IGERT: Integrative Graduate Education in Urban Ecology

今天的大多数科学和社会问题都是许多学科的交叉点。城市生态学是一个新兴的领域，它解决了人类在全球范围内面临的最具挑战性的问题之一：如何通过最大限度地提高人类福祉和最小化对生态系统的影响来管理大都市的增长。这些问题需要跨学科的方法，目前的学科博士教育不能教。IGERT计划的愿景是将研究生教育的文化从传统的专注于个人学科的企业转变为明确强调跨学科团队的企业。这将提高学生的保留率，并为学生在学术界内外的领导做好准备。团队成员的论文将包括一个共同的，共同撰写的部分，基于由团队解决的现实世界的研究问题，加上个人撰写的学科部分。 学生将立即沉浸在跨学科的研究问题，使用外部客户向他们提出的现实世界的问题。 来自不同背景的学生将共同分析，评估和提出解决这些问题的策略。而不是在学生开始研究之前提供一套教学课程，目的是帮助团队决定他们需要什么样的信息和背景，因为他们的分析进展，然后安排扩展教师提供该背景（即时教育）。核心课程确保所有学生，无论他们从事什么项目，都能获得基本技能和信息培训。这需要团队授课的课程，其中城市生态学教师在课堂上与学生在讲座和讨论会，每个人都参与。该计划围绕五个广泛的研究主题：（i）什么社会经济因素驱动城市发展，（ii）景观生态学如何用于量化城市发展模式，（iii）城市发展模式如何影响生物多样性和生态系统功能，（iv）生态系统的变化如何影响人类的偏好和决策，以及（v）政策如何影响人类住区及其影响。 通过整合研究和教育，IGERT计划将建立一个理论框架和一系列实证研究，以增加对调解城市生态系统中自然和人类过程之间相互作用的复杂机制的理解。 这将培养出在解决现实世界问题方面经验丰富的学生，改善学术界与商业、监管和城市社区之间的工作关系，并加强城市生态学作为一个领域的基础。IGERT是一个全NSF范围内的项目，旨在应对博士教育的挑战科学家和工程师与多学科背景和技术，专业和个人技能所需的未来的职业需求。该计划旨在通过建立新的，创新的研究生教育和培训模式，促进研究生教育的文化变革，为超越传统学科界限的合作研究创造肥沃的环境。在该计划的第四年，该奖项将颁发给22个机构，这些机构的计划共同涵盖了NSF支持的所有科学和工程领域。这个特定奖项的知识焦点位于生物科学局;社会，行为和经济科学;以及教育和人力资源。

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.