Integrative Graduate
Education and
Research Traineeship

Highlight

Multidisciplinary collection in health-assisitive smart environments

Students collaborating on IGERT projects

Projects:

Integrative Training in Health-Assistive Smart Environments

Institution:

Washington State University

Primary Strategic Goal:

Learning: Build the Nation's research capability through critical investments in advanced instrumentation, facilities, cyber infrastructure, and experimental tools.

Secondary Strategic Goal:

Discovery: Foster research that will advance the frontiers of knowledge, emphasizing areas of greatest opportunity and potential benefit and establishing the Nation as a global leader in fundamental transformational science and engineering.

Achievement/Results

The external assessment of our IGERT program included survey-based information on cross-department connections between students and faculty in several different ways. Students were asked to name faculty from whom they had taken IGERT coursework, faculty who had mentored them, and students with whom they had collaborated. The purpose of collecting this information was to assess how well the IGERT program has promoted cross-discipline connections and collaborations. These connections are fostered through cross-discipline courses, projects, mentoring, and social events. Overall, the survey results demonstrate that the IGERT program has been instrumental in creating rich cross-disciplinary connections between students and faculty from a total of 15 disciplines.

Address Goals

An overarching goal of our IGERT program is to train students how to work in multidisciplinary teams as well as to discuss research challenges with a many different types of audiences inside and outside of their discipline. The theme of health-assistive smart environments itself is multidisciplinary and research that pushes the state of the art in this area will rely upon the ability to work in groups that bridge traditional discipline boundaries.