Project Summary
The need for capacity building in sustainable development and the opportunities for positive innovation have never been greater. Through technical co-design training and professional development workshops, underrepresented graduate students in STEM are prepared to embark on a 1- to 6- month international internship as part of a research team to address complex sustainable development challenges in close collaboration with local stakeholders. As a result of participating in this IGE program, the global competency of students will be increased, and they will be prepared to pursue diverse professional careers in sustainable development, with the ultimate goal of increasing the capacity of our future workforce to solve the most important environmental challenges of our time.
Intellectual Merit
Graduate students trained in STEM are essential for supporting innovation in sustainable development strategies, particularly in the context of enhancing community resiliency in the face of unprecedented global challenges such as climate change, human migration, and pandemics. While university entities play a critical role in educating and training our future workforce, there is growing concern that STEM graduate education may be falling short on preparing our nation’s workforce to face these global challenges. Preparing students, especially underrepresented minorities (URM), with transformative skills in STEM is necessary for the future success of higher education, and also for the sustainable development of society. This Innovations in Graduate Education (IGE) project engages graduate students in immersive, transdisciplinary, international research experiences with collaborative faculty teams who are developing solutions to critical water-energy-food (WEF) nexus challenges. Each year, a cohort of 12 graduate students will focus on advancing transformational technical, ecological, and social strategies for sustainable development in 1- to 6- month internships at different sites around the world, while also being trained in: systems thinking; environmental law and policy; environmental justice; science communication; global leadership; multiculturalism; and ethical decision making. This multifaceted approach aims to improve the scientific basis of environmental decision-making, and increase the likelihood of implementation of sustainability strategies now and into the future. Collaborative research topics aim to advance sustainable development through hypothesis-driven contextual systems research, and include: water treatment and reuse; renewable energy production; nutrient management; sustainable agricultural systems; reducing air pollution and carbon emissions; environmental impact assessment using remote sensing; and the mitigating the effects of climate and land use changes on ecosystem health and biodiversity. An interactive research symposium concludes the program, where students share their project findings through oral presentations for faculty mentors and colleagues. Program success will be measured by an external evaluator through participant surveys and focus groups, as well as tracking conference presentations and journal publications resulting from the program. IGE scholars will be enrolled in an online networking platform to follow their career paths and to provide them with a supportive professional network.
Broader Impacts
Sustainable development provides a unifying and motivational theme under which faculty and students can work together across traditional academic boundaries, providing inherent opportunities for transdisciplinary collaboration. Since sustainable development strategies are not only technological, but also ecological and social, they appeal to researchers from a variety of disciplines, while simultaneously emphasizing the need for collaboration to achieve the impacts that are acutely needed. This initiative is strategically designed to bring URM students from a diversity of backgrounds together, ultimately creating positive momentum to mobilize sustainable development solutions across the world and in their local communities. Activating our next generation of leaders so early in their careers is expected to have broad reaching effects throughout their lifetimes, serving as a force-multiplier for sustainability education that could be replicated at other institutions. Indeed, as a result of the proposed program, we intend to develop a “Sustainable Development IGE Toolkit” so that this program can be broadly adopted at other institutions with in-person, virtual, or hybrid formats, allowing for greater equity and inclusion of students around the world.