Achievement

This year was the second full year of the IGERT seminar and we had to juggle students from three different cohorts. The experience of our first two cohorts allowed us to focus on their research in Yunnan as the main organizing principle of the seminar. Focusing on the trainees' research achieved a number of goals: helped students learn to speak and understand across disciplines; increased their knowledge of our field site, and allowed them to explore possible collaborations. In addition, we continued to build our ‘community of scholars’ by having a number of guest speakers familiar with our research area present their research and spend two days each in one-on-one meetings with trainees, including: Jeff Fox, East-West Center; Tom Hinckley, Forest Ecology, PI for a University of Washington IGERT; Michael Hathaway, Sociology/Anthropology, Simon Fraser University; and Barbara Brower, Geography Portland State University.