The Computation-based Science and Technology Research Centre (CaSToRC) of The Cyprus Institute (CyI) will coordinate a consortium of 13 European academic and industrial institutions to implement a European Joint Doctorate (ITN - EJD) programme in Computational Science over the next 4 years. The programme is entitled “Simulation in Multiscale Physical and Biological Systems (STIMULATE)” and has been selected to receive funding of about 3.7 M Euro. The Project Coordinator is Constantia Alexandrou, Institute Professor at CyI and Professor at the Physics Department of the University of Cyprus.

The programme is under the prestigious Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions of Horizon2020. STIMULATE is the second ITN-EJD project to be coordinated by the Cyprus Institute. The first ITN-EJD project, entitled “High Performance Computing in Life Sciences Engineering and Physics (HPC-LEAP)”, was funded in 2014 under the first call of proposals of H2020. STIMULATE extends the HPC-LEAP framework and takes a decisive step towards establishing a joint European doctoral programme based on advanced computational science and its applications.

The coordination of two out of approximately 30 such projects funded since 2014 across Europe is a huge success for the Institute but also for Cyprus and highlights the capacity of the country as a European centre of excellence in education and training.

The participating institutions entrusted CyI with the coordination of the programme, capitalising on the successful coordination of the HPC-LEAP programme and on the existing interdisciplinary PhD programme in Computational Sciences, which was launched at a period when only a handful of such PhD programmes existed in Europe. The University of Cyprus is also an important partner in the programme, clearly demonstrating the added value that a synergy between a novel research institute and a leading university can bring about to a country.

STIMULATE at a glance
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 programme with the objective to train the next generation of computational scientists to use simulation and data analytics to advance their domain of specialization.

The programme covers scientific applications in Computational Fluid Dynamics, Lattice Quantum Chromodynamics, Biological Systems and Brain Imaging. Fifteen fully-funded PhD fellowships will be offered to outstanding candidates irrespective of nationality and gender. Each of the fifteen students of the programme 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.

Consortium
In addition to The Cyprus Institute and the University of Cyprus, the other degree awarding institutions are the Universities of Rome Tor Vergata and Ferrara (Italy), the Universities of Wuppertal, Berlin and Aachen (Germany) and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (Israel). The Cyprus Institute of Neurology and Genetics, the Juelich Super-computing centre, the research centre DESY, IBM-Zurich, NVIDIA and MAGWEL NV are partners in the project.