Findings and Recommendations - New Research Opportunities in the Earth Sciences - page 103

infrastructure in other agencies by communicating and, as appropriate engaging in
MoU to sustain data flow. Research opportunity topics involving surficial processes
and coastal dynamics address problems that are at the core of the missions of the
USGS, NOAA, and U.S. Forest Service. Continued efforts to develop and maintain
these partnerships are key to maximizing the impact of EAR research programs.
TRAINING THE NEXT GENERATION AND DIVERSIFYING
THE RESEARCHER COMMUNITY
Capitalizing on the research opportunities set out in the preceding sections
will require researchers with the skills and knowledge to advance the science. As
several high-profile reports have recently laid out (e.g., CGS, 2007; NRC, 2010d),
providing the appropriate training remains a major challenge in the United States,
both within the Earth sciences specifically and STEM (science, technology,
engineering, and mathematics) disciplines in general. Earth science K-12 education
standards are still inconsistent from state to state (Hoffman and Barstow, 2007), and
The Global Competitiveness Report 2010-2011 by the World Economic Forum ranks
the United States 52nd in the quality of math and science education (Schwab, 2010),
continuing a downward trend that presents a significant challenge to the nation's
ability to draw on domestic sources of expertise in the Earth sciences. Many of the
research areas discussed above require advanced skills in computer science and
information technology. The specialized skills in these areas are not typically
developed in Earth science curricula and a possible approach is to foster attraction of
more students with good computational skills into Earth science research through
outreach to those programs and students. EAR might help this process by creating
incentives for computer science participation in key research areas rather than the
current focus on cyberinfrastructure, which often has Earth scientists trying to find
ways to collaborate with computer science initiatives.
Most university curricula in Earth science have moved toward some level of
geosystems perspective for developing the cross-disciplinary foundations needed for
research in opportunity areas like those described above. EAR can build on the
successful example of internship programs (notably those for IRIS, UNAVCO, and
SCEC), along with interdisciplinary educational workshops like CIDER, to foster
broad cross-disciplinary training in other areas. The model of summer graduate
training workshops, with several weeks of lectures by diverse experts addressing a
cross-disciplinary topic, developed by CIDER and several European-based
organizations holds potential for all of the opportunity areas. Few, if any, university
programs are now able to provide in-house expertise across the relevant areas for
many of the geosystems of interest and immersive training in short-courses can be an
effective way of developing awareness, understanding and competency for cross-
discplinary research for undergraduates, graduates and faculty alike.
Increasing the participation of historically underrepresented groups is an
equally important and directly related challenge. There remains an uneven minority
exposure to science and math (NRC, 2010c), as well as a significant science
knowledge disparity between poor and affluent students (National Center for