The Academic Committee of the Mathematics and Statistics program is responsible for designing, organizing and coordinating the Doctoral Program. It will be made up of two representatives from each university proposed by that university.
The programme coordinator will be appointed by the Academic Committee from among the two representatives of the University of Zaragoza and will act as the Chairman of the Committee. The two members of each university in the Academic Committee will be appointed by agreement between the rectors of the participating universities (Art.8.4RD 99/2011).
Each non-coordinating university will appoint a specific coordinator from among the two members who form part of the Academic Commission. This coordinator will preside over the corresponding local Academic Commission, designated by each participating university and to which the two members of the university who belong to the Academic Commission will belong and which will be constituted in accordance with current legislation.
The Academic Committee of the program will assign a tutor to each doctoral student admitted to the program, who will coordinate the interaction with the Academic Committee of the program. The tutor must be a doctor with proven research experience. Proven experience is understood to be fulfilling one of the following conditions:
a) Have two research six-year periods, the last one alive,
b) Have three six-year research periods,
c) Be the IP of a project of the National or Autonomous Plan,
d) Having directed at least one doctoral thesis unanimously awarded “cum laude”,
e) Have a patent,
f) Have at least 5 publications in the last 6 years, three of which must be in JCR journals.
The academic committee of the programme will assign a thesis supervisor to each PhD student within a maximum period of 6 months from the first enrolment. The thesis supervisor is the person ultimately responsible for the coherence and suitability of the PhD student's training in research and transversal skills.
As a general rule, the thesis director will be a professor or researcher from one of the universities participating in the programme, who holds a doctorate and has proven research experience, understood as in the case of the tutor. However, the inclusion of doctors from entities linked to the different participating universities, as well as from research institutes as co-directors of doctoral theses, will be facilitated, in accordance with the respective collaboration and affiliation agreements. Co-supervision by two professors will be encouraged, one from the university to which the student belongs, with proven research experience, and another from any university, who does not need to meet the above requirements. In this way, access to the supervision of doctoral theses will be facilitated for young researchers, without previous experience, who will be able to co-supervise with a researcher with extensive experience in the supervision of doctoral theses.
In the event that a researcher from the business sector participates as co-director of a doctoral thesis, the requirements of accredited research experience indicated above will not be required either.
Within the thesis committees, the participation of international experts will be encouraged, as is already being done in the PhD programmes currently deployed in the participating universities. Specifically, the development of theses with an international doctoral mention will be encouraged, which already entails that two reports from international experts are required in the evaluation of the thesis and that one member of the committee must also be a foreign expert. Note that this is already being done currently (see as an example the list of theses provided in section 6).