Students enrolled in the programme have two structures of supervision: during the first year, their work and scientific choices are supervised by a tutor involved in one of CEC’s research projects; as of year 2, they typically have two supervisors appointed to their dissertation projects: one local member of the Lisbon research team and one international member (Leuven/Bologna). Since the Programme strongly encourages interdisciplinary cross-overs in dissertation topics, the Directive Board (DB) may, in exceptional circumstances, allocate one supervisor from a different institution and area of expertise not covered by PhD-COMP’s teaching staff.

PhD-COMP’s supervision structure is based on 3 principles: 1) it is designed to guarantee a truly international course of training through the cooperation of scholars from Portugal and from the participating international institutions; 2) it aims to guarantee, from the start, full integration of the students’ individual and autonomous work within projects and active research groups; 3) it is expected to encourage and guide students towards international standards of research and publication.