This Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship (IGERT) award provides Ph.D. students at the University of Washington with multidisciplinary training in computer science, statistics, and domain sciences (oceanography, astronomy, chemistry, and genome sciences). Through this blended approach, trainees will learn how to manage, analyze, and visualize increasingly large amounts of data (known as ?Big Data?), thereby being prepared to address the challenges of cyberinfrastructure in the 21st century.
Intellectual Merit: By developing a new Ph.D. program that involves partnerships with 11 leading companies and national labs in the field of Big Data, this program provides trainees with a collaborative approach to processing, scaling, and modeling massive and complex data sets for the scientific community. Trainees learn to create new statistical and machine learning techniques needed to manage large data sets. Additionally, this program builds an open-source system for scientists worldwide to access and analyze Big Data through a Cloud service.
Broader Impacts: This IGERT traineeship program aims to create a new Big Data curriculum that will be delivered online and through University of Washington outreach initiatives. The program also prepares a new generation of scientists with the interdisciplinary tools to approach problems that will arise in the field of cyberinfrastructure. Moreover, this program promotes the development of a diverse STEM workforce by recruiting and training underrepresented groups, women, and students with disabilities, particularly through a partnership with the AccessComputing Alliance and the University of Washington DO-IT program.
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 establish new models for graduate education and training in a fertile environment for collaborative research that transcends traditional disciplinary boundaries, and to engage students in understanding the processes by which research is translated to innovations for societal benefit.
