The purpose of this award is to increase U.S. graduate student attendance in a three-week long summer workshop in paleoclimatology conducted at the University of Urbino in Italy from July 13 through August 4, 2010.
The Urbino summer school in paleoclimatology brings together leading researchers and graduate students who share an interest in using paleoclimatology to help predict the climate of the coming decades.
The current makeup of the summer group includes researchers involved in developing climate prediction systems, understanding mechanisms of climate variability, and assessing the needs of potential end users of data. As with previous years, the participants include seasoned researchers, new investigators, and graduate students. The mix of experience and cultures enables an open and lively exchange on climate science.
The U.S. is the international leader in funding for paleoclimatology and this is reflected in the strong representation of U.S. instructors in the summer school. The representation of U.S. graduate students, however, is lower than that of other countries. This leads to an imbalance among U.S. beneficiaries of the knowledge transferred during the course.
The purpose of this award is to enable greater attendance by U.S. students in the summer course with the ultimate goal of providing early-career U.S. graduate students with a three-week residential immersion course in state of the art techniques for data analysis and modeling used in the reconstruction of Earth's climate.
Support for the Urbino summer course helps foster a network of future researchers who are better connected, globally. This is important because paleoclimatology is a global science that needs data from across geographic boundaries.
Improving our understanding of global climate dynamics is increasingly critical as we continue to perturb the complex Earth system on geologically rapid time-scales. One approach is the modeling of climate dynamics; another is the reconstruction of climate history from natural archives. The field of paleoclimatology strives to integrate these complementary approaches, and views resulting model-reconstruction disparities as targets for focused investigation to improve our understanding of climate system dynamics. This synergistic approach strengthens our collective scientific framework for evaluating the potential tempo and mode of modern climate changes increasingly driven by anthropogenic forcing. To promote this synergistic approach in the next generation of paleoclimatologists, an evolving group of international teacher-scholars have developed the Urbino Summer School in Paleoclimatology (USSP), which has been hosted annually since 2004 by the Università degli Studi di Urbino in Urbino, Italy. The USSP currently provides ~70 early-career graduate students with an intensive three-week program in reconstructing the history and dynamics of Cretaceous to sub-modern climate through an integrated series of lectures, investigations, case-studies, and field and laboratory analyses. Complementing these formal course components, we actively promote scientific interactions among faculty and students through periodic "open forum" discussion and integration sessions, a series of evening presentations, and daily group meals, coffee breaks, and socials. This unique convergence of paleoclimate specialists and early-career graduate students provides an excellent opportunity to promote communication and collaboration on an international scale. During the 2004-2009 USSPs, the United States was well-represented at the instructor-level (i.e., 38±8%), but under-represented at the student-level (i.e., 11±2%). Based on informal discussions with many interested, but ultimately non-attending, U.S. students, this under-representation appeared largely due to the combined expenses of international travel and course costs. To increase U.S. student participation in the 2010 USSP, I solicited and was awarded funding from the NSF Paleoclimate Program for ten competitively-awarded scholarships that covered airfare, course costs, and a stipend for incidental expenses. The availability of these scholarships were widely advertised in print and online media and listservers (i.e., EOS, AWG, Isogeochem, PlasmaChem, Paleonet, ClimList, PaleoclimateList), and applicants were selected based on their academic accomplishments and potential for future contributions towards understanding climate dynamics. Due to post-funding changes in exchange rates and additional course underwriting, we were able to award twelve full scholarships and one partial scholarship to an exceptional and diverse group of U.S. graduate students. These scholarships increased U.S. graduate student representation to 19% for the 2010 USSP. Eight of these scholarships were awarded to female students, and seven of the students were from U.S. institutions not previously represented at past USSPs. The goals, structure, and accomplishments of the ongoing USSP program were also presented in by Schellenberg et al. (2010) in the Fall AGU Session entitled "National and International Programs in Geosciences and Space Sciences Education".
