In the academic year 2019/2020, more than 1600 students graduated from the University of Luxembourg, including 129 doctoral candidates. The university traditionally confers the diplomas and celebrates the success of its graduates at the Graduation Week in December. Considering the ongoing health crisis, the event was postponed to spring 2021. On 12 May, a smaller, livestreamed event took place to congratulate the graduates and wish them all the best on their future paths.
Celebrating an important milestone
Between September 2019 and December 2020, 10 PhD students defended their thesis at the LCSB, joining the almost eighty doctoral candidates who completed their PhDs since the creation of the centre. The Doctoral Graduation Ceremony was the occasion to celebrate their achievements and to mark this important milestone. In no particular order, congratulations to Dr Simone Larsen, Dr Zoé Hanss, Dr Ni Zeng, Dr Gaia Zaffaroni, Dr Laurent Mombaerts, Dr Federico Baldini, Dr Clara Berenguer-Escuder, Dr Anna Sophia Monzel, Dr Jennifer Modamio Chamarro, Dr Oihane Uriarte Huarte and their supervisors!
The ceremony took place virtually from 17.00 to 18.30, with only a few invited participants in the room. You can re-watch the live stream in the video below.
During the ceremony, the university honoured 15 doctoral graduates with “Excellent Thesis Awards” recognising the outstanding quality of their doctoral theses. These awards celebrate cutting-edge research and are awarded to the top 10% of the university’s doctorates. Dr Anna Sophia Monzel who was a PhD student in the Developmental & Cellular Biology group is among the nine awardees from the Doctoral School in Science and Engineering. During her stay at the LCSB, she worked on a midbrain model for understanding Parkinson’s disease and is now continuing her scientific career as a postdoctoral researcher at Columbia University in New York. Once again, congratulations!
Doctoral candidates at the heart of the LCSB
2020 has been a very peculiar year and quite a challenging one for all the young researchers working on their doctoral thesis. So, it is all the more important to acknowledge that many have successfully graduated in the past academic year and that the LCSB values greatly its role in training the next generation of scientists.
Within its 16 research groups, around 60 PhD students are working on scientific projects and learning how to become fully fledged researchers. They are the lifeblood of our teams, performing experiments and bringing in new ideas. The LCSB strives to provide them with a good training environment and a formative experience. “I am very impressed by how the doctoral candidates have faced the challenges over the past year. I want to congratulate the ones who have graduated and to ensure those who are still working on their thesis that we will fully support them through these unusual times,” says Rudi Balling, director of the LCSB. “We know this is an important steppingstone for their scientific career or the next phase of their professional life.”
In the video below, get a glimpse of what PhD life at the LCSB is all about.