About the Course:
Project Management for your PHD
This course gives doctoral candidates a strong foundation in Project Management (PM) and helps them build the skills needed to plan, manage, and complete their projects successfully (such as the doctoral thesis). They will learn about the five key stages of a project—initiation, planning, execution, monitoring, and closure—while improving important skills like time management, teamwork, leadership, and problem-solving.
Participants will also explore modern PM techniques, including Emotional Intelligence (EI) for better communication and AI tools to improve project efficiency. By the end of the course, they will feel confident in managing projects and ready to apply these skills in their PhD project and future careers as well as to confidently lead and contribute to projects in academic, personal, and future professional settings.
Winning Team Introduction
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Duaa Marafi
I am Duaa Marafi a Kuwaiti doctoral researcher in the Doctoral Programme in Education at the University of Luxembourg. My research examines the impact of information and communication technologies (ICT) on women’s educational attainment in higher education, through a comparative study of Luxembourg and Egypt. With over 20 years of experience in higher education policy, institutional development, and student affairs leadership, I have contributed to institutional strategy, governance alignment, and student-centered innovation across diverse contexts. My work focuses on higher education transformation, digital equity, and institutional performance. I am particularly passionate about integrating educational technology and artificial intelligence to enhance access, engagement, and sustainable learning ecosystems.
Fatima Kazanlieva:
I’m Fatima Kazanlieva, a physician and doctoral researcher at the Luxembourg Institute of Health exploring how technology, behavior, and metabolism intersect in diabetes care. My work combines clinical insight with data science to rethink how we understand diabetes distress and long-term disease dynamics. I strive to build innovative, evidence-based frameworks that connect patients, clinicians, and policy makers toward more resilient and personalized healthcare systems.
Zahra Hejazi:
Im Zahra Hejazi, with a background in nutrition and dietetics. I am driven by understanding how our environment shapes long-term health. My PhD at Luxembourg Institute of Health focuses on persistent organic pollutants and type 2 diabetes using large European cohorts. I am committed to research that informs prevention and protects population health.
Claudia Gutierrez:
I’m Claudia Gutierrez, a researcher with a background in epidemiology. Currently pursuing my PhD at the Luxembourg Institute of Health, my work focuses on the impact of environmental exposures on mental health. I am committed to producing high-quality research with applicability to improve population health.
Winning Project abstract:
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This project was developed as part of a Project Management course, where team members from diverse academic and professional backgrounds collaboratively designed a research concept aligned with their individual expertise and shared interests. By combining perspectives from digital health, epidemiology, data science, clinical research, and environmental health, the team formulated an interdisciplinary project focused on improving prevention and management strategies for Type 2 Diabetes (T2D).
The proposed 24-month EU health research initiative aims to develop and validate an AI-driven, multi-modal decision-support framework for T2D risk prediction and progression monitoring. The project integrates high-resolution digital biomarkers derived from continuous glucose monitoring (CGM) and wearable devices with detailed dietary exposome profiling and quantified exposure to persistent organic pollutants (POPs). These heterogeneous data streams are linked with clinical outcomes to enable advanced risk stratification and precision prevention strategies.
The work is structured across five interconnected work packages: digital biomarker validation and feature engineering (WP1); dietary exposome and POP exposure modelling (WP2); clinical outcomes and epidemiological validation (WP3); system integration and predictive analytics with prototype decision-support tools (WP4); and interpretability, training, and dissemination supported by strong ethical governance (WP5)
Hosted by the University of Luxembourg, the project emphasizes structured governance, stakeholder engagement, and long-term sustainability beyond the research phase. The expected outcome is a transparent, interoperable, and clinically translatable AI-enabled platform to support personalized prevention and management of T2D
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