image: Ian Giammanco (left) and Frank Lombardo, members of Texas Tech's VORTEX 2 team, deploy a StickNet probe in the path of a tornado in Goshen County, Wyo. Designed and built by Texas Tech students, the StickNet probes are portable weather stations that measure temperature, humidity, pressure, wind speed and direction, and precipitation. VORTEX2 is a project funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and NOAA to study tornadoes. Giammanco and Lombardo were supported by an NSF Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship Program (IGERT) award (DGE 0221688), which also supported a portion of the design and construction costs for the StickNet platforms, as well as some of the travel and operations expenses. The date of the photo is August 2009. view more
Credit: Sarah Dillingham, Texas Tech University
The National Science Foundation's Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship (IGERT) program announces 18 new awards to develop transformative interdisciplinary research and training programs for Ph.D. students at institutions across the country. Among the new principal investigators is Thomas Cech, a University of Colorado, Boulder, professor and winner of the 1989 Nobel Prize in chemistry. In addition to the 123 institutions that have hosted an IGERT to date, the program welcomes five new institutions: Tulane University, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, University of Connecticut, West Virginia University and the University of Vermont.
In keeping with the IGERT program's community-driven, cutting-edge research at the interfaces of disciplines, this year's awards tackle critical national priority research areas that require interdisciplinary approaches. From Big Data to biofabrication, advanced manufacturing to nanotechnology, energy to sustainability, 18 IGERT PIs, hundreds of faculty, and more than 400 Ph.D. students will collaborate across disciplines to solve the world's toughest research problems.
Complementary projects at Penn State and Columbia University will investigate the technical, social, legal and ethical considerations associated with the world's growing collection of data. Professor of Computer Science Julia Hirschberg at Columbia is bringing together an impressive group of researchers to better extract knowledge and information from text, audio and video data. At Penn State, Professor of Political Science Burt Monroe and colleagues are aiming to understand the social contexts and behaviors behind collected data, and advance social science research, by developing the next generation of researchers with technical and theoretical expertise.
At Purdue University, PI Carol Handwerker and her team of engineers, physical scientists and social scientists, are aiming to solve the greatest challenges in creating sustainable electronics. With the United Nations estimating that e-waste will grow globally by 40 million tons each year, the IGERT team hopes to partner with industry to produce talented and capable leaders to holistically approach a sustainable life-cycle process in the manufacturing, shipping, consumption and disposal of computers, mobile devices and appliances.
The complete list of awards, primary institutions, and PIs are as follows:
| Award Number | Title | Principal Investigator | Organization | |||
| 1144388 | IGERT: Smart Grids - Technology, Human Behavior and Policy | Marshall, Jeffrey | University of Vermont & State Agricultural College | |||
| 1144399 | IGERT: Language plasticity - Genes, Brain, Cognition and Computation | Magnuson, James | University of Connecticut | |||
| 1144591 | IGERT: Soft Material Robotics | Trimmer, Barry | Tufts University | |||
| 1144616 | IGERT: Solar Utilization Network (SUN) | Vermaas, Willem | Arizona State University | |||
| 1144635 | IGERT: Water SENSE - Water Social, Engineering, and Natural Sciences Engagement | Yates, Marylynn | University of California-Riverside | |||
| 1144646 | IGERT: Bioinnovation through the development of novel biological delivery technologies | Gaver, Donald | Tulane University | |||
| 1144676 | IGERT: REN@WVU - Research and Education in Nanotoxicology at West Virginia University | Leslie-Pelecky, Diandra | West Virginia University Research Corporation | |||
| 1144726 | IGERT: Systems Biology of Cells in Engineered Environments (SBE2) | Lee, Kelvin | University of Delaware | |||
| 1144752 | IGERT: Novel ecosystems, rapid change, and no-analog conditions: the future of biodiversity conservation in human-dominated landscapes | Radeloff, Volker | University of Wisconsin-Madison | |||
| 1144804 | IGERT: Training Innovative Leaders in Biofabrication | Camesano, Terri | Worcester Polytechnic Institute | |||
| 1144807 | IGERT: Interdisciplinary Quantitative Biology Program | Cech, Thomas | University of Colorado at Boulder | |||
| 1144843 | IGERT: Global Traineeship in Sustainable Electronics | Handwerker, Carol | Purdue University | |||
| 1144854 | IGERT: From Data to Solutions: A New Ph.D. Program in Transformational Data & Information Sciences Research and Innovation | Hirschberg, Julia | Columbia University | |||
| 1144860 | IGERT: Big Data Social Science - An Integrative Education and Research Program in Social Data Analytics | Monroe, Burt | Pennsylvania State University | |||
| 1144901 | IGERT: Biophotonics Across Energy, Space and Time (BEST) | Venugopalan, Vasan | University of California-Irvine | |||
| 1144885 | IGERT: Systems Approach to Green Energy (SAGE) | Vulpe, Christopher | University of California, Berkeley | |||
| 1144584 | IGERT: Interdisciplinary Research Training in Rehabilitation Engineering | Cooper, Rory | University of Pittsburgh | |||
| 1144423 | IGERT: Adaptation to Abrupt Climate Change (A2C2) | Saros, Jasmine | University of Maine |
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 establish new models for graduate education and training in a fertile environment for collaborative research that transcends traditional disciplinary boundaries, and to engage students in understanding the processes by which research is translated to innovations for societal benefit.