Regulations for the Doctoral/PhD Program

Regulations for the PhD Program

The PhD committee decides about all regulations and issues of the BCCN Berlin PhD/doctoral program. The PhD committee also approves the admission of applicants. Fellows are expected to fulfill the program's requirements of supervision and training that can be found here.

In this program fellows can obtain a "Dr. rer. nat." (issued by Freie Universität zu Berlin, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, and Technische Universität Berlin) or a "PhD" (issued by Charité Universitätsmedizin Berlin). Links to the official regulations of these institutions are provided below.

Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

Faculty of Life Sciences, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

School IV - Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Technische Universität Berlin

Department of Biology, Chemistry and Pharmacy, Freie Universität Berlin

Charité Universitätsmedizin Berlin

 

Committees

Actual members of the PhD committee are:

Prof. Livia de Hoz, Charité
Prof. Richard Kempter, HU Berlin
Prof. Klaus Obermayer, TU Berlin (head)
Prof. Henning Sprekeler, TU Berlin

 

Credits

The workload of the PhD program is measured in credit points based on the European Credit Transfer and Accumulation System (ECTS). The general rule is that 30 hours of student invested time make up 1 credit point. These hours can be made up of class time as well as time to prepare for or recap classes. Credits can be accrued by lectures, tutorials, praticals, seminars and projects, tutoring, conference presentation etc..

Students in the PhD/doctoral program need to accrue 25 ECTS in total/30 ECTS for PhD students at Charité in course work as followed:

  • 15 ECTS (20 ECTS for PhD Charité fellows) for advanced scientific courses including the compulsory
    attendance in the PhD Lecture Series "Computational Neuroscience and Machine Learning".
  • 10 ECTS for general skills (also called "soft skills") essential for successful scientific work

 

Certificates and transcripts

Upon successful completion of the thesis, a certificate/diploma will be issued by the faculty of the institution where the doctoral student is enrolled.

Students who have fulfilled the requirements for the doctoral degree and who have successfully completed the course work will additionally be awarded a special certificate from the BCCN Berlin. This double-track procedure will allow us to integrate the Doctoral Program into the existing examination structures and thus offer doctoral students a degree that is well accepted by industry and traditional departments. At the same time successful students will obtain a second certificate that clearly documents their education at the BCCN Berlin and their interdisciplinary work in Computational Neuroscience including a transcript of records.