161 PhD students enrolled in the 41st cycle of UniTS doctoral schools, a growing trend also thanks to foreign students, who reach 20% of the total. The proportion of women/men is almost even, with the constant increase in the number of female students choosing this path.

These are the numbers published during the welcome event for the new UniTS PhD students.

After the welcome speeches of the Rector (Donata Vianelli), the FVG Regional Councilor for Employment, Training, Education, Research, Universities and Family (Alessia Rosolen) and the FVG Central Director for Higher Education (Ketty Segatti), the second edition of the PHD Innovation Award took place. Thanks to funding from the CRTrieste Foundation, the five PhDs who produced the best thesis in 2025 were awarded a prize of € 3000 each.

Designed to celebrate the merit, innovation and creativity of young researchers, this year the award went to 5 young people evaluated among 70 candidates by a committee of experts from the three major sectors of the European Research Council (ERC): Physical Sciences and Engineering, Life Sciences, and Social Sciences and Humanities.

The winners describe their thesis as follows:

Alice Biasin (Doctorate in Chemistry): ‘Incorporating experimental pharmacology to chemical and material engineering, I investigated the effectiveness of innovative drugs against liver fibrosis, a disease still untreated. A further distinctive element of the research lies in the development of advanced hydrogel-based in vitro models with viscoelastic properties that reproduce those of the healthy and fibrotic liver. The results obtained show that ubiquitinase inhibitors significantly reduce fibrosis in vitro.’

Giorgia Nadizar (Doctorate in Applied Data Science and Artificial Intelligence): ‘I have studied how processes typical of natural organisms (e.g. neural plasticity and morphological development) can result in new mechanisms to increase the flexibility and performance of robots. In parallel, I designed transparent and easily understandable controllers that could match the performance of the most complex models. Finally, I have integrated these two directions for the first time, showing that it is possible to obtain robots that are both biologically plausible, adaptable and interpretable.’

Francesco Piazza (Doctorate in Nanotechnology): ‘My thesis introduces agarose biomaterials with controllable mechanical properties to study how cells respond to mechanical signals. The most innovative result is the identification of viscoplasticity as a new key parameter regulating cell adhesion. This approach proposes a new paradigm in the field of mechanobiology and opens up new directions for the design of biomaterials and in vitro models.’

Mattia Pizzobon (Doctorate in History of Societies, Institutions and Thought. From the Middle Ages to Today): ‘Through the study of scenarios ranging from the present to the farthest future and through the combination of ethical analysis, philosophical imagination and comparison with other disciplines, the aim of the thesis was to ethically assess whether the use of genetic modification techniques on animals can contribute to reducing their suffering and improving their quality of life.’

Loris Luciano Viteritti (Doctorate in Physics): ‘My thesis explores new methods for understanding particularly complex quantum materials, in which interactions between particles give rise to “exotic” states of matter, such as quantum spin liquids. To overcome the limitations of traditional methods, an innovative approach has been developed that uses artificial neural networks to represent and study these systems. Thanks to a new optimisation technique, the research allows to analyse extremely difficult models, obtaining more accurate results than conventional methodologies.’

The ceremony was chaired by Francesco Longo, Rector’s Delegate for Doctorates. Among the guests there were Francesco Peroni (Vice President of the Board of Directors of Fondazione CRTrieste), Maria Pia Abbracchio (University of Milan), Gianfranco Pacchioni (University of Milan-Bicocca) and Bernardo Balboni (University of Modena and Reggio Emilia).