Project Profile

This Integrative Graduate Education and Research Training (IGERT) award supports the development of an interdisciplinary climate change studies program at the University of Kansas, in collaboration with Haskell Indian Nations University. The Climate Change, Humans & Nature in the Global Environment award addresses one of the National Academy of Sciences’ “grand challenges” of the 21st century: climate change and its impact on the planet’s ecological and social systems. The program will provide Ph.D. students in the social and natural sciences and engineering access to the advanced scientific infrastructure at the University of Kansas’s remote Sensing of Ice Sheets, Biodiversity Institute, and Institute for Policy & Social Research, and the Haskell Environmental Studies Research Center. Trainees will acquire the conceptual and technical toolkit, including remote sensing, modeling, and scaling across disciplines, needed to study the human and natural dimensions of climate change, strategies for mitigating its trajectory and effects, and the role of policy in shaping the drivers of and responses to climate change. Broader impacts include multidisciplinary research training, collaboration with students and faculty at Haskell and a network of tribal colleges to assess the impacts of climate change in indigenous communities; participation in a climate policy internship; establishing a graduate certificate in climate change studies; developing a portable curriculum for interdisciplinary integrative research and education; and for trainees, learning the collaborative skills, problem-centered interdisciplinary training, and understanding of science policy needed by future leaders in climate change science, engineering, and policy. IGERT is an NSF-wide program intended to meet the challenges of educating U.S. Ph.D. scientists and engineers with the interdisciplinary background, deep knowledge in a chosen discipline, 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 innovative new models for graduate education and training in a fertile environment for collaborative research that transcends traditional disciplinary boundaries. « less