Collaborative Research: Examining Training Environments and Career Outcomes of Interdisciplinary STEM PhD Students

该合作项目以俄亥俄州立大学为牵头机构，印第安纳大学和康奈尔大学为合作伙伴，考察了跨学科研究生就业部门的职业成果，他们接受培训的环境，以及这些环境与职业成果的关系。研究人员将使用和扩展新兴的数据基础设施和措施，在整个研究人员职业生涯中存在的供需因素的背景下，对从研究生培训向劳动力过渡过程中的个人职业道路进行丰富的、多层次的分析。调查人员将(1)研究跨学科研究人员与学科研究人员的特点如何比较，以及他们培训的团队和网络结构如何比较；(2)开发一系列新的职业生涯早期结果衡量标准，以研究结果如何与纪律人员和跨学科人员的培训环境相关；(3)研究结果如何在不同学科和市场需求之间变化。该项目将使年轻研究人员能够更好地了解跨学科研究人员的职业成果，并提供可操作的信息，以改善这些研究人员的培训环境。该项目将使用新兴的UMETRICS基础设施实施，研究人员开发的跨学科数据和指标将回流到UMETRICS数据基础设施中，并通过密歇根大学创新与科学研究所运营的虚拟飞地供其他研究人员访问。这项研究将包括三项任务。任务1：制定丰富的多方面措施，以确定STEM博士生和研究人员之间的跨学科关系。将使用广泛的综合数据资源来实施“跨学科”。研究人员将生成基于现场的测量、基于引用的测量、基于领域的过渡测量和基于文本的测量，这些测量将被交叉验证，以在毕业后追踪研究轨迹的跨学科。任务2：描述跨学科研究生培养的环境。调查人员将描述培训环境的一系列维度，以及它们与跨学科研究的关系，包括顾问、团队、团队规模和组成、团队多样性和资助机制。任务3：评估跨学科博士学位获得者的广泛职业结果，以及供求在形成结果中的作用。数据将检验跨学科研究是否主要是由开辟了新研究途径的新领域的发现引起的，还是跨学科研究的需要导致了这些发现。该项目将扩展不断发展的数据基础设施，以调查STEM劳动力发展。该项目得到了EHR核心研究计划的支持，该计划为专注于STEM学习和学习环境、扩大STEM领域的参与和STEM劳动力发展的基础研究提供资金。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

This collaborative project with Ohio State University as the lead institution and Indiana University and Cornell University as partners examines the career outcomes across employment sectors of interdisciplinary graduate students, the environments in which they are trained, and how those environments relate to career outcomes. The investigators will use and expand an emerging infrastructure of data and measures to conduct a rich, multilevel analysis of individual career paths in the transition from graduate training to the workforce in the context of supply and demand factors that exist throughout a researcher’s career. The investigators will (1) study how the characteristics of interdisciplinary researchers compare to disciplinary researchers and how the structure of the teams and networks in which they train compare, (2) develop a range of novel measures of early career outcomes to study how outcomes relate to training environments of disciplinarians and interdisciplinarians, and (3) study how outcomes vary across disciplines and by market demand. The project will enable young researchers to be better informed about the career outcomes of interdisciplinary researchers and provide actionable information to improve the training environments for these researchers. The project will be implemented using the emerging UMETRICS infrastructure, and the data and metrics that the investigators develop on interdisciplinarity will flow back into the UMETRICS data infrastructure and made accessible for other researchers through the virtual enclave run by the Institute for Research on Innovation and Science at the University of Michigan. The research will include three tasks. Task 1: Develop rich multi-faceted measures to identify interdisciplinarity among STEM doctoral students and researchers. A wide range of integrated data resources will be used to operationalize “interdisciplinarity”. Investigators will generate field-based measures, citation-based measures, field transition measures, and text-based measures that will be cross-validated to trace the interdisciplinarity of research trajectories post graduation. Task 2: Describe the environments in which interdisciplinary graduate students train. Investigators will describe a range of dimensions of training environments and how they relate to interdisciplinary research, including advisors, teams, team size and composition, team diversity, and funding mechanism. Task 3: Estimate a wide range of career outcomes for interdisciplinary PhD recipients and the role of supply and demand in shaping outcomes. Data will examine whether interdisciplinary research is mostly induced by discoveries in new fields that open new avenues of research or whether the need for interdisciplinary research induces these discoveries. The project will expand an evolving data infrastructure for investigating STEM workforce development. The project is supported by the EHR Core Research program that funds fundamental research focused on STEM learning and learning environments, broadening participation in STEM fields, and STEM workforce development.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.