The main objective of the Integrative Graduate Education and Research Training (IGERT) in Urban Ecology is to educate a new kind of life, earth, or social scientist who is broader, more flexible, more collaborative, and more adept at linking science and social issues.

Training is built on a model emphasizing collaboration and teamwork. Fellows can earn degrees in a core discipline of the life, earth, or social science. They also participate in team research, courses, and seminars that emphasize integration among collaborative components beyond the student’s home discipline. Collectively, these activities afford skills that are broadly applicable to careers in public and private sectors and in academia.

Urban Ecology: An Integrating Theme

Urban ecology is the organizing research theme of our IGERT. This theme incorporates the spatial scale characteristic of urban regions, the long-term perspective of the Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) program, and a comparative view of natural and human-dominated systems. The organizing question of the Central Arizona–Phoenix LTER is:

How does the pattern of development of cities alter ecological conditions of the cities and their surrounding environments, and how do ecological changes feed back on further development via the human social system?

This question obviously takes a different form in the collective mind of each discipline of our program; however, within each, it is inherently integrative (drawing broadly from subdisciplines). Even more significant is that by analyzing approaches to and answers from an array of disciplines, we can achieve what might be considered a meta-integration provided by a interdisciplinary perspective.

IGERT 2, our second five-year funding period, builds upon substantial investment over the past five years and effectiveness won by concerted trial and error. This phase coincides with a major reorganization of ASU’s four campuses, a synthesis of several new schools from traditional departments, and a focus on interdisciplinarity as an organizing principle. IGERT faculty members and students are strategically placed to both inform and influence this reorganization. A new University Initiative on Disciplinary Integration has been stimulated in part by IGERT activities and involves IGERT faculty members as leaders. The broader impact of this effort lies in its scientific understanding of urban dynamics and in a lowering of discipline-related barriers to innovative, socially relevant graduate education at this and other American universities.

As IGERT2 is coming to an end, a new graduate student organization (GISER) have been implemented to institutionalize IGERT at ASU.

Graduates in Integrative Society and Environment Research (GISER) is a new graduate student organization aimed at providing graduate students from schools and departments across ASU with the opportunity to move from talking about interdisciplinarity to engaging in short-term, student-driven interdisciplinary research related to society and environment.

To serve this purpose, GISER includes three sets of activities:

1. Monthly plenary meeting: All graduate student and faculty involved with GISER meet monthly to talk about working groups and workshops and brainstorm future activities. These meetings have also included panel discussions on interdisciplinary topics such as objectivity in science.
2. Working groups: These graduate student led projects usually take the form of a reading or discussion group where students can engage with other disciplinary perspectives on a topic.
3. Workshops: These product-oriented projects often emerge from working groups. These projects typically receive funding, and participants gain academic credits for participation.

GISER has been initiated with seed money from the IGERT in Urban Ecology, and has since obtained funding for workshop research (distributed on a competitive basis) from other ASU organizations. In our first 9 months, GISER has attracted over 100 members and has 5 active working groups which include over 30 students as well as collaborators from non profit and governmental organizations. Participants have come from a range of disciplines, including sustainability, geography, life sciences, humanities, political science, anthropology, archaeology, engineering, urban planning, and mathematics.

While GISER is still in its infancy, it is promising to be a productive forum for integrative research and collaboration for graduate students from a wide range of disciplinary backgrounds.