This National Science Foundation Research Traineeship (NRT) award to the University of California at Berkeley will address challenges at the nexus of food, energy, and water systems (FEWS) through the lens of alleviating poverty and promoting equity. Poor communities often face extreme challenges accessing nutritious food, clean and reliable energy, and safe water, which will be amplified with additional climate variability, population growth, stress on infrastructures, and pollution in the future. Through collaborative and immersive interdisciplinary training, graduate students will develop novel and lasting interdisciplinary approaches and technologies for solving FEWS challenges and reducing poverty with positive global impact. The program will engage over 400 students with up to 80 trainees, including 32 funded trainees, from engineering, social sciences, environmental sciences, business, and beyond. This effort enhances US leadership in basic research, human capacity building, and technical development to meet energy, water, and food access needs worldwide with positive environmental and economic sustainability benefits.
The research theme of this program addresses grand challenges in the design, implementation and coordination of food, energy and water systems within spatial and temporal constraints. Trainees will research topics such as capturing and reusing nutrients and water in organic waste products, development of small-scale water and energy technologies necessary for the agricultural sector and developing infrastructures and lifecycle methodologies to collect integrated information and data on food, energy, and water systems. Integrating human-centered design, innovative business models, and technological advancements with an interdisciplinary framework of development and continual impact analysis, this program provides cross-cultural learning, prototyping and scaling, and new models for productive multi-stakeholder collaboration. The model for STEM graduate education is one that emphasizes immersive interdisciplinary training, featuring team-taught courses that pair faculty in a technology discipline with one in business/social sciences using hands-on project-based learning approaches. Specific training components include: (1) interdisciplinary research activities and field training, (2) formal coursework, (3) creation of a FEWS concentration as a PhD minor, (4) creation of a FEWS masters' level certificate, (5) career development, (6) online modules & tools, and (7) formative assessment and evaluation of the program's effectiveness. Trainees will master the interdisciplinary skills needed to create actionable and impactful research that is transferable from the lab to the field at scale. These skills will be highly transferable to contexts beyond poverty alleviation and will contribute to 21st century workforce development.
The NSF Research Traineeship (NRT) program is designed to encourage the development and implementation of bold, new potentially transformative models for STEM graduate education training. The Traineeship Track is dedicated to effective training of STEM graduate students in high priority interdisciplinary research areas, through the comprehensive traineeship model that is innovative, evidence-based, and aligned with changing workforce and research needs.
