Summary of agreements of the PhD programme in Biomedical Research concerning the monitoring and assessment of PhD students and the criteria for the presentation and defence of the PhD thesis.
The Academic Committee of the PD in Biomedical Research, in a meeting held on 2 February 2017, has taken a series of agreements to implement the adaptation of our programme to the new regulations for the presentation and defence of Doctoral Theses of the University of Valladolid. The agreements reached aim, on the one hand, to comply with the regulations and, on the other hand (and more importantly) to ensure the quality of the programme's theses and the training of our PhD students.
The key points approved are:
(compulsory from 1 October 2017). In our programme, a first or second quartile JCR publication (Q1 or Q2) will be required. Without assessing the position of the PhD student in the group of authors, it will also be required that the subject of the article corresponds to that of the PhD thesis.
In addition to complying with the requirements of the stay abroad established by RD99/2011 and detailed in the UVa regulations, the Thesis document must be written in English in its entirety (with an abstract in Spanish). Likewise, the defence will also be in English.
With the new regulations, the tribunals are now made up of three members, and the experts who issue the previous report can no longer be members of the tribunal, and they can also request changes to which the PhD student must respond (such as the peer review system for articles). To ensure the quality of the process, five possible experts will be provided together with the pdf of the thesis to be sent for assessment, from which the academic committee will select two.
In order to obtain a positive evaluation of the academic year, each full-time student must complete a minimum of 30 hours of training activities (of those proposed by the Programme or by the EsDUVa). Regardless of which ones are chosen, attendance at the cycle of seminars and the regular presentation of the Thesis project at these seminars remain compulsory activities.