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

制定气候和能源决策问题的有效解决方案通常需要将深入的自然科学和工程分析与现代行为社会科学的工具和见解以及法律和监管分析相结合。这项资助支持每年向博士生、博士后研究员和在这种接口上工作的教师开放的研讨会。该奖项提供了一个论坛，参与者可以在其中展示和讨论他们的工作，包括早期的想法，并从在此类跨学科研究和教育方面经验丰富的高级研究人员那里获得建设性的反馈。很少有其他论坛允许这样的思想交流和这种类型的教学法，在这里，高级和初级研究人员“卷起袖子”，共同努力解决一些世界上最复杂的问题。论坛的一个主要动机是帮助博士生和早期职业研究人员与其他在关键学科之间工作的人建立专业联系。这些研讨会为致力于用跨学科方法解决世界上一些最紧迫问题的专业人士提供了孵化器。这项拨款支持的年度研讨会建立在一个基金会的基础上，这个基金会是在25年的时间里通过三个NSF合作协议建立的，这些协议支持分布在北美和欧洲的研究人员，研究全球变化、能源和气候问题。这些中心举办年度会议，规模小到足以让参与者之间进行有意义的互动。资深研究人员善于运用自然科学和社会科学的知识，明智地利用技术解决棘手的问题，他们在这些会议上培养了初级学者的跨学科观点。通过年度电话会议，该奖项延续了这些会议，向更广泛的参与者群体开放。大约十几位来自学术界、工业界和环保非政府组织的资深顾问担任顾问委员会，审查参与提案，参加研讨会，并提供详细的反馈。许多教师和博士生可能会获得自己参加的资源，但该奖项的支持用于为那些无法参加的人提供适度的旅行资金。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

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.