The official launching ceremony of the European Joint Doctorate Project «Simulation in Multiscale Physical and Biological Systems (STIMULATE)» was held on Monday the 14^th of January at the premises of The Cyprus Institute which is the coordinator of the project.

STIMULATE aims to promote international, intersectoral and multi-/interdisciplinary collaboration in doctoral training in Europe. It brings together Mathematicians, Computer Scientists, Physicists and Biologists to implement an innovative training PhD program with the objective to train the next generation of computational scientists to use simulation and data analytics to advance their domain of specialization.

The program covers scientific applications in Computational Fluid Dynamics, Lattice Quantum Chromodynamics, Biological Systems and Brain Imaging. Fifteen fully-funded PhD fellowships were offered to outstanding candidates irrespective of nationality and gender. Each of the fifteen students of the program will obtain a single joint PhD degree from three academic institutions. Students will be seconded to industrial partners to receive hands-on training and complementary expertise in computer technologies, mathematical modelling and data analytics.

The 15 PhD fellows of the project that were recruited from all over the world attended the launching ceremony. All the involved postgraduate students and academic advisors stayed in Cyprus for three days for the completion of the implementation planning of the project. The Cyprus Institute and the University of Cyprus will be hosts for 12 doctoral fellows in total.

At the launching ceremony of the STIMULATE project, the National Scientist of the Republic of Cyprus, Mr. Kyriakos Kokkinos and the Head of the Dept. of Higher and Tertiary Education, Ministry of Education & Culture, Dr. Terpsa Constantinidou gave a welcome address. Mr. Kokkinos mentioned among others how important such endeavors are for Cyprus and its scientific community and stated that the Institute can contribute towards the accomplishment of the governmental targets for the implementation of high level research activities.

Dr. Constantinidou commended the work of The Cyprus Institute and the importance of the STIMULATE project being funded by the «Marie Skłodowska-Curie» framework of Horizon 2020.

As she specified, this consists a huge success for Cyprus as the coordinating country of two such projects, and highlights the attractiveness of innovative doctorate programs at the European level.

A speech also was given by the representatives of the partner institutes, Prof. Andreas Frommer, Vice-Rector of the University of Wuppertal, Assoc. Prof. Nazario Tantalo from the University of Rome “Tor Vergata”, Prof. Paolo Carloni from the Aachen University RWTH, Prof. Rachel Nechushtai from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Prof. Raffaele Tripiccione from the University of Ferrara, Dr. Costas Bekas from IBM Research Zurich, and Prof. Constantia Alexandrou from The Cyprus Institute and the University of Cyprus.

The ceremony was also attended by representatives from the rest of the academic institutions (Humboldt University of Berlin), research centers (DESY- Zeuthen, Jülich and The Cyprus Institute of Neurology & Genetics) and private companies (ΙΒΜ-Research Ζurich, NVIDIA and MAGWEL).

The attendees included distinguished academics, scientists and entrepreneurs.