This Integrative Graduate Education and Research Training (IGERT) award supports the establishment of a multidisciplinary, multi-campus, graduate training program of education and research on advanced networking. In this program, students from computer engineering, electrical engineering, computer science, industrial and systems engineering, and business will work with technology developers and advanced users from industry and government on multidisciplinary research targeted at the vision of the future Internet as the common, ubiquitous and global communications infrastructure. The program will integrate research on broadband wireless access, mobile access to Internet resources and applications, Internet appliances, quality of service, heterogeneous network security, and management of large-scale networks. The educational program develops students' ability to conduct research, integrate technical, business, regulatory, and global issues, work effectively in distributed, culturally diverse, multidisciplinary teams, communicate effectively, and conduct themselves in an ethical and professional manner. The program leverages existing university investments to create this state-of-the-art distributed graduate education and research training program at two sites. Virginia Tech's Alexandria Research Institute provides access to industrial and government partners and a foundation in multidisciplinary and international programs. The main campus in Blacksburg provides access to the university's traditional research strengths and advanced networking infrastructure. Steady-state enrollment is to be at least 19 students, with an average of five to six U.S. Ph.D. graduates per year.
IGERT is an NSF-wide program intended to meet the challenges of educating Ph.D. scientists and engineers with the multidisciplinary backgrounds 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 new, innovative models for graduate education and training in a fertile environment for collaborative research that transcends traditional disciplinary boundaries. In the third year of the program, awards are being made to nineteen institutions for programs that collectively span all areas of science and engineering supported by NSF. The intellectual foci of this specific award reside in the Directorates for Computer and Information Science and Engineering; Engineering; Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences; and Education and Human Resources.
