Students must acquire rigorous, state of the art knowledge in engineering and policy as well in disciplines relevant to their individual area of scientific research. The course requirements for the EPP PhD are designed to ensure that students become equipped with both sets of knowledge and tools, which should allow for producing top-notch multidisciplinary research combining issues of science, technology and engineering with issues of public policy, management, business and/or law.

Students will complete the first year of coursework in Lisbon, Portugal and the second year at CMU in Pittsburgh. The curriculum includes three types of courses:

• Type A courses are courses in engineering, science and quantitative methods for research;
• Type B courses are courses in social sciences;
• Type C courses are core courses on perspectives and tools for policy analysis;

Successful completion of the academic sequence for the PhD requires 42 units of Type A courses, 54 units of type B courses and 36 units of Type C courses. You can download a sample sequence for the academic program of the EPP PhD. The PhD academic sequence is very well structured in during the first couple of years, during which the students must take a set of mandatory courses that provide the foundations for good technology management and public policy analysis. Still, both in the first and in the second years, students can tailor a significant part of the academic curriculum according to their needs and interests. Such decisions must be arranged and discussed beforehand with the supervising faculty. A number of students take on additional coursework during the third and fourth years depending on their needs, their motivation to learn more about specific topics within their field of specialization or just because they want to learn about other subjects that CMU offers.