The PhD program at UPF Engineering

PhD PROGRAM

- OVERVIEW: ENG-UPF has evolved from training individuals to a comprehensive ecosystem cultivating globally competitive researchers for careers in academia and industry. Our training model ensures high-quality supervision, rigorous publication standards, and seamless cross-disciplinary collaboration. It provides access to top-tier research infrastructure, and guarantees mobility through competitive project funding and a dedicated travel grant program for international conferences.

- RECRUITMENT AND FUNDING: approximately 45 Early Stage Researchers (ESRs) join annually. All 206 currently active ESRs are fully funded. For 2021-25, 112 ESRs with grants from competitive external programs, 29 corresponding to AEI’s pre-doctoral program (Spain's most selective scheme, offering only 1 position every four years to top teams). ENG-UPF was also involved in 9 Marie Curie Doctoral Networks (2 coordinated) in 2021-25. Complementing that, the unit runs its own fellowship program, and the share of industrial PhDs is rising (26% in 2024-25), supported by partners such as BMAT, Eurecat, Huawei, i2Cat, Sony, or Yamaha. ENG-UPF also hosts ESRs with external contracts at top institutions (e.g., CERN) and it has recently closed the 4th edition of its Dorcas Muthoni PhD Fellowship for African women in STEM.

- OUTPUT AND IMPACT: 186 PhD theses were defended in 2021-25, all in English. This yields 0,83 theses per permanent faculty member per year – six times the average of Spain's public universities [Source: www.iune.es]. One ESR obtained the only Google PhD Fellowship in Spain in 2025. Alumni occupy relevant positions in academia (e.g., King’s College London, Harvard, Yale, University of Vienna, Univ. Cardiff, British Columbia, MIT), industry (e.g., Adobe, Amazon, Epic Games, Innovamat, Meta, Microsoft, Snapchat), entrepreneurship (e.g., ChangeDyslexia, RSS.com, VirTest), and policy-making (e.g., JRC), generating new opportunities for research and education.

This excellence led to the ANECA ACCREDITATION of the PhD Programme with the "Excellence" distinction and the highest possible score in the Spanish system for Scientific Performance.

- PhD TRAINING MODEL: it is most intensive during the first year, to establish a strong foundation. The curriculum is designed to cultivate deep cross-disciplinary literacy and systemic awareness, to ensure that ESRs can critically position their inquiries within wider societal, industrial, and governance ecosystems. The modules remain open to ESRs throughout their doctoral journey, ensuring continuous access to advanced topics as their projects evolve.

FIRST YEAR: ESRs engage with our PhD seminar series, designed to transcend disciplinary boundaries and span the entire research value chain. ESRs customize their development within the full catalogue by completing a minimum of 15 hours, tailoring development to their needs. Delivered via in-person, hybrid, and asynchronous formats to accommodate industrial and hybrid students, the curriculum is taught by a rotating roster of internal faculty and external experts, and it evolves annually. It is structured around three interconnected pillars:

- Research foundations and ethical rigor: statistics and experimental design, software reproducibility, gender dimensions, responsible conduct, ethical aspects of research with human subjects, and the responsible use of AI in scientific workflows.

- Professional skills, innovation and communication: intellectual property, data management, innovation pathways, social impact, technical writing, scientific career planning, communication with lay audiences, productivity and mental health, gender-related challenges in academia, and roundtables featuring alumni experiences in academia, industry, and public policy.

- Institutional resources and community: workshops on advanced library and computational resources, seminars by faculty and external speakers; peer-to-peer support is driven by an ESR-run collective initiated in 2024 that organizes targeted thematic fora alongside institutional social events to anchor the cohort.

ESRs undergo a formal evaluation at the end of the first year, involving a committee of three members.

SECOND YEAR: focus shifts toward visibility, dissemination, and networking. The core milestone is the annual PhD Workshop, where ESRs showcase their research to a broad audience.

THIRD YEAR: training pivots toward the exploitation and transfer of research results, with specialized training in entrepreneurship, spin-off formation, open source communities, and industrial commercialization. Recognizing that a single unit cannot cover every niche, we also strategically connect researchers with external initiatives (e.g., Jump4Women, EIT Health Women Entrepreneurship Bootcamp, Xartec Venture Builder, Ignite Program at Cambridge, BA Deep Tech Pre-Acceleration, EIT Health Digital Medical Devices Summer School, IDEA2 at MIT, Alira Market Access Support Program).

* POSTDOCTORAL: all postdoctoral researchers are embedded in a research group and provided access to infrastructure, resources and training. Positions in 2021-25 included 13 individual MSCA grants (11 individual fellowships, 2 COFUND fellows within the AIRA program), and 8 Juan de la Cierva.