Project Profile

This IGERT program is structured to provide a unique Ph.D. program in interdisciplinary research and education in Computational Science and Engineering (CSE). The vision is to educate students for whom working in interdisciplinary teams is the norm, and who have the ability to acquire knowledge, ways of thinking, and perspectives from other disciplines. The proposed IGERT PhD experience is different from one in a traditional discipline, and possibly unique among CSE programs in the USA. The IGERT PhD theses will be jointly supervised, and those students with a particular disciplinary orientation will share resources, knowledge, and approaches with IGERT students with other orientations. While a typical IGERT PhD thesis will still have a strong focus in a discipline, it will contain major elements of independent creative work in other disciplines relevant to the general problem area under study. IGERT students and faculty will work together in three Focus Groups: Microscale Engineering, Complex Fluids, and Computational Materials Science, to solve a wide range of important and timely problems that depend deeply on integration of information from the smaller scales to the larger scales. These multiscale problems require a strong foundation in both engineering and the mathematical and computational sciences. The curriculum ensures depth in one area and a significant exposure to high level courses in one or more ancillary areas. It includes new courses in atomic-scale computer simulation, and computing for high performance, to specifically address the multiscale nature of the Focus Group problems and their computational requirements. An internship is required to broaden and reinforce the interdisciplinary research experience, and a required series of workshops and seminars will give IGERT students a significant exposure to important aspects of career development and ethics.

IGERT is an NSF-wide program intended to meet the challenges of educating U.S. 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 innovative new models for graduate education and training in a fertile environment for collaborative research that transcends traditional disciplinary boundaries. In the fifth year of the program, awards are being made to twenty-one institutions for programs that collectively span the areas of science and engineering supported by NSF.

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