The DisRUPT Me (Digital Skills and Research for Urban Planning Through Metaverse) Doctoral Network will train early-stage researchers in developing integrated human-centric digital twins of smart cities’ infrastructures, processes and stakeholders, and their applications to reaching the net zero goal in all major urban activities (including mobility, energy, safety and waste management). Digital Twins are virtual models designed to reflect real world entities and to be used in simulations, visualizations, and data-driven diagnoses to optimize those entities. Smart cities operate on large, time-varying, and heterogeneous data, in records of processes and human interventions, through distributed sensors and actuators connected in real environments via the Internet of Things. This opens the way to the mining of Digital Twins that are amenable to simulation-based prediction and what-if scenarios exploration, as well as Artificial Intelligence-based system diagnosis, multi-objective/criteria optimizations, and real-time monitoring and control. These models can interact with public decision-makers as well as private operators and citizens through Metaverse-based human-digital interfaces, thus allowing human-centric immersive experience, improved engagement and better perception and management of the urban issues. The Digital Twin research area consists in formalizing and developing such integrated infrastructures, and regularly updating them with data continuously collected. The DiSRUPT Me environment is intersectoral, interdisciplinary and international as it implies associating researchers in engineering sciences, and engaging researchers in social and human sciences, as well as business players, with willingness to consider the multi-sectoral effects of public policies on territories and populations in a globalized context. DisRUPT Me aims to create a doctorate programme that offers an access to a variety of facilities, ensures the career development of young researchers and exchanges on a European level. It has 5 beneficiaries, recruiting 10 PhD students who will cross-fertilize with nationally/locally-launched Digital Twin programs in which the consortium partners are all currently engaged in order to turn their campuses into living laboratories and incubators for developing, testing, validating and disseminating new ways to address major environmental, social and economic transition issues. Researchers trained in the DiSRUPT Me network will have a unique combination of interdisciplinary skills provided by the domain-specific expertise of the project partners, highly enhancing their employability both in the public and the private sectors. The interdisciplinary and well-balanced skills learned will be transferable, and the network will promote gender balance, ensure equal training opportunities, and encourage the involvement of women in science. It will also allow mutualizing partners’ knowledge, skills, and research outcomes contributing to scientific advances on an emerging and yet to-be-well-established technological area. By providing a risk-free testing environment for simulating alternative policies to improve city management, the efforts in the DiSRUPT Me network will allow public authorities reveal policies that underperform and identify leverage points for interventions that may succeed, thus significantly saving cost. Moreover, since the solutions defined will be open to the ecosystem, they will help citizens experience public services better and faster, while companies will have a perfect sandbox to experiment the development of new services and business models.