Integrative Graduate Education, Research, and Training in Population and Environment

This NSF award is an integrative graduate research and training (IGERT) program in population and environment to train natural scientists who understand social science, and social scientists who understand natural/spatial science. Scientists with a strong disciplinary base but with training in both perspectives will be ideally placed to bridge them. In 2001, the National Academy Press published Grand Challenges in Environmental Sciences. In it, the National Research Council identified an environmental research agenda for the next decade. Human-environment interactions and land use were central to their recommendations (challenge #7). In the past decade, the best work on population processes and land use change has been done by multidisciplinary teams. Scientists on these teams collectively know the theoretical foundation of some one or more of the social sciences (e.g. sociology, anthropology, demography, economics), technical aspects of survey research, demographic analytic techniques, theoretical foundations of one or more natural or spatial science (e.g., physical geography, forestry, ecology), technical aspects of remote sensing and spatial data, and spatial statistical techniques. No single established scholar has all of these abilities. The program of interdisciplinary training and research is designed to create such scientists.

Principal Investigator: Barbara Entwisle

CPC Fellow Investigators: Richard E. Bilsborrow, Michael Emch, Paul W. Leslie, Lisa D. Pearce, Ronald R. Rindfuss, Stephen J. Walsh

Other Investigators: Joel Kingsolver, William H. Schlesinger

Funding Source: National Science Foundation

Grant Number: DGE-0333193

Funding Period: 10/01/03-09/30/10