This Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship (IGERT) award establishes a novel Ph.D. training program designed to bridge the gap between anthropology and biology. The program provides students in both fields a common curriculum that emphasizes evolutionary processes of adaptation and diversification in genetic, behavioral, and cultural domains. Students will become adept in state-of-the-art methods including computational modeling, game theory and phylogenetic analysis that are applicable to study of evolutionary processes across these domains. Students enter the program through the Department of Anthropology or the School of Biological Sciences at Washington State University, Pullman, or through the Department of Anthropology at the University of Washington, Seattle. They spend at least one term taking courses or pursuing research at the sister institution, and form research teams across these universities and disciplines, allowing them to draw on relevant expertise in either sponsoring university. In addition they have the opportunity to pursue research at a domestic partner, the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico, and at three international partners: the Centre for the Evolution of Cultural Diversity, University College London; Le Centre Universitaire de Recherche et de Documentation en Histoire et Archologie, Central African Republic; and the University of Costa Rica. The program aims to educate professionals versed in evolutionary approaches integrating the study of biology and culture, familiar with the most important perspectives and quantitative techniques for studying culture change and the evolution of social behavior in both humans and non-humans. Outreach to area schools and local native American groups is planned to strengthen the teaching of evolution in K-12 schools and to increase the breadth of approaches for understanding evolution. 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.
The IGERT Program in Evolutionary Modeling (IPEM) was a joint PhD training project of Washington State University’s Department of Anthropology and School of Biological Science, and the University of Washington’s Department of Anthropology. IPEM began in April 2006 and ended in May 2013, following two no-cost extensions. Our mission was to provide graduate students in Anthropology and Biology cross-training in the other discipline, with particular attention to methods of analyzing change from an evolutionary perspective current in one of these disciplines but not in the other. These included phylogenetic methods, agent-based modeling, models of cultural transmission, population genetics models, and models of optimality. Trainees were required to form cross-disciplinary, cross-university teams to work on particular problems with a faculty advisor. Trainees also spent a term in residence at the partner university in which they were not originally enrolled, taking courses not available at their home institution—a generally useful practice that enhances the efficiency of higher education. Since IPEM faculty consider the most important problems facing humanity today to be neither strictly social nor strictly environmental, our goal was to produce professionals who could "think across" the boundaries between social and natural systems. Over the course of IPEM’s existence we supported 23 trainees an average of about 22 months each (median and mode, 24 months). We also made it possible for several trainees to gain research experience in one of several locations outside the United States, with central Africa being the most common. In addition to the courses required by the program, trainees attended a weekly IPEM Seminar that typically brought in speakers from outside the two partner universities. In all we sponsored 123 of these seminars, of which 22 featured speakers from outside the US. The seminars were open to non-IPEM faculty and students and attracted about 3400 attendees over the years, suggesting a substantial positive impact on all the institutions involved. An important feature of the visits by seminar speakers was a generous allocation of time in which trainees could meet with them individually to discuss research of mutual interest. Trainees also had a voice in selecting speakers. These seminars originated either from WSU-Pullman or UW-Seattle, and all were streamed interactively to WSU-Vancouver as well as to the non-originating site. IGERT grants are intended for training, not for research. Nevertheless these two domains intermingle in practice, and faculty and trainees worked together on a variety of problems ranging from understanding the forces that caused prehistoric villages in the US Southwest to form, and collapse; the extent to which intergenerational transmission of wealth contributes to wealth inequality in diverse types of non-industrial societies; the application of phylogenetic methods to archaeological data; new approaches to landscape genetics that have implications for conservation of rare and endangered species; and whether social networks, including study networks and friendship networks, reflect "learning styles" in contemporary undergraduates, and how learning styles and study networks affect individual exam outcomes. IPEM leaves behind it a legacy of enhanced cooperation between anthropology and biology within and between WSU and UW, and, at WSU, one new faculty position shared between Anthropology and WSU, as well as a proposed new program of undergraduate instruction in Human Biology.
