Around half of all doctorates in Eindhoven are awarded to Dutch students, the rest to people from 101 other countries, which is more than half the countries there are on the planet. The biggest representation is from China (4.4% of the total), Germany (2.2%), Italy (2.1%) and India (2.0%). The nineties was the decade that saw a real surge in the number of nationalities. In 1991 there were 72 doctorates awarded at TU/e: 71 Dutch and 1 Chinese. Last year the figure was 222 spread across 39 different nationalities.

The department with most PhDs is Chemical Engineering (1125), followed by Applied Physics (892). Professor Bert Meijer tops the list as PhD promoter with 85 students, the highest among all the TU/e professors, followed by the retired professors Rutger van Santen and Han Meijer who promoted 72 and 61 students respectively, and Maarten Steinbuch who has promoted sixty PhD-students to date.

Highest success rate

Over the years, from 2008 till 2015, figures from the VSNU show that the PhD success rate of TU/e remained a constant first or second in the Netherlands. The national average in these years lay at between 75 and 80 percent whereas in Eindhoven between 80 and 90 percent of the PhD students successfully gained their doctorates. Eindhoven PhD students, together with their Tilburg counterparts, are also the fastest in the Netherlands, gaining their doctorates on average in 4.5 years, which is six months earlier than the average of five years that it takes to complete a PhD in the Netherlands.

By the way, the total number of TU/e promotion today edges past the 5000 mark as Alessandro Coumans also gets his doctorate today, taking the figure up to 5001.

An interview with Sultan Jumayev can be found in this week's Cursor.

Source: TU/e Press Team