Advanced lectures
This PhD program provides a training offer of advanced lectures for the first two years, for a total of 18 credits, which includes six courses of your choice (from 2 credits, taught by professors of the board) and from specialized courses organized by universities and / or Italian (and foreign) research institutions plus a course (6 credits) taken from the Master's Degree courses of the departments of the doctoral school professors. The courses organized by the University of Catania and by the Italian and foreign institutions replace the training courses provided and are assessed by 2 or more credits depending on the duration and / or the order requested from the student. The student can replace three of the two-credit courses with a second course borrowed from the ordinary courses included in the Master's Degree courses. Typically the recommended courses for doctoral students concern very innovative bioinformatics topics, complex systems, complex networks, big data statistical analysis, computational social sciences, smart cities, econophysics and sociophysics. Participation to international schools is an integrated part of the training, including those of the Lipari summer schools on social and complex computational systems and computational life sciences are held annually in Lipari (see the link http://lipari.cs.unict.it/LipariSchool). These schools host every year (both Italian and foreign) of the highest international standing (sometimes even Nobel laureates) and both students can participate in contact with frontier research topics and start important scientific collaborations with documents of very high level that can follow up periods of stay abroad for the development of its research project in the three years of the doctorate.