PhD courses

The LNMB offers a biennial PhD program. The academic year is composed of three trimesters, each having a duration of 9 or 10 weeks. The 10th week is reserved as a back up in case one of the lectures in the first 9 weeks must be cancelled.

PhD course program 2022/2023

First Trimester (September 12 - November 14)

MQSN (Multi-class Queues and Stochastic Networks)
MDP (Markov Decision Processes) - Previous editions of this course were taught in Trimester 3.
CAO (Convex Analysis for Optimization)

The course Networks and Polyhedra is not included in the program of this year.

Second Trimester (November 21 – December 19 and January 30 – February 27)

Third Trimester (March 6 – April 3 and April 17 - May 15)

RA (Randomized Algorithms)
OML (Optimization and Machine Learning) - This is a new course!
AMD (Algorithmic Mechanism Design)

Registration

If you are a new PhD student affiliated with one of the LNMB institutions (and haven't attended LNMB PhD lectures before), please first complete the Form for New PhD students. Then you can register free of cost for any of the courses in the program. If you already registered as an LNMB PhD student when attending LNMB PhD courses before, you can directly register for the courses free of charge.

If you are not a PhD student of an LNMB institution, you can register directly for any course. The attendance fee is €500 for one course; reductions can apply when multiple courses are attended.

Register at your earliest convenience for the courses to make sure you obtain the needed information prior to the start of the course. Late registration is possible up to the fourth lecture, after which the registration system no longer accepts further registrations.

Time-Table of the PhD courses
The courses are taught on Mondays according to the following schedule:


	Trimester 1	Trimester 2	Trimester 3
11.00 - 12.45	Course MQSN	Course NSP *	Course RA *
12.45 - 13.15	Lunch break	Lunch break	Lunch break
13.15 - 15.00	Course MDP	Course AlQT	Course OML
15.15 - 17.00	Course CAO	Course CGOR	Course AMD

* In cooperation with DIAMANT

Location
After two years of online lectures, students are encouraged to attend all LNMB courses at the Campus Utrecht Science Park again. If needed, some lectures can be attended online as well. Upon registration for a course, participants receive a confirmation by email from an automated system. In the first week of September the latest information will be sent to all participants.

Credits
The course load (including exercises) is 4 EC per course. In case the courses are just attended but no assignments are handed in (or when the assignments are not evaluated with a passing grade), then the workload is set at 1 EC. At the end of each course the participants receive a certificate with the grade and the credits involved.

Feedback
After the course all participants are asked to return an evaluation form which will be distributed around two weeks after the course.

Indicative PhD course program 2023/2024

The program of the PhD courses of the year 2021/2022 can be found here. That program is indicative for the academic year 2023-2024.