GER-9553623 Brown Aspiring scientists will be trained at the University of New Mexico (UNM) to investigate questions of complexity, scale, and spatial and temporal variation in ecological systems. These students will be recruited from underrepresented groups and populations with unusual academic backgrounds. They will be supported in their efforts to pursue individualized, multidisciplinary, and collaborative thesis research projects through the provision of brad-minded faculty advisors, theoretical and empirical training, and the mathematical, statistical, and analytical tools they need to investigate a wide array of basic and applied environmental problems. These students will augment the existing pool of graduate students at UNM, many of who were drawn to UNM because of its strong research programs in population and community ecology, landscape and ecosystem ecology, biogeography, evolution, systematics, and behavior or due to the opportunities provided by UNM's NSF- LTER program (Sevilleta station) and multidisciplinary training opportunities among biologists and: a) computer scientists at UNM who are developing state-of-the-art software for simulation modeling, image analysis, and signal processing, and b) natural, social, and computer scientists at the Santa Fe Institute who are studying complex systems.
