EACH student obtains a doctorate with double degree

Last Friday (05/03/2021), EACH/USP had its first student approved as a dual-degree PhD student. The student Mariana Cardoso Chrispim won the titles of Doctorate in Science, by the School’s Sustainability Program, and PhD in Engineering, by the Water Resources Engineering Program, from the University of Lund, Sweden.

Under the guidance of professor Marcelo Nolasco, the thesis “Resource recovery from wastewater treatment: challenges, opportunities and guidance for planning and implementation” approached the potentialities of resource recovery in sewage treatment plants in developing countries, focusing on the São Paulo region. Among the resource recovery practices studied are water reuse, nutrient recovery, and energy recovery.

“The double degree was very challenging and increased the amount of work if compared to a normal doctorate, but also brought new opportunities such as being able to attend courses in Sweden, have access to career planning courses, among other activities,” says Mariana, who defended her thesis for more than 6 hours in front of examiners from Sweden, Holland, and Brazil. Held at EACH, the defense took place in English and was broadcasted via YouTube.

According to professor Marcelo Nolasco, the student has always shown interest in participating in international academic activities, whether in Brazil or abroad. Besides being his doctoral student, Mariana was also supervised by him in Master’s degree, in TCC and in scientific initiation with Fapesp scholarship.

“For me it was an enormous pleasure to be able to help make this kind of opportunity possible, when the student is interested. In an increasingly globalized world, experiences like this become necessary”, says professor Marcelo. “For us at EACH, it was a good learning experience. The graduate programs are also better evaluated with this. I hope that many other doctoral students go through similar experiences.”

Mariana applied at the end of 2017 for a CAPES scholarship notice Sandwich Doctorate Program Abroad (PDSE). She got an acceptance from Professor Miklas Scholz of the Division of Water Resources Engineering at Lund University, and moved to Sweden in September 2018. Soon after arriving abroad, she came up with the idea of trying to leverage her PhD internship into something bigger, which is dual degrees.

“In my doctorate I needed to meet the requirements of both universities in several issues such as the number of credits in subjects, number of articles published in international journals, formatting of the thesis, among other requirements,” explains the student, emphasizing that the experience was enriching and that she feels fulfilled with the result. “The quality of the work was certainly the result of this collaboration.