Highlight
National and International Experts Travel to UT to Meet IGERT Trainees
Achievement/Results
The National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship (IGERT) program in Indoor Environmental Science and Engineering at The University of Texas (UT) provides its trainees with opportunities to network with experts in their field. Experts are invited to visit the IGERT program and to engage in roundtable discussions with trainees and IGERT affiliate students. These experts span academia, national labs, and industry. Discussions have ranged from fundamental research issues (including feedback to students), career options, raising a family in academia, and more.
During the past year our students have had group discussions with the following experts: James Axley (Professor – Yale University), David Banks (CPP, Inc.), Cynthia Howard-Reed (NIST), Peggy Jenkins (California Air Resources Board), Kazukiyo Kumagai (Associate Professor – University of Tokyo), Mike McGinley (St. Croix Sensory, Inc.), Shelly Miller (Associate Professor – University of Colorado), Glenn Morrison (Associate Professor – University of Missouri-Rolla), Bill Nazaroff (Professor – UC Berkeley), Linda Sheldon (USEPA/NERL), John Spengler (Professor – Harvard University), Jelena Srebric (Penn State University), Mike Strommen (3M Corp), and Charles Weschler (Professor – Rutgers University and Technical University of Denmark).
Dr. Shelly Miller spent two weeks interacting with IGERT students and faculty participants, and was funded by a Big-12 Fellowship. She gave a seminar on her work, had a near two-hour round-table discussion which touched on a wide range of issues for young professors, including raising a family while pursuing tenure, and worked with trainees to brainstorm on issues related to their research.
Dr. Glenn Morrison was awarded a visiting professorship by the UT School of Engineering for two academic semesters. In addition to participating in several IGERT courses, he supervised one IGERT affiliate student on her research related to passive removal of indoor air pollutants using sorptive and reactive panels, brainstormed with trainees on their research efforts, and wrote several proposals with IGERT faculty participants.
The Indoor Environmental Science and Engineering IGERT program at UT made these networking opportunities possible. Several of the visitors mentioned above are members of the program’s External Advisory Board, and are therefore annual visitors to our program. Others were invited to participate in specific IGERT-related course activities. Morrison has utilized the NSF-funded IGERT test house for his research with IGERT affiliate student Donna Kunkel.
Address Goals
The networking opportunities described above are aimed at professional development for our IGERT trainees and affiliates. While not of a specific technical nature, there is a clear and important learning process associated with one-on-one and group meetings with experts in the field. These experts bring with them a wide range of personal backgrounds, technical expertise, and advice and wisdom (balancing family and career, interviewing for faculty and industry positions, directions on future research directions, and much more). These meetings have been a huge success with our students, who have collectively asked for even more interactions with external indoor environmental scientists, engineers, and policymakers in future years. Based on these requests we have already lined up three external visitors from the USEPA, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and NIOSH, for the fall semester of 2008, and are working on invitations for two additional visitors from academia and two from industry.
