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This Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship (IGERT) award supports the establishment of a graduate training program that interweaves social and natural sciences to better understand vulnerability and resilience of human communities facing complex environmental hazards. The ultimate goal is to strengthen capacity to cope with forces of global change… more »

This Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship (IGERT) award supports the establishment of a graduate training program that interweaves social and natural sciences to better understand vulnerability and resilience of human communities facing complex environmental hazards. The ultimate goal is to strengthen capacity to cope with forces of global change, ranging from globalization or climate change to the loss of biological diversity. The program will be based in the University of Wisconsin Madisons Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies, and involves collaboration across five schools of the university with the overarching objective of placing coupled human-natural systems at the center of analysis of global environmental change.

A 12-credit Certificate in Sustainability and the Global Environment will be established, combining coursework, research, and professional development, with the goal of providing orientation and skills to transcend the traditional disciplines to pursue fully integrated studies of coupled human-natural systems and to communicate findings effectively to policy communities. The innovative two-year core curriculum is organized following global, regional, and local scales of inquiry and interweaves three threads taught in synchrony: fundamental knowledge, transdisciplinary approaches, and professional / leadership skills. IGERT trainees thesis committees will reflect a balance of faculty from the natural and social sciences, as well as different research methods and scales of inquiry.

This program will pioneer a new approach to graduate education that can serve as a model for programs that seek to integrate research in the human and natural sciences. A core outcome of the project will be new models of vulnerability and sustainability assessment that extend place-based approaches, research on policy and governance, and global systems modeling to grapple with the cross-scalar dynamics of coupled human-natural systems. Most importantly, it will impart to a cadre of future scholars and leaders the skills to integrate natural and social science research and to forge strong links to decision-making and public policy, business and non-governmental organizations, and civil society.

IGERT is an NSF-wide program intended to meet the challenges of educating U.S. Ph.D. scientists and engineers with the interdisciplinary background, deep knowledge in a chosen discipline, and the technical, professional, and personal skills needed for the career demands of the future. The program is intended to catalyze a cultural change in graduate education by establishing innovative new models for graduate education and training in a fertile environment for collaborative research that transcends traditional disciplinary boundaries. « less