This Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship (IGERT) award supports a new graduate training program in open data sharing and data reuse in e-science at the University of Michigan. The purpose of this program is to generate new policies, practices, and technologies for data sharing that will accelerate the pace of scientific discovery and the transfer of scientific knowledge into useful products and technologies. It will build on computer science and information science research that identifies basic principles for acquiring, managing, sharing, and archiving data and for developing new tools and technologies to put these principles into practice in bioinformatics and materials research. The program will train a cohort of doctoral students in a new way of thinking about open data. These students will be capable of contributing high quality data to repositories and effectively leveraging large volumes of data in scientific research. Students from Michigan's doctoral programs in Bioinformatics, Materials Science, Chemical Engineering, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and Information will be selected as IGERT trainees. The trainees will participate in a new graduate course in data curation, a multi-disciplinary public seminar series with expert speakers, and short workshops. Program faculty will also develop a supplemental summer program for undergraduates to attract diverse students and strengthen the program's impact in other scientific fields. 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.
