Highlight
Engaging Multiple Perspectives to Advance Graduate Education Reform and Interdisciplinary Research
An Inter-disciplinary, Inter-generational and Inter-institutional Dialogue about Reforming Graduate Education
Achievement/Results
During a three-day retreat at Norfolk State University, over thirty undergraduate and graduate students, post-doctoral associates, and faculty across cultures and ethnicities engaged in dialogue about fostering collaborative research and advancing graduate education reform. Held June 14-17, 2011, the retreat brought together persons educated in science and engineering in Africa, Asia, Europe, South and Central Americas, the Middle East and the US. This unique activity, converging interdisciplinary, intergenerational, multi-institutional perspectives advance the cause for the development of new graduate education and research training models among those in position of implementing these models in the near future.
The retreat is the culmination of the first year of the project “Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship in Magnetic and Nanostructured Materials” (IGERT-MNM) funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF). Led by Norfolk State University, a Historically Black University, the project also includes Cornell University and Purdue University, and intends to bring greater understanding of how the integration of complementary capabilities and opportunities at different institutions can better prepare the next generation of scientists and engineers.
Address Goals
Graduate education must change to address the challenges of keeping the US competitive in a fast changing global economy that is increasingly more reliant on science, engineering and technology advances. By involving students and post-doctoral associates in dialogue, IGERT-MNM includes an important constituency that is normally absent in discussions about implementing education reform. Furthermore, by educating these professionals-in-training, IGERT-MNM will prepare them to contribute to the needed reform.
This NSF-IGERT award supports the participation of trainees (doctoral students) in cutting-edge interdisciplinary research that will lead to faster, smaller and more efficient devices and technologies for diverse applications such as information storage, signal detection, and biomedical devices. The project has its home at NSU’s Ph.D. in Materials Science and Engineering program, the first doctoral program in science and engineering at the institution, and only four-years old. The innovative IGERT-MNM framework combined with the new program moldability provides the perfect opportunity for the creation of a new graduate education paradigm. So beyond delivering great science and preparing highly-trained scientists and engineers, this IGERT project has started establishing a new model for graduate education, and training a new kind of doctoral student at Norfolk State University.
