Welcoming Greetings from the Director

• The 27th and 28th September 2021 the election of the new Director of the Doctoral School took place: the new Director is Prof. Eleonora BONIFACIO.

Welcome to the Doctoral School, the reference body for high level education on research of the University of Torino.

The School is young, as it was founded in 2018 by uniting the former four PhD schools of the university. It was born as a challenge: PhD programs in humanities, socio-economics, health sciences and hard sciences were brought together under one umbrella.  The School is therefore really multidisciplinary and aims at coordinating the activities of the various PhD programs to give each PhD Candidate the same formative opportunities, while respecting differences and specificities. The School is a meeting point where coordinators and PhD Candidates exchange opinions and experiences towards a common goal: the success of the program both from a professional and personal point of view. 

During your PhD you will certainly acquire high level knowledge and skills on your specific research topic, but an underlying objective of all PhD programs is the development of critical thinking and top-level capacity in analysis and synthesis, as well as an understanding of the added value of collaboration when dealing with complex systems. These are appreciated and required characteristics of any professional career. But a PhD is not only that; there is something that is less easy to describe and also depends on the stage in life during which a PhD program is typically carried out. It has to do with the satisfaction felt when the logical link between the results obtained in a research is perceived, the feeling everybody has when his/her name appears for the first time as an author of a published article or book, and the emotion of being allowed to use the designatory letters “PhD” after the name. Because any PhD holder knows perfectly what this acronym represents.

I wish you all very fruitful work

Eleonora Bonifacio, PhD