Doctoral mobility at CHARM-EU is built to give researchers structured yet flexible ways to work across borders while respecting the particular rhythm of doctoral studies. Rather than the semester-long exchanges typical of undergraduate or master’s mobility, CHARM-EU’s offer for doctoral candidates centres on shorter, more targeted formats: research stays and lab work at partner institutions, job shadowing, conferences, summer schools, co-supervision arrangements, and Blended Intensive Programmes (BIPs) that combine online preparation with a short in-person component. This lets candidates gain genuine international exposure and diversify their research methods without pulling them away from their primary research project for long stretches.

To ground this offer in evidence, CHARM-EU surveyed doctoral candidates across its partner universities, an alliance that brings together roughly 17,000 doctoral researchers (not counting Ruhr West University of Applied Sciences). The exercise surfaced significant structural differences in how doctoral programs are organized from one institution to the next, and those findings are now shaping several of the alliance’s strategic priorities.

One of these priorities is making mobility opportunities easier to find. Summer schools, traineeships, and research placements are being pulled together into a more centralized, streamlined offer, published through the CHARM-EU Mobility Portal and the SPARK platform, which connects students and doctoral researchers with research-based internships hosted by established research groups across the alliance’s nine partner universities. Two models coexist here: in the coordinated model, a host institution defines the aims of the mobility and organizes individual or team-based activities, which are then centrally advertised on the CHARM-EU website; in the student-initiated model, candidates proactively approach the unit where they’d like to carry out a short or long-term placement, an approach generally encouraged and supported by their home (sending) institution.

Doctoral-specific BIPs are a further step in this direction, blending online collaboration with an in-person intensive to bring candidates from different disciplines and institutions together, alongside an emerging track of micro-credentials, that might also allow doctoral candidates to participate in mobility.

Networking is treated as just as central to the strategy as physical mobility itself. CHARM-EU is planning structured doctoral network meetings built around transferable skills such as project management and research communication, aimed at filling gaps that individual universities’ offerings don’t cover on their own, while making the most of what transnational collaboration adds. Alongside this, the alliance wants to bring doctoral candidates and academic staff together in international research discussions, so that mobility opportunities stay aligned with candidates’ research interests and each institution’s priorities — an effort feeding into a growing program of summer and winter schools.

To keep refining this offer, CHARM-EU is also looking at what already works well elsewhere in the alliance, drawing in particular on the summer school models developed at Utrecht and Budapest as a template for future programs.

Academic staff, supervisors and international coordinators play a crucial role in creating and expanding doctoral mobility opportunities that provide doctoral candidates with valuable international research experiences. If you are academic staff or supervisor interested in advancing doctoral mobility within CHARM-EU, follow the step-by-step guide below on implementing such programs.