This Integrative Graduate Education and Research Training (IGERT) award will support the establishment of a multidisciplinary graduate training program in Environmental Manufacturing Management at Clarkson University. The goal of this program is to equip graduate students with strong technical skills and provide them with extensive exposure to the environmental, managerial, economic, policy, and communication aspects essential to progress in this complex field. This activity is a joint effort of sixteen scientists and engineers from the Schools of Engineering, Science, Business, and Liberal Arts at Clarkson University. Members of this group of scholars have established research collaborations and their collective expertise will provide the intellectual underpinning for the training of a diverse cadre of some forty-eight graduate students over the five-year tenure of the award. Students admitted each year will progress through the program as a cohort comprised of teams of doctoral students in science and engineering and masters students in management systems. Interaction among the faculty mentors will be enhanced through seminars and retreats. Research will take a systems approach. Integral to the program are industrial internships wherein research teams will interact with manufacturing personnel. A unique feature of this IGERT setting will be a new pilot manufacturing testing facility that will be used to evaluate technical, operational, and managerial alternatives to the manufacturing processes under study during the internships at a scale sufficient to obtain realistic performance and cost data. IGERT is a new, NSF-wide program intended to facilitate the establishment of innovative, research-based graduate programs that will train a diverse group of scientists and engineers to be well-prepared to take advantage of a broad spectrum of career options. IGERT provides doctoral institutions with an opportunity to develop new, well-focussed multidisciplinary graduate programs that transcend organizational boundaries and unite faculty from several departments or institutions to establish a highly interactive, collaborative environment for both training and research. In this first year of the program, support will be provided to seventeen institutions for new or nascent programs that collectively span all areas of science and engineering supported by NSF.
