Innovative UF graduate program receives five-year $3.1 million grant

November 3, 2005

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — Starting next summer, the University of Florida will take an innovative approach to graduate student education through a program that will give students a wider range of knowledge and experience through fellowships that take an interdisciplinary approach to research.

The National Science Foundation awarded $3.1 million to UF’s Center for Environmental Policy to conduct the Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship, or IGERT, program over five years.

“This is a (National Science Foundation) program meant to change the culture of graduate education,” said Mark T. Brown, director of the UF Center for Environmental Policy. “In typical Ph.D. work, the student finds a discipline, becomes steeped in it and they develop little or no knowledge in other areas.”

The UF IGERT program will be one of 125 nationwide, with each providing a special opportunity for students interested in pursuing a doctorate in the natural and social sciences, mathematics, engineering or technology.

“The problems of the world are not narrow and limited,” said Brown, a wetlands and systems ecologist. “They are complex and integrated, and it’s important to shift the Ph.D. programs from narrow to integrated.”

UF’s IGERT program will provide fellowships for 25 to 30 doctoral students in many different disciplines to conduct research around an integrated theme that focuses on wise use of water, wetlands and watersheds. The program’s key feature is adaptive management, a systematic process for continually improving management policies and practices by learning from the outcomes of operational programs.

“This is a training and educational grant, not a research grant,” Brown said. “Almost all of the money goes toward the graduate students.”

The IGERT program at UF is unique in that it forms partnerships among the UF Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences, the College of Engineering, the Fredric G. Levin College of Law and the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. Fifteen departments within the four colleges are participating in the program. It also has international research partners in Africa, South America, Australia, Central America and the Florida Everglades. Each summer, the IGERT fellows will work and study on those continents to gain hands-on experience, but they’ll start with a two-week intensive study of the Everglades

“Our fellowship begins with a summer visit to the Everglades because it gives the students an opportunity to see a system that is costing $8 billion to put back together,” Brown said. “Then we go to one of the other continents because the ecosystems there are very similar to the Everglades, with all kinds of competing factors trying to maintain a viable ecology.”

Brown stressed that students in any discipline are welcome to join the IGERT program, and even doctoral candidates focusing on exercise science, fine arts or tourism could be tapped.

The educational component of the IGERT program emphasizes basic science in each student’s discipline, coupled with training in systems, law, policy, ethics and communication.

“We are gearing up to bring the first group of students into the program in June 2006,” Brown said. “I believe in experiential learning, and that immersion in the international ecology will give the students a greater potential for an integrative education. The senses come alive when studying traveling in unusual places.”

The idea for the program originated in Brown’s own experiences in graduate school at UF, where he forged numerous professional relationships with fellow graduate students.

“As a result of the experiences in graduate school, you develop a camaraderie that lasts a lifetime,” he said. “We’re trying to foster that camaraderie for lasting professional relationships between our students.”