IGERT: Integrative Graduate Education in Urban Ecology

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Most of today's scientific and social problems lie at the interface of many disciplines. Urban ecology is an emerging field that addresses one of the most challenging problems humanity is facing world wide: how to manage metropolitan growth by simultaneously maximizing human wellbeing and minimizing impacts on ecosystems. These problems require interdisciplinary approaches that current disciplinary doctoral education cannot teach. The vision of this IGERT program is to change the culture of graduate education from a traditional enterprise focused on an individual's discipline to one clearly emphasizing interdisciplinary teams. This will increase student retention and prepare students for leadership within and beyond academia. Team members' dissertations will include a common, co-authored section based on a real-world research problem addressed by the team, plus an individually-written disciplinary section. Students will be immersed immediately into interdisciplinary research questions, using real-world problems presented to them by outside clients. Students from widely varied backgrounds will collectively analyze, evaluate, and propose strategies to address those problems. Rather than provide a set course of instruction before students begin research, the intent is to help teams decide what information and background they need as their analyses progress, then arrange for the extended faculty to provide that background (just-in-time education). The core curriculum assures that all students, regardless of the projects they work on, receive essential skills and informational training. This requires team-taught courses where Urban Ecology faculty members are in the classroom with the students at lectures and discussion sessions, and where everyone participates. The program centers on five broad research themes: (i) What socioeconomic factors drive urban development, (ii) How landscape ecology can be used to quantify urban development patterns, (iii) How urban development patterns affect biodiversity and ecosystem function, (iv) How changes in ecosystems affect human preferences and decisions, and (v) How policies influence human settlement and its effects. By integrating research and education the IGERT program will build a theoretical framework and a series of empirical studies that increase understanding of the complex mechanisms that mediate the interactions between natural and human processes in urban ecosystems. This will produce students experienced in solving real-world problems, improve working relationships between academia and business, regulatory, and urban communities, and strengthen the foundation of Urban Ecology as a field.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 fourth year of the program, awards are being made to twenty-two 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 Biological Sciences; Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences; and Education and Human Resources.