Transdisciplinary Research in Graduate Engineering Education

Society faces burgeoning challenges to sustain and enhance life on earth. Smart use and management of natural resources plus proactive responses to the corresponding rapid changes within and beyond the energy and environmental fields hold promise for society to act. But such action requires future professionals equipped with transdisciplinary research abilities coupled to a broad understanding of dynamic relationships across natural, social, and engineering systems.

This award will pilot and test transformative approaches to develop and improve engineering graduate students’ ability to conduct transdisciplinary research. This research is needed to reach sustainable solutions respecting the interdependence of natural, social, and engineering systems on local and trans-local scales that resonate globally. This project brings researchers and graduate students from different fields of study to share spaces, conversations, analyses, scholarship, research approaches, methods, questions, and solutions through workshops and service learning projects.

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