Creating an interdisciplinary project: a dash of creativity, pinch of teamwork, and all the patience

This week the Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center (SESYNC) in Annapolis, MD released their pursuit awards for graduate teams. After months of hard work, my team and I found out that we were one of the five funded projects!

While this project began as a few post-it note ideas on a white board, it's turned into a focused, and actionable proposal that seeks to incorporate environmental justice objectives into stream restoration projects.

Since sophomore year of my undergrad at American University, I've been interested in interdisciplinary research and specifically socio-environmental research. While it's almost impossible to create connections and partnerships at USF to do this due to the partitioning of departments and graduate requirements that allow for little flexibility in classes, research, and committee members, SESYNC makes it incredibly easy.

They start by inviting motivated individuals to a training workshop on team science and providing space and time to allow for ideas to flow among participants under broad umbrella categories like "Freshwater Systems in a Changing World." They then encourage groups to present first ideas at the end of the five-day workshop to get immediate feedback about its feasibility, novelty, and actionability — essentially how fund-able this project is.

Therefore, once you leave the workshop, you should have plenty of tools and connections to submit a proposal a few months later! Once selected, SESYNC provides funding for teams to meet in-person three times over an 18-month timeline and pays for cyberinfrastructure, technical support, and even publication fees.

The entire process is an incredible example of how to inspire and promote interdisciplinary research and build lasting connections with collaborators, something more academic institutions should try to recreate.

While I'm incredibly excited for what this project will turn out to be, I'm sure that our team will run into some roadblocks along the way. Crossing disciplinary bounds is not only an unfamiliar practice, but can be an uncomfortable journey as well. We have group members that come from backgrounds in hydrology, geomorphology, biogeochemistry, ecology, governance, and critical theory as well as members with experience in both government and academic sectors. We've already experienced difficulties with jargon and coding software preferences, and this is only the very beginning. Who knows what will come up?

It's also a project run entirely by graduate students (Lucy Andrews, another PhD student at University of California Berekley and myself are the Co-PIs), which I find equal parts exhilarating and terrifying. But this is where all that patience discussed above will come in.

Wish us luck!

If you're interested in our project, you can read our abstract on the SESYNC website here or head on over to Research Interests → Stream Restoration & EJ on my website!

If you're interested in learning more about SESYNC's Graduate Pursuit Program, you can read about that here or drop me an e-mail. I'd be happy to discuss more about it!