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Something new! The final of the My Thesis in 180 Seconds competition is open to the public. The two prize winners will fly off in May for the grand final in Quebec.

From one Doctorate title to another, the academic ceremony, which will take place on Saturday March 23, 2013, at the University of Liège, will be the opportunity to highlight the demanding nature of research and to build bridges between the generation of freshly graduated researchers and more experienced researchers/professors, whose already very developed academic and scientific pathways have kindled the admiration of the ULg and its Faculties.

Ten international personalities, whose names have been put forward by the Faculties, will receive ULg Honorary Doctorates (see the list below). The ceremony will begin by 242 new Doctorate graduates from the ULg’s Faculties being honoured, in caps and gowns.

The day will begin with a ‘first.’ In effect the ULg will be holding the final of the ‘My Thesis in 180 Seconds’ competition: 20 doctoral researchers or recent Doctorate graduates at the ULg will pick up the challenge of presenting their research to the general public in a maximum of three minutes. A jury will select the two prize winners of the ULg competition, who will depart for Quebec next May to take part in the Quebec inter-university competition.

Inspired by the very popular Australian concept, Three Minutes Thesis, the ‘My Thesis in 180 Seconds’ competition has been organised by Quebec since two years ago. In 2013 the Quebec organisers opened it up to other francophone universities in the world. The ULg has decided to take part.

Through this competition, researchers are invited to develop their communicational skills and to present the subject of their thesis in an accessible, clear, concise and as convincing a way as possible. The general public is invited to attend the ULg final, which will take place at the Liège Zoology Institute, in the framework of the 2013 Springtime of Sciences weekend Open Days.
 
→ The Academic Ceremony granting ULg Honorary Doctorates and awarding new ULg doctorates
Saturday March 23 2013 at 10.00 – Amphithéâtres de l’Europe at the Sart Tilman campus (by invitation)
More info? www.ulg.ac.be/dhc2013
 
→ Final of the ‘My Thesis in 180 Seconds’ competition
Saturday March 23 2013 à 15h30 – Liège Zoology Institute, quai Van Beneden, 4020 Liège – Open to all, free of charge, no reservation necessary.
More info? www.ulg.ac.be/180secondes

ABOUT THE NEW ULg HONORARY DOCTORATES

Proposed by the Faculties
 
→Faculty of Philosophy and Letters
Antoine Compagnon, Professor at the College of France (Chair in French and Contemporary Literature) is one of the foremost figures of contemporary literary criticism, editor of Proust, expositor of Montaigne and theorist of literary form.
 
→Faculty of Law and Political Sciences
Pierre Mayer taught private international law at the University of Paris 1 (Panthéon Sorbonne) before being awarded Emeritus status in 2012. He is considered a legend of business law as a legal practitioner of international arbitration law.
 
→Faculty of Sciences
Michael Graetzel is a Professor of Chemistry at the Lausanne Federal Polytechnic School, and the Director of the Laboratory of Photonics and Interfaces. He is the inventor of the ‘Graetzel cells’, which hold much promise in terms of converting solar energy into electric energy.
 
→Faculty of Medicine
Constantine A. Stratakis is the Science Director of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD – Bethesda, MD, United States). Paediatrician, geneticist, and endocrinologist, he combined these three specialisms to clarify the genetic origins of endocrine neoplasia.

→Faculty of Applied Sciences
René Therrien, Professor at the University of Laval in Quebec, is currently one of most brilliant scientists in the domain of hydrogeology, the modelling of ground water and the transportation of contaminants in the subsoil.

→ Faculty of Veterinary Medicine
Maurice Pensaert (University of Gent) was the first to discover epidemic diarrhoea virus in pigs and porcine respiratory corona virus. He was the first European researcher to isolate and identify the bird flu virus in pigs.

→Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences
Linda Allal is Honorary Professor at the University of Geneva. He is a specialist in evaluation methods in education.
 
→HEC-Management School – University of Liège
Knox Lovell was a Professor at the University of Georgia (United States) and at the University of Queensland (Australia). He is recognised as one of the founding fathers of frontier production methods and the ensemble of his contribution in the area of analysing productive activities.
 
→Institute for Human and Social Sciences
John Mollenkopf (City University of New York) is one of the biggest specialists in urban analysis, the comparative analysis of cities and the impact of migratory patterns in the United States. He is also interested in the comparative analysis of urban processes in the United States and in Eastern Europe.
 
→Gembloux Agro-Bio Tech
Bernard Chevassus-au-Louis, former Research Director at the INRA (France), Inspector General of Agriculture and member of the General Agriculture, Food and Rural Areas Council, as well as the Academy of Technologies. He currently presides over the Food Observatory and the ‘Scientific and Technological Culture’ Excellence Initiative Steering Committee.

About the ULg’s doctoral students

242 researchers were proclaimed Doctors in 2012 at the ULg: 131 men and 111 women. There theses were defended in the different ULg Faculties: 70 in the Faculty of Sciences, 46 in Medicine, 34 in Applied Sciences, 26 at Gembloux Agro-Bio Tech, 19 at the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine, 16 in Psychology and Educational Sciences, 14 in Philosophy and Letters, 7 at the Institute for Human and Social Sciences, 6 at HEC-ULg and 4 in Law. Overall the ULg has 2,075 researchers studying doctorates (44% women). 13% come from an EU country, 24% from outside the EU. Each year over 200 new Doctors graduate at the ULg.

Marking its support for the European Charter for Researchers and the Code of Conduct for the Recruitment of Researchers, the ULg benefits from the European Commission’s ‘Human Resources Strategy for Researchers’ label. In its support of its policy of researcher mobility, the ULg has one of the 200 EURAXESS centres (established in 35 countries); this centre offers a free and personalised service in order to help foreign or Belgium researchers to plan and organise their research stay. Together with the ULg’s Doctoral Research Network and the dissemination of sciences Unit, ‘Réjouisciences,’ the ULg also helps its researchers to develop certain skills, such as communicating with the general public. In the same way as the Doc Café (research presentations in cafés), the ‘My Thesis in 180 Seconds’ competition falls in with this objective.

More info? http://www.ulg.ac.be/cms/c_25325/fr/doctorant