PhD in brief

The Industrial PhD program in Modeling and Data Science trains students to develop new approaches to collect, organize, extract information from massive, heterogeneous and complex data. Students will learn the necessary methods to analyze datasets and to forecast future behaviors through “ad hoc” mathematical models. They will become expert users of computers and they will develop the appropriate attitudes for a quantitative approach to the study of real-life problems.

 The PhD program will be focused on an interdisciplinary approach, so that the graduates will be able to solve problems using mathematics, physics, high performance computing, and statistics in different contexts such as chemistry, medicine and social sciences. To this end, a number of companies, health centers as well as centers for humanities or social sciences that are partners of the PhD program will provide challenging datasets. Students will thus learn to apply standard techniques and develop innovative ones to answer complex questions arising in variety of fields ranging from bioinformatics to neurosciences, from economics to social sciences, medicine, law, humanities…

The mission of the program is to provide graduates with innovative tools to deal with present and future challenges in data analysis of Big or Small datasets. The successful students will be able to address data research problems with inventive and creative solutions, capable of generating new knowledge, through studies that demonstrate a high degree of intellectual merit and the potential for broader impact. Data mining, machine learning, statistical analysis, simulation will be some of the important keywords of the student’s daily experience. Education to improve the collaboration between technicians and users of the models will be an unavoidable ingredient of an interdisciplinary preparation.

The PhD program will promote collaborations with international experts. Scientists of high international reputation will teach part of the courses. Students working for one of the company supporting the program will work on a research project, agreed with the company and under the supervision of an academic and an industrial tutor. The research of each student is expected to lead to publications in international scientific journals or to patents. 

The research themes of the program mainly belong to the classes PE1, PE2, PE6 of the research areas of the European Research Council but the contexts of application include many other classes, such as SH1, SH2, SH3, SH4, SH6, PE4, LS2, LS9 and many others. Furthermore, Data Science is recognized in HORIZON 2020.

Coordinator: Prof Laura Sacerdote (Università di Torino)