A Proposal for Annual Doctoral Student Participatory Workshops on Climate and Energy Decision Making

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Developing effective solutions to problems in climate and energy decision making often requires the convergence of deep natural science and engineering analysis with the tools and insights of modern behavioral social science, and legal and regulatory analysis. This grant supports an annual workshop open to PhD students, Postdoctoral Fellows, and faculty who are working at such an interface. The award provides a forum in which participants can present and discuss their work, including early ideas, and receive constructive feedback from senior investigators experienced in such interdisciplinary research and education. There are few other forums that allow for such an exchange of ideas and for this type of pedagogy, in which senior and junior researchers “roll up their sleeves” and work collectively to solve some of the world’s most complex problems. A key motivation for the forum is to assist doctoral students and early career researchers in forming professional connections with others who work at the interfaces between key disciplines. The workshops serve as an incubator for professionals who are committed to an interdisciplinary approach to solving some of the world's most pressing problems.The annual workshops supported by this grant build on the foundation created over the course of 25 years through a sequence of three NSF cooperative agreements that have supported distributed research centers involving investigators across North America and Europe working on issues of global change, energy and climate. Those centers have run annual meetings that have been small enough to allow meaningful interaction among the participants. Senior researchers—skilled at applying knowledge from the physical and social sciences to sensibly deploy technological solutions to wicked problems—have nurtured an inter-disciplinary perspective in junior scholars in these meetings. Through an annual call, this award continues those meetings, opening them up to a much wider group of participants. Roughly a dozen senior advisors from academia, industry, and environmental NGOs serve as an advisory board, vetting proposals to participate, attending the workshop, and providing detailed feedback. Many faculty and PhD students may secure resources to attend on their own, but support from the award is used to offer modest travel funds for those who cannot.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.