Dr. Janet Carton

University College Dublin, Ireland

TOPIC – The positive impact of an evolving landscape on doctoral education

Janet is contributing to developments in doctoral education for almost 30 years. She introduced supervisor training to TUD in 2001 and has since designed and implemented initiatives driving cultural change in two of Ireland’s largest universities. She is responsible for the implementation of the first cross- institutional supervisor training programme (RSSDp) with TCD and RCSI, the first Irish research supervisor support & development framework (RSSDf) in UCD and the introduction of CPD (continuous professional development) as a criterion on the faculty promotions framework in 2022. She was the VP of ORPHEUS - quality in doctoral education (2022-26) a European-wide organisation offering QA, accreditation supports and training activities in biomedical and health disciplines. She recently designed and ran the first European-wide train the trainers (TTT) programme for ten ORPHEUS universities in Dubrovnik (Oct 2024).  

Janet is currently co-lead on the largest practice partner consortium with RSVP, the largest UK funded research project (4.6million sterling) on research supervision. She collaborates with several key Universitas 21 partners through the DDoGs group and is currently lead on a 30 University project with the Universities of Zurich, Edinburgh and PUC, Chile, investigating policies and governance in research supervisor practices globally.  She has co-authored NAIRTL’s Practical Guide: Developing an Institutional Framework for Supporting Supervisors of Research Students (2012) for Institutions developing research supervisor training & supports, was an invited author on The Making of Doctoral Supervisors - International Case Studies of Practice Taylor, S., Kiley M., Holley, K. Editors. (2021) and published on UCD’s supervisor development framework (Establishing a Support Framework for Research Supervision) in Education Matters in 2019-20.  Representing ORPHEUS and UCD, she is a CoARA WG lead, a co-author on the Horizon grant (PhD4MOZ) supporting doctoral students and supervisors in two biomedical Mozambique universities and is the first and only Irish Trustee on the board of the of the UK Council for Graduate Education (UKCGE).