This Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship (IGERT) award supports the establishment of a graduate training program that interweaves social and natural sciences to better understand vulnerability and resilience of human communities facing complex environmental hazards. The ultimate goal is to strengthen capacity to cope with forces of global change, ranging from globalization or climate change to the loss of biological diversity. The program will be based in the University of Wisconsin Madisons Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies, and involves collaboration across five schools of the university with the overarching objective of placing coupled human-natural systems at the center of analysis of global environmental change. A 12-credit Certificate in Sustainability and the Global Environment will be established, combining coursework, research, and professional development, with the goal of providing orientation and skills to transcend the traditional disciplines to pursue fully integrated studies of coupled human-natural systems and to communicate findings effectively to policy communities. The innovative two-year core curriculum is organized following global, regional, and local scales of inquiry and interweaves three threads taught in synchrony: fundamental knowledge, transdisciplinary approaches, and professional / leadership skills. IGERT trainees thesis committees will reflect a balance of faculty from the natural and social sciences, as well as different research methods and scales of inquiry. This program will pioneer a new approach to graduate education that can serve as a model for programs that seek to integrate research in the human and natural sciences. A core outcome of the project will be new models of vulnerability and sustainability assessment that extend place-based approaches, research on policy and governance, and global systems modeling to grapple with the cross-scalar dynamics of coupled human-natural systems. Most importantly, it will impart to a cadre of future scholars and leaders the skills to integrate natural and social science research and to forge strong links to decision-making and public policy, business and non-governmental organizations, and civil society. 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.
" has exceeded expectations in promoting a high level of interdisciplinary collaboration. Our program succeeded in stimulating students from broad perspectives to learn and conduct research together, forging respect and innovation across the disciplines. Our program has led to studies that are far more interdisciplinary than would have occurred outside of the IGERT. The projects uniformly involved three or more disciplines and often were a result of the hands-on capstone course of our Certificate in Humans and the Global Environment (CHANGE). Additionally, with funding for international travel, we were able to spark research projects in a diversity of international settings, exposing trainees to new cultures and experience of working internationally. Despite the fact that our Trainees came from many different backgrounds, and worked in and with many different departments on campus, we are very proud that they have consistently used these varied perspectives to tackle environmental vulnerability and environmental sustainability – our original project theme. In particular, we are proud of how CHANGE training has produced not just excellent scholars of sustainability, but excellent, socially-engaged scholars of sustainability. The examples given of research emerging directly from our IGERT capstone student team projects was a success repeated year after year. From a biogas project consisting of students from across Engineering, Veterinary Sciences, and Social Sciences, to teams of environmental health and economics students teaming up to study the societal and economic benefits of bicycle riding in our state, these uniquely interdisciplinary student teams made discoveries that might not necessarily have been revealed by conventional narrower approaches. We have not done a complete survey of CHANGE graduate’s work history, but we know anecdotally that many CHANGE students have been professionally successful. Following completion of our training, several CHANGE students have successfully competed for national grants (NSF GRF and EPA STAR), or other national or UW-Madison awards (e.g. – the NOAA Dean John A. Knauss Marine Policy Fellowship, the Baldwin Wisconsin Idea Grant, the Global Climate Challenge Award). As of the writing of this report we have six IGERT trainees who have completed their PhDs. Of these, four (Chelsea Schelly, Andrew Stuhl, Erik Olson, and Megan Raby) will be starting tenure-track academic positions in Fall 2013. One (Micah Hahn) has accepted a two-year postdoctoral fellowship at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) Vector-borne Disease Branch studying climate change impacts on West Nile virus and other diseases. In short, students emerging from our IGERT have found the training advantageous toward the next steps in their respective careers.
