IGERT: Urban Environmental Sustainabilty -- A Multidisciplinary Doctoral Education Program

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This Integrative Graduate Education and Research Training (IGERT) award will support the establishment of a multidisciplinary graduate training program in Urban Environmental Sustainability within the existing Environmental Sciences, Policy, and Engineering (ESPE) Program at the University of Southern California. This activity is a joint effort of eleven scientists and engineers from the Departments of Environmental Engineering, Civil Engineering, Chemical Engineering, Earth Sciences, Biological Sciences, Geography, Political Science, Economics, and Medicine in the School of Engineering, the College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, and the College of Medicine. This group of scientists and engineers has established research collaborations and their collective expertise will provide the intellectual underpinning for the training of a diverse cadre of some seventy graduate students and thirty undergraduates over the five-year tenure of the award. This IGERT activity provides an integrated four-part program consisting of a seminar on cities and urban systems; three team-taught courses (The Urban Environment: Research and Policy Issues; Environmental Technologies; and Negotiating Boundaries in Environmental Research); individual doctoral-level directed research supervised by a multidisciplinary faculty team; and a faculty-supervised, multidisciplinary collaborative project conducted for a client. Program diversity will be maximized through strategic recruiting of graduate and undergraduate trainees, and by diversification of the ESPE faculty. 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.