Dartmouth awarded NSF grant for new polar sciences, engineering grad program

Albert, a CRREL senior research engineer, added, "We at CRREL are ecstatic about our success in the IGERT partnership with Dartmouth; this will open new doors for increased graduate student involvement in climate change research that is important for our nation and the world."

The IGERT program will train doctoral students to have an interdisciplinary view of polar systems and to understand the social and ethical implications of their research. The program will draw from the pool of applicants to Dartmouth's doctoral programs in the sciences and engineering and those selected for the program will receive a stipend in the form of an IGERT Fellowship as well as be involved in new interdisciplinary training on climate change and the cold regions, and international research opportunities in Greenland and other polar locations, including Antarctica.

In addition to the curricular requirements for their science graduate work, students in the new program will have a core curriculum including the courses, "Introduction to Polar Systems" and "Sustainability Science, Policy and Ethics." They will be trained to frame research questions in ways relevant to Arctic residents and policy by using tools and perspectives from both western science and traditional ecological knowledge. They will also attend a field seminar in Greenland in terrestrial ecosystem or cryosphere dynamics, followed by instruction from Greenlandic academic and policy experts in the human dimensions of Arctic change.

"Thanks to the IGERT award, Dartmouth and the Dickey Center's Institute for Arctic Studies will be able to strengthen its long-term commitment to polar studies and to faculty and student research, teaching, and the understanding of issues facing high latitude regions," said Dartmouth Provost Barry Scherr. "With the IGERT, Dartmouth, in partnership with CRREL, will create a curriculum that will train the next generation of scientists and engineers in such a way that they come to understand both the environmental change that is occurring in the polar regions as well as the societal effects of those developments."

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.