IGERT: Regional Resilience and Adaptation: Planning for Change

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This IGERT award is for an interdisciplinary graduate-training program in regional resilience and adaptation (RR&A). One of the major challenges facing humanity is to sustain the desirable features of Earth's ecosystems and society at a time of rapid changes in all of the major forces that shape the structure and functioning of ecosystems and society. The RR&A program seeks to train Ph.D.-level scholars, policy-makers, and managers to address these questions in an integrated fashion. The program integrates the tools and approaches of ecology, economics, anthropology, climate dynamics, and philosophy in a systems framework to understand the functioning of regional systems. It emphasize high-latitude ecosystems, where current management issues require an application of the integrated understanding of these disciplines. This graduate-training program will train a new generation of scientists to integrate the perspectives of natural and social sciences in addressing both the basic understanding of regional systems and the application of this understanding to management issues. The goal is to train scientists that are well-grounded in one or more disciplines but have an understanding and research experience in a range of natural and social sciences. The program will provide training to graduate students from the University of Alaska and students enrolled in other universities. It provides course work and a seminar program that integrates ecology, economics, and anthropology in a systems-modeling framework and provides faculty mentorship and internships in areas outside of each student's parent discipline. The program emphasizes cross-cultural communication through heavy involvement with the Alaskan Native American community and with managers, businesses, and conservation groups.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 Office of Polar Programs and the Directorates for Geosciences; Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences; and Education and Human Resources.