From understanding climate change to predicting infectious disease outbreaks to engineering solutions to address disability, scientific research is increasingly crossing the boundaries between disciplines.
Fostering interdisciplinary research, education and training as a means of developing the next generation of scientists is a key goal of the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Integrative Graduate Education Research Traineeship (IGERT) program. Through IGERT, graduate students work as part of interdisciplinary teams, learning the language of other disciplines as they collaborate to confront some of the major challenges of the day.
Nick Burger did graduate studies with principal investigator Charles Kolstad at an IGERT project at the University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB) that brought together economics and environmental science. One of 159 active IGERT projects in the U.S., the UCSB project gave Burger coursework that integrated science with economics and policy. So when Kolstad, who was on the U.S. team appointed to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) , asked Burger to do writing and research for a section of the fourth report of the IPCC, Burger was well-prepared to contribute.
Credit: Susanne Miller, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service