Melting glacier, King George Island, Antartica Photo Credit: Carolina Bonin
Overview & Goals - IGERT/Interdisciplinary PhD
Global Change, Marine Ecosystems, and Society
Maintaining the integrity of ocean ecosystems and managing their use in
the face of rapid and inevitable global change is one of the greatest
challenges of this century. Research in climate change is both complex and multi-disciplinary and many aspects of this field, particularly those addressing impacts, require a wider prospective than is typically gained in a traditional Ph.D. program. Changes in temperature, sea level, and ocean chemistry will have
enormous implications for marine biodiversity and ecosystem function,
and for human exploitation of marine resources, human migration, and
national security. Scientists and policy makers need to understand and
quantify ongoing and potential perturbations to natural processes
caused by global change, and to incorporate this knowledge into social
policy.
Our goal is to train
professionals who not only can identify the problems, but who can also
find practical solutions within ecological, social and economic
constraints.
Transformative elements of this project include:
(1) a focus on the scientific, economic, political, and legal implications of global change impacts on the oceans,
(2) integration of the IGERT with emerging campus-wide interdisciplinary institutes devoted to solutions-based research on global change,
(3) participation by former project faculty and new faculty, particularly by those in the climate science, physical sciences, science studies, history, anthropology, politics, and business,
(4) the design of new courses that directly integrate interdisciplinary research into student theses and team research projects, as well as courses that address international agreements, and a full communication course that teaches non-traditional approaches to communications of research to diverse audiences,
(5) organization of the IGERT around a series of interdisciplinary “process studies” in which multidisciplinary teams of researchers will bring their expertise to bear on a set of related problems at the interface between climate science and the social dimensions of global change and
(6) a close relationship with the UCSD Rady School of Management to help train students in the business culture necessary to translate many aspects of research into global change solutions.
