arena Centre for European Studies at the University of Oslo. Her main research interests are on governance at national and European level and the role that organisational factors play in the governance process and the link between expertise and policy making. She heads the national strategic unit for research of Universities Norway (UHR-Research). She is member of The Guild of European Research-Intensive Universities’ Vice-presidents’ group and the European University Association Research and Innovation Strategy Group.

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.