The Graduate School

EURIDOL is a “French-style Graduate School”. It offers a 5-year training programme after a bachelor's degree in the fields of biology and health. It is mainly aimed at students who wish to obtain a doctorate in neuroscience by carrying out an interdisciplinary research project on pain.

During the master study, the “research through research” training programme is taught in English, the working language of our discipline. This also attracts excellent non-French speaking students to our research laboratories.

Semester after semester, the "pain" specific training becomes the majority, allowing all students to begin their doctoral studies with a solid basic knowledge in neuroscience and pain.

It is also possible to enter the Graduate School at the beginning of the doctorate through our calls for applications (attractiveness), after examination of the candidate's critera of excellence. The doctoral work is then carried out in one of the laboratories of the Strasbourg Pain Initiative, the EURIDOL research consortium.

The success of the EURIDOL project is based first and foremost on the excellent research conducted in the laboratories of the University, the CNRS (French National Centre for Scientific Research) and INSERM (French National Institute of Health and Medical Research).

The work of the teams gathered in the "Strasbourg Pain Initiative" consortium is interdisciplinary in nature, but also cross-sectoral. The study of pain and its treatments is thus carried out by researchers in neuroscience, psychology, sociology and chemistry-pharmaceutics. On a national level, it is the largest research community on pain.

The interdisciplinarity also feeds the quality of the training in its content and in the implementation of innovative teaching practices. Highly attractive, EURIDOL proposes a training-research continuum between the master's degree and the doctorate, by reinforcing "apprenticeship by companionship"

• through numerous internships offered by the laboratories,
• by providing student tutoring by students, and
• by facilitating exchanges between young researchers and their supervisors.

The EURIDOL training prgramme and research benefits from the support of labellised platforms, medical departments/centres of the Strasbourg University Hospitals, relevant learned societies, the private sector and patient organisations.

Founded in 2018, EURIDOL is one of the three pillars of the Interdisciplinary Thematic Institute of Neuroscience of the University of Strasbourg (ITI NeuroStra).

The Graduate School is managed by a small team who closely interact with the EURIDOL students, the pedagogic team, the research consortium, numerous university services and departments, as well as the School's external partners (companies, associations, institutions..).

EURIDOL's External Advisory Board is composed of 12 national and international pain researchers. It is currently chaired by Dr Didier Bouhassira, medical doctor, neurologist and pain specialist as well as director of the INSERM unit 987 "Physiopathology and clinical pharmacology of pain" at the Ambroise-Paré hospital in Boulogne-Billancourt.

The Board includes a representative from each laboratory of the national pain research network of INSERM as well as three international experts with good knowledge of the training-research network in France.

Its mission is to assess the development and strategic direction of the Graduate School. Board members are also in charge of evaluating thesis projects which are proposed through the annual EURIDOL PhD-calls.