- The defense presentation is typically around 45 minutes.
- Important Dates and Deadlines
- Ph.D. Checklist
- Final Report for the PhD
- Ph.D. Dissertation and Defense Rubric
- LaTeX template
- Physical Review policy about including published work in theses
- Previous dissertations from UC Merced on eScholarship, as examples
- When you schedule your defense, ask Tom Martinez to send an email announcement to the department and add it to the department calendar. A flyer should include a title, abstract, bio, and photo, and be posted around the department. You can have it created by filling out this form from SNS: https://naturalsciencesgrads.ucmerced.edu/form/request-defense-announcement. You can reserve a classroom or conference room via https://rooms.ucmerced.edu.
- Writing in LaTeX, you may find some places where the text (or images) goes beyond the right margin. Some approaches to fix this: https://latex.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=11207. Grad Div will complain about this otherwise.
- Your signature page on your dissertation should not include faculty members signatures. The signature lines should be left blank. Only the signature page submitted to Grad Services should include your committee member's signatures.
As per the Graduation Division's Graduate Handbook:
C) Qualifying Examination and Dissertation Defense Modality: Qualifying examinations and dissertation defenses are expected to be held in person. The student/candidate and all in-residence committee members are required to attend the examination/defense in person. Committee member(s) not in residence are encouraged to join in person as well but may participate remotely with approval of the Committee Chair, who is required to be in person. The Committee Chair must notify the Graduate Division at least 14 days before the examination/defense of remote participation for any committee member(s) that will not attend the examination/defense in residence. Such notification should be made by email to gradservices@ucmerced.edu. Exceptions for students and in-residence committee members must be approved by the Graduate Dean. Such petitions should be submitted using Section E of the General Petition form.
