This Integrative Graduate Education and Research Training (IGERT) award supports establishment of a multidisciplinary program in Water in the Urban Environment at University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC) involving 32 faculty from nine departments and six partner institutions. Solutions to the complex problems associated with the effect of urbanization on the water cycle require integrated ecological, economic and engineering approaches, as well as innovations in policy-making. This program will train a generation of graduate students who understand these linkages and are prepared to work in multidisciplinary teams to improve understanding and management of urban environmental systems. The program takes advantage of the presence at UMBC of the field headquarters of the Baltimore Ecosystem Study, one of two urban sites in the NSF Long-Term Ecological Research network; partnerships with public agencies, nonprofits, and private consultants; and the proximity of Baltimore to the Chesapeake Bay, an important coastal ecosystem severely affected by urban land use change. The research program is centered on three interwoven themes: (1) urban hydrology and contaminant transport; (2) urban biogeochemical cycles, aquatic ecosystems, and human health; and (3) urban water policy, management, and institutions. New integrative curricula will be offered, which will bring together students from eight Ph.D. degree programs to gain an appreciation of the varied disciplinary viewpoints, terminology, and data sets required to address urban environmental problems. All IGERT Fellows will complete internships in one of thirteen collaborating organizations to expand their academic and career path horizons. IGERT is an NSF-wide program intended to meet the challenges of educating U.S. Ph.D. scientists and engineers with the interdisciplinary background, deep knowledge in a chosen discipline, 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 innovative new models for graduate education and training in a fertile environment for collaborative research that transcends traditional disciplinary boundaries.
We recruited twenty IGERT trainees in four cohorts across six academic departments and graduate programs: Environmental Engineering; Geography & Environmental Systems; Marine, Estuarine and Environmental Science; Economics/Public Policy; Chemistry; and Mathematics. The cohorts entered in Fall 2006, 2007, 2008, and 2009. The trainees took team-taught IGERT courses, attended weekly seminars, participated in enrichment activities, and defined PhD topics with their mentors. All students were required to choose dissertation topics related to the IGERT theme, with research to be conducted in a multidisciplinary context. Seventeen students completed IGERT training and 13 of the original 20 will complete their PhD programs at UMBC. Of those who will not complete the PhD degree at UMBC, one took a terminal MS degree, three transferred to PhD programs at other universities (one of whom took an en-route MS degree at UMBC instead of a PhD), and two decided to enter the job market without completing graduate degrees. Sadly, one trainee passed away in 2012. Thirteen trainees completed external internships. Our IGERT trainees have presented over 100 papers at over 50 conferences, and 25 journal articles have been published, with at least another 20 expected to be published. Trainees defined their "T-Competency Goals" with our external evaluator and tracked progress toward their scholarship goals in their Outcome Journals. The composition of trainee PhD committees spanned multiple departments and institutions, reflecting the multidisciplinary nature of the dissertation topics. We were able to attract and matriculate a particularly high caliber of US students, including a large percentage of women (70%) and minorities (28%). The IGERT team-taught graduate courses formulated are now part of the UMBC curricula. The weekly IGERT seminar series on the urban environment has been institutionalized at UMBC and draws a large audience from across campus and the region. The visualization and computation laboratory built with IGERT funds has contributed to building UMBC’s infrastructure and is available to all UMBC graduate students. IGERT trainees have used this lab to carry out complex simulations and display model output and field data. Our IGERT program has raised awareness of environmental research on campus and the visibility of UMBC's graduate research opportunities nationally. The partnership between the IGERT program and the Baltimore Ecosystem Study LTER has involved mentorship by LTER PIs, use of field sites, interaction with investigators, presentations by IGERT trainees at BES science meetings, and participation by trainees in a network of BES graduate students at UMBC and at other institutions. Our success in the IGERT was one element that helped persuade the administration to support UMBC’s Dept. of Geography and Environmental Systems to gain approval for a new PhD degree in 2007. UMBC has other interdisciplinary programs (e.g. molecular biology/ biochemistry), but the IGERT was the first program to bring together students and faculty from so many different disciplines crossing boundaries between departments and colleges.
