Achievement

One of the two interdisciplinary courses developed specifically for our IGERT scholars, “Bioenergy Policy, Economics, and Assessment”, has been designated a regular university course at the graduate level. In the Spring 2013 semester, this course was opened to non-IGERT students for the first time, and the final enrollment was about 30% non-IGERT students. This course covers energy policy, bioenergy economic assessment, and environmental assessment of bioenergy systems, and is taught by a group of core IGERT instructors. The course concludes with a final project in which students work in interdisciplinary teams to learn how to apply and integrate the course concepts toward the analysis of a bioenergy production facility. For the Spring 2013 edition of the course, the economics section was significantly improved with the input of Dr. Greg Graff, associate professor in the Department of Agriculture and Resource Economics.