These interdisciplinary group activities are designed to strengthen existing interdisciplinary linkages, build new connections, encourage multi-faceted thinking, and create a self-sustaining culture of graduate education beyond the duration of this award. Most importantly, we expect to create a common experience for participants and encourage cohesiveness among program scholars. Activities will include team building, local networking, working in a shared office space, and sharing computing resources in the IGERT Computational Facility.
Team Building
At the beginning of the academic year, IGERT fellows will participate in a 2-day camp integrated with Tufts’ existing “intellectual outward bound” camp to facilitate team-building across disciplinary boundaries.
Local Networking
The trans-boundary water group, already in-place with participants from Tufts, MIT, and Harvard, will both provide networking opportunities and expose students to water issues beyond the focus of the faculty at Tufts.
Office Spaces
Infrastructure support provided by the university will centrally locate all IGERT student offices. We have learned the value of such a common space to enhance interactions among students from different disciplines.
IGERT Computational Facility (ICF)
The ICF will be co-located with student office spaces to facilitate interaction among all IGERT students. The ICF will be used to house databases of climate and water resources data, archive water conflicts related data from different regions of the globe, provide web based case study database AquaPedia and NDSS to users from anywhere in the world, publish research findings and jointly defined student projects with all supporting data sets and models.
Ethics
Ethics and principles of research conduct will be integrated through the courses and emphasized directly in carefully designed workshops. Ethics will be dealt with explicitly in the cases and examples presented in class and IGERT water colloquium. Our goal is to present ethical issues as an integrated factor in problem solving, rather than having separate, isolated discussions of ethics. University Chaplain Rev. Dr. O’Leary, who holds a doctorate in Ethics, will provide a special workshop on specific ethical issues for IGERT fellows.