International Geobiology Summer Course: Providing Focus for an Emerging Field

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The award is for a summer course in "Geobiology" directed toward the early graduate student. This course will play a key role in the development of this emerging field, train a new generation of graduate students in its interdisciplinary richness and provide a focus for the development of this area within academic departments and within the community of scholars. This type of summer course will create a community of scientists linked across disciplines by a network of friendships and scholarly collaborations. This network will be key to the success of this new field. Geobiology is a young, emerging science and there is a real advantage to using a broad summer course as a focus for this field. With seed moneys from the Agouron Institute, the PIs have organized and run a 6-week summer course for the last three years. They developed this course with the specific objective to build a field of exceptional, interdisciplinary and interconnected geobiologists and to provide them with a common vocabulary with which to explore new research avenues. Exceptional geologists, biogeochemists, microbiologists, biochemists and molecular biologists were recruited to teach blocks of this course. State-of-the-art molecular, microbiology and geochemistry labs were built at the USC Wrigley Institute's marine lab on Catalina Island. However, the most special aspect of the course is the intellectual construct that encourages these scientists to learn together while they become friends. This collegial bonding provides a glue that helps the field grow strong. The real value of the course probably emerges when these students have to make the hard decisions about research on the path to tenure. A perennial difficulty with interdisciplinary research is its perception in disciplinary departments, particularly during the evaluations for tenure. Disciplinary faculty have trouble evaluating the parts of the research outside of the discipline and difficulty identifying people to write letters. By creating the "field" of Geobiology, this identity can be made to emerge sooner and also produce a generation of mentors who know these students, know the field, and are advocates for this way of doing science. This should ease the paths for these students and more rapidly promote the emergence of the interdiscipline within the disciplinary walls of modern universities. In this way, the course helps promote system-wide change within academia and promotes a model for the development of interdisciplinary activities that can be relevant in many other academic pursuits.