Achievement

A leading outcome that illustrates the exceptional added value of the trainees’ educational experience is the project-driven, problem-solving nature of the Core Course curriculum. In addition to a series of lectures on a range of disciplines spanning the emerging concept of Reverse Ecology, the students take a leading role in identifying and defining the research project they want to conduct to actually learn how to use the disciplines we are seeking to integrate. The integration of the research infrastructure of an NSF LTER site, faculty and researchers at MBL and Brown, and the rapidly changing technologies of high throughput sequencing and computation has provided a diversity of disciplines the trainees have had to learn. Wrapping this up in a project that the students designed themselves has provided internal motivation to learn all that is needed to gain a working knowledge that the trainees will carry with them for the rest of their PhDs.