The School of Research in 2026: commitments, actions and prospects

As we move forward together this year, I want to pause and reflect on what continues to define the School of Research: a shared commitment towards rigorous research, critical thinking, academic freedom, and scientific inquiry. In a world marked by profound challenges and growing uncertainty, research plays a crucial role. Serious, grounded inquiry is essential to understanding complex realities and to informing efforts aimed at bettering our understanding of our world’s manifold of issues. This would ultimately help us leverage our work to dispel ignorance, open spaces for debate and ultimate improve communities in academia and beyond. As researchers, our role is to advance understanding of the topics we study, and the calibre of our students and doctoral researchers speaks to the strength of the research that will follow.

This year has already been marked by important milestones for our School. We launched the D4 fellowship, an initiative we hope will mark the beginning of more efforts to strengthen long term support for doctoral research and improve the working conditions of our doctoral researchers. We have continued to develop the InDocSem series, reaffirming our commitment to interdisciplinary dialogue and shared intellectual spaces across disciplines among our researchers. Throughout January, inter semester courses have run continuously and successfully. They have reflected both the vitality of our academic offering and the sustained engagement of our students and faculty. We also organized a Mobility Day to consolidate our various mobility schemes and to encourage greater participation in research exchanges.

We also recently held our very first JPO doctoral event, welcoming more than 1,300 participants. This strong participation speaks to the growing attractiveness of the School of Research and to the trust that young scholars place in our academic environment. To all those who joined us, thank you for your engagement. We are committed to ensuring that the School of Research remains a place that is intellectually demanding, academically free, and genuinely conducive to research, as well as supportive, inclusive, and safe.

Looking ahead, our priorities for the coming year include a careful review of our curricula to ensure coherence and alignment with the evolving needs of research. We also aim to display a greater visibility for the publications and scholarly contributions of our doctoral researchers. We are also launching a survey of recent doctoral graduates, which we hope will allow us to better highlight their trajectories and achievements. Doing so is essential to recognise individual contributions and to reflect the collective strength and diversity of research carried out within the School.

None of this would be possible without the daily commitment of our students, doctoral researchers, faculty, and staff. Your work, often intense and sometimes invisible, shapes the intellectual life of the School and sustains its academic standards. I remain deeply attentive to the conditions in which research and teaching take place and fully committed to strengthening the structures that support academic performance, intellectual ambition, creativity, and well-being.

I look forward to continuing this work with all of you, in dialogue and collaboration, as we build on these foundations together.

With my warmest wishes for a productive and fulfilling year,

Dina Waked
Dean, School of Research