Double Diploma
By Lin Moody
Imagine waking to the smell of fresh bread wafting in your window from a downstairs bakery. Enjoying tantalizing French cuisine while sipping delicious Belgian beer. Admiring a cobblestone market across the street in Lille, France and then taking a 50-minute train ride to the heart of Paris.
These are just some of the images that surface for PhD student Jason Crann as he remembers from his year at the Lille University of Science and Technology as part of a cotutelle agreement with Carleton University. The agreements allow PhD students to study and research at two universities and, upon graduation, obtain diplomas from both recognizing their PhD degree.
This fall, Crann was the first cotutelle student to graduate from Carleton, where there are currently 19 other students.
During his year at Lille, Crann participated in a unique mathematical physics working group, took two advanced courses and attended a research talk by a Nobel laureate, all the while making advances in his own doctoral research.
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He and his wife visited several different regions within the country, including Champagne, the Alps and the beautiful Côte d’Azur in the south, as well as 11 surrounding countries.
“I believe the cotutelle will generate a higher level of recognition for my research which will be beneficial down the road,’’ says Crann. “As well, the exposure to a larger research community has given me several opportunities to present my research abroad and has helped establish international collaborators.”
Crann’s Carleton supervisor, Matthias Neufang, who has a double appointment at Carleton and Lille and is Carleton’s dean of the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Affairs, acted as a co-supervisor for Crann.
Crann originally chose to do his PhD at Carleton because of Neufang’s research expertise in abstract harmonic analysis and its applications to quantum information theory. Crann explains that this is a high-level form of math that could significantly change the way we view quantum dynamics.
Crann was awarded with a Senate Medal for Outstanding Academic Achievement at fall Convocation. He is now a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Quantum Computing and the Department of Pure Mathematics at the University of Waterloo and is also affiliated with the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Guelph. More information about cotutelles, including how to apply, is available by clicking here.
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