Ron Mitchell received a five-year, $472,494 grant from the National Science Foundation last week to continue a program that he says has been helping social scientists and natural scientists to understand each other’s research for the past six years.
For Mitchell, DISsertation initiative for the advancement of Climate Change ReSearch,” or DISCCRS, helps improve the ability of social scientists and natural scientists to understand each other’s research, helps these scholars better communicate their findings to policy-makers and the public, and helps them build more successful interdisciplinary careers in an academic world that has disciplinary boundaries.
Mitchell is the director of the DISCCRS program, and professor of Political Science at the University.
The DISCCRS program helps people who have recently received their PhD researching issues related to climate change learn new interdisciplinary skills so they can better understand and address the problem of climate change.
For Mitchell, discussion among scientists and policy makers is like a new language.
“We all talk in different languages,” Mitchell said. “This helps them learn to talk to each other.”
Mitchell says that those who take part in DISCCRS figure out the cost of climate change, “how much it will cost if we don’t do something, and how it will cost if we do something.”
“This allows them to communicate effectively with people like Governor Ted Kulongoski, Nike Inc, and others on what they need to know about climate change,” Mitchell said, “It’s really about helping to train the next generation from economists to political scientists and oceanographers.”
“DISCCRS provided me with a community of peers working on issues relating to climate change,” Betsy Bancroft said. “In addition, I was exposed to new findings in fields of research I don’t normally follow in the literature.”
Bancroft was a member of the 2008 Symposium session, and a PhD graduate student from Oregon State University. She presented dissertation work on Ultraviolet B radiation as an environmental stressor on amphibians.
A key component of DISCCRS is the capstone DISCCRS Symposium, Mitchell said.
“Those Symposia involve a week-long retreat at which 34 top new PhDs working on climate change are brought together with 6 to 10 top climate scientist ‘mentors’ from the natural and social sciences as well as policy-makers, representatives of national funding agencies and media experts,” Mitchell said.
Jennifer Marlon sees DISCCRS as a link between people who are highly specialized with very disciplined backgrounds to help make connections.
“This program is pretty intense,” Marlon said. “You have thirty-five new graduates with a dozen highly specialized mentors on a fairly small ranch, strong connections are always made.”
Marlon is University graduate of 2009 with a PhD in geography and was a previous research assistant to Mitchell for four years, helping organize and plan many aspects of the conference.
“The program has created a broad network of over 2,000 PhDs who have deposited their dissertation abstracts in an online database as well as a ‘committed core’ of over 140 Symposium Scholars who participated in DISCCRS I through IV,” Mitchell said. “Through these Symposiums numerous articles have been published, grant proposals funded and a network of teaching and communication created.”
Mitchell said the Symposium’s value has been consistently recognized with awards totaling over $2 million from NSF, and the University has been awarded over $600,000 of these funds.
Anthony Leiserowitz is the director of the Yale Project on Climate Change and a Research Scientist at the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies at Yale University. Leiserowitz was in the 2006 symposium with Mitchell, and received his PhD from the University in 2003.
“It’s very rare to have the opportunity to meet and learn from an interdisciplinary group of junior and senior climate scientists,” Leiserowitz said. “Interdisciplinary science is all the rage these days, but is very hard to do in practice, and DISCCRS does a great job helping new scientists understand the tremendous value of interdisciplinary research, but also help in recognizing and overcoming the many barriers.”