GRADUATE EDUCATION IN THE ERA OF DISCIPLINARY CONVERGENCE

Graduate student education and academic research in the US are inexorably connected as academia is the primary employer of new PhDs; hence, graduate programs are largely shaped to continue enabling the mission of institutions of higher education. During the past two decades, the increased interest of academe in solving complex societal problems, which in turn require expertise from different disciplines, prompted the development of interdisciplinary courses in regular graduate curricula. More recently, as the scientific community started to view transdisciplinarity and disciplinary convergence, i.e., deep integration across disciplines driven by a specific research problem, as more direct means for solving the vexing problems of society, graduate education has started to undergo rapid changes. Many faculty/researchers at US academic institutions are single-handedly developing new curricula and degree programs. These programs transcend traditional disciplines and have the potential to enable their graduates to forge new ways of solving research grand challenges. This paper reviews the pertinent graduate education trends of the past two decades, and how these trends were driven by policy, funding sources and the faculty/researchers' desire to achieve disciplinary convergence. Included are programs developed under the auspices the Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship, a National Science Foundation initiative with the objective to reform graduate education by promoting multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary training. More recent, bottom-up, faculty driven programs are discussed primarily in the context of Academic Research Centers, which offer effective platforms for launching new multidisciplinary/transdisciplinary courses, hands-on training and new degree programs. The paper highlights the strategies these centers employ in recruitment, training and education of students, and the development of communities of experts in the emerging disciplines.