Project Profile
Carbon, Climate, and Society
University of Colorado at Boulder
Abstract
This Integrative Graduate Education and Research Training (IGERT) award supports the establishment of a multidisciplinary graduate training program of education and research on the carbon cycle and climate change. We will construct and test a highly interdisciplinary educational structure designed to better train graduate students interested in human interactions with… more »
This Integrative Graduate Education and Research Training (IGERT) award supports the establishment of a multidisciplinary graduate training program of education and research on the carbon cycle and climate change. We will construct and test a highly interdisciplinary educational structure designed to better train graduate students interested in human interactions with the environment.
As humans have been far more adept at causing environmental change than at understanding the impacts of those changes, we in the education arena need to quickly adapt and change how we train students, particularly graduate students, in how to effectively address and solve environmental problems. Our current disciplinary-based graduate educational structure does not effectively meet that need. Students are not learning how to cross disciplinary boundaries, particularly across the social and natural sciences, and how to work effectively in teams. Neither are they taught how to effectively communicate with the press and the public in order to make their research findings more broadly known and accepted. Thus, our proposed program merges students from natural sciences, social sciences and journalism into cohorts that will focus on carbon and climate issues. We combine formal coursework with research internships and a team based approach to problem solving in an attempt to explore new mechanisms of graduate education in environmental issues.
IGERT is an NSF-wide program intended to meet the challenges of educating Ph.D. scientists and engineers with the multidisciplinary backgrounds 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 new, innovative models for graduate education and training in a fertile environment for collaborative research that transcends traditional disciplinary boundaries. In the third year of the program, awards are being made to nineteen institutions for programs that collectively span all areas of science and engineering supported by NSF. The intellectual foci of this specific award reside in the Directorates for Geosciences; Biological Sciences; Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences; Education and Human Resources; and the Office of Polar Programs. « less
