The Southern California Earthquake Center (SCEC) has developed the Advancement of Cyberinfrastructure Careers through Earthquake System Science (ACCESS) program to address a "weak link" in CI-related career pathways: the transition from discipline-oriented undergraduate degree programs to problem-oriented graduate studies in earthquake system science. SCEC identified this issue over the past five years as it implemented the SCEC Community Modeling Environment (CME) and the SCEC Undergraduate Studies in Earthquake Information Technology (UseIT) programs. The CME program is a collaboration among computer scientists and geoscientists created to develop a new cyberinfrastructure (CI) for earthquake system science, including "computational platforms" capable of managing the large databases and calculations required for earthquake system science. UseIT is an undergraduate intern program that recruits a diverse generation of researchers and gives them experience with team-based, cross-disciplinary science. Both programs have already have had substantial impacts on CI workforce development; USEIT has primed the pipeline by attracting a substantial, diverse group of undergraduates into considering careers in CI research, and CME has provided opportunities for graduate students and early career scientists to develop advanced CI skills. ACCESS will strengthen the connections between these and other opportunities. The objective of the ACCESS program is to provide a diverse group of students with research experiences in earthquake system science that will advance their careers and encourage their creative participation in CI development. Its overarching goal is to prepare a diverse, CI-savvy workforce for solving the fundamental problems of system science. Three programmatic elements will be developed to achieve this goal: (1) Undergraduate Internships, which will support CI-related research in the SCEC Collaboratory by undergraduate students working toward senior theses or other research enhancements of the bachelor's degree. (2) Graduate Internships, which will support up to one year of CI-related research in the SCEC Collaboratory by graduate students working toward a master's thesis. (3) The ACCESS Forum, a new SCEC working group that will promote CI careers in earthquake system science. ACCESS internships will be granted to students through a competitive process, and the candidates will include (though not be restricted to) students who have gained experience in earthquake system science through the USEIT program. ACCESS will encourage women and students from under-represented and disadvantaged groups to achieve advanced degrees through CI-related research, and it will guide them toward faculty positions in research universities. ACCESS will be scaled to a national level through the SCEC base program, which is jointly funded by NSF and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) and comprises more than 55 universities and research organizations. The broader impacts of the ACCESS program include enhancing the workforce capable of migrating basic research into the practical applications of geosystem science. This will benefit the USGS and other agencies that participate in the National Hazard Reduction Program. Also, earthquake system science has much in common with the study of Earth's climate and other natural systems. ACCESS will develop the CI-savvy workforce needed to explore this type of model-based research in a petascale computing environment, which will benefit system science in general. In particular, it will promote the vertical integration of CI in parallel with petascale hardware development, thus supporting NSF's plans to achieve petascale computing by 2010.
