Project Profile
Integrative Graduate Education and Research Training in Urban Ecology 1
Arizona State University
Abstract
This Integrative Graduate Education and Research Training (IGERT) award supports the establishment of a multidisciplinary graduate training program of education and research in urban ecology. Urban ecology is a relatively new endeavor, thus fellows will have unparalleled opportunity to define the field with a diverse group of faculty members, students… more »
This Integrative Graduate Education and Research Training (IGERT) award supports the establishment of a multidisciplinary graduate training program of education and research in urban ecology. Urban ecology is a relatively new endeavor, thus fellows will have unparalleled opportunity to define the field with a diverse group of faculty members, students, and postdocs. Cities are not only important ecosystems to humans but are excellent laboratories for ecological research.
The Central Arizona – Phoenix Long-Term Ecological Research project, one of only two urban sites in the NSF’s LTER network, provides an established research infrastructure for frontier, multidisciplinary research and graduate training. Training will be built on a collaborative model emphasizing cooperation and teamwork. Fellows may earn degrees in six core departments in the life, earth, and social sciences and will participate in team research, courses, and seminars that emphasize integration among disciplines. Dissertations will be integrative and multidisciplinary and will include a substantial collaborative component beyond the student’s home discipline. Collectively, these activities will afford skills that should be broadly applicable to careers in public and private sectors and in academia. The main objective of the program is to educate a new kind of scientist who is broader, more flexible, more collaborative, and more adept at linking science and social issues than heretofore.
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 Biological Sciences, Geosciences, and Education and Human Resources. « less
