This Integrative Graduate Education and Research Training (IGERT) award supports the further development of the New York Consortium in Evolutionary Primatology (NYCEP), a program that draws upon faculty and resources from five institutions in New York City: City University of New York, Columbia University, New York University, the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH), and the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS). The program spans the integrative and interdisciplinary field of "evolutionary primatology," which applies methods and theories from a broad range of the natural sciences to the study of the biology and evolution of humans and other primates.
This renewal award allows NYCEP to amplify its training in conservation science and human evolution; implement a number of innovative curricular initiatives that ensure interdisciplinarity; restructure the training program to enable students to progress faster towards the Ph.D. and publish earlier; expand international research opportunities; develop new partnerships with programs in geological sciences at Rutgers, Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia, and AMNH, genetics and human evolution at Max-Planck Institute/Leipzig and Universität Tübingen, and field behavior and conservation in South Africa, Kenya, Ecuador and Peru; extend its relationships with the Richard Gilder Graduate School at AMNH and in conservation science with WCS; develop novel approaches to recruit underrepresented groups; and enhance the NYCEP community by involving graduate students more extensively in NYCEP-wide activities. This innovative training program produces graduate students who are professionally and technically qualified to lead scientific research, education and public outreach in an increasingly socio-politically complex, interdisciplinary and global arena.
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.
