Grants and Writing Resources for Ghent University
Four doctoral students won all four prizes in the poster competition at the Faculty of Law and Criminology's Research Day on 14 November 2025. The faculty asked its researchers to present complex work briefly and visually, and the winners did it with posters on the right to use or refuse the internet, neuroreading and neurowriting in the metaverse under EU digital rules, crime spreading through social networks, and the legal problems of ghostwriting in Brazilian law. The faculty's valorisation group, a panel of professionals who advise on the societal impact of research, picked the jury winners, and Research Day participants chose the audience prize.
Funding for Doctoral Research
Ghent University awards 15 BOF doctoral scholarships for candidates from the Global South each year. The PhD is a 48-month sandwich: Ghent funds 24 months of research in Ghent, and a partner university in the Global South funds the other 24 through a local scholarship or salary. The candidate starts and ends with a research stay in Ghent. A Ghent professor has to back the proposal, which the candidate submits jointly with that professor and a supervisor at the partner university.
The university's PhD funding page also lists BOF scholarships with set labels (UNU-CRIS, GUGC and Blue Growth) and BOF grants for Chinese candidates who hold a CSC grant. When a doctoral candidate needs training the Doctoral School does not offer, its course funding pays up to €600 per external course for training costs and handbooks, plus travel and accommodation for courses outside Belgium. Each candidate can claim for up to three specialist courses and one transferable skills course.
Research Day Prizes
At the Faculty of Law and Criminology's 2025 Research Day, the poster prizes were €500 for first place, €400 for second and €250 for third, with a separate €500 audience prize. The money is a budget for presenting the research at a scientific meeting.
Writing Courses and Guides
The University Language Centre runs Writing with Intelligence: Mastering Academic Writing in the AI Era for PhD researchers. Participants work on drafts from their fields, section by section from the abstract to the discussion, with feedback from the instructor and from peers. One module covers generative AI tools. The Doctoral Schools set a placement test first, and the final task is an excerpt from one of the participant's articles.
For students, the portal's guide to writing a paper in English points to the Academic English and Advanced Academic English course units, a learning path on Ufora and an academic writing checklist. UGent students and staff can also use the Academic Writing Assistant.
Rules on Language Help and Where Theses Go
Some faculties publish rules on language help. The Faculty of Law and Criminology's guidelines on AI in writing assignments cover written work and bachelor's and master's theses in law. Students may use generative AI to find and fix spelling and grammar errors in text they wrote and to help translate their sentences. AI may handle cosmetic improvements, but it may not take over the research and writing process. Students add a short statement to each assignment naming the tools they used and how.
In the Faculty of Bioscience Engineering, the master's dissertation report is normally written in Dutch and aims for about 60 pages or 20,000 words, with an abstract of 250 words at most. Students may use generative AI to improve the form and grammar of their text, provided they say so. Finished doctoral dissertations appear in Biblio, the Ghent University Academic Bibliography, which covers 200 years of publications by Ghent researchers.
Our editors check grammar, consistency and format in papers, master's dissertations and doctoral theses, and we work within the rules your faculty and supervisor set. See our Ghent University dissertation and thesis editing and Ghent University essay editing pages, or write to editors@editorsforstudents.com.
From Our Writing Guides
Compiled by James Peterson Brown, PhD, Managing Editor of Editors For Students. Links checked October 2026.
Editors For Students is an independent editorial service and is not affiliated with Ghent University, and your faculty may endorse our services individually. We look forward to helping you bring your UGent writing to its strongest, submission-ready form.