The Educational Program of the Earth System Science Research School (ESSReS) - Towards an Interdisciplinary Approach in Earth System Science - page 8

The Helmholtz (ESSReS) is a small unit

of PhD students co-organized by three educational and research institutions in the
city state Bremen: University of Bremen (Institute for Environmental Physics, IUP),
Jacobs University (School of Engineering and Science, JU), and Alfred Wegener
Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research in Bremerhaven (AWI).
The principal concept of ESSReS and its management structure has already been
introduced by Grosfeld et al. ( 2013 ). For the educational program the existing
research infrastructure at the host institutes offered a unique research environment
to study past, present and future changes of the Earth System (compare to Meggers
et al. 2014 ). In its second term ESSReS brought together 23 PhD students from 12
countries to conduct their research in various disciplines, ranging from climate
sciences, bio-geosciences, geo-information sciences to computer modeling and
remote sensing of the atmosphere. After successful completion of the

“ Earth System Science Research School ”

rst ESSReS
group (Grosfeld et al. 2013 ), the second generation of PhD students within ESSReS
have been trained and prepared in this interdisciplinary environment since October
2011. This topic in the Springer Briefs on Climate Change series provides an
overview of the various PhD students research projects. We present the structure of

the accompanying academic program of ESSReS including seminars and courses,
and illustrate how the courses were conceived and carried out.

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2 The Educational Program

ESSReS aims to exchange and cooperate with other graduate programs that have
related topics, since this cooperation produces synergy and added value. The
associated Helmholtz Graduate School for Polar and Marine Research (POLMAR)
at the AWI offers an educational training program, which is also open for interested
ESSReS PhD students. Thus, the PhD students have access to a huge range of
research facilities, course offers, and to a larger scienti c community. This helps

building their individual scienti c network. Larger events like self-organized PhD

conferences, career symposia or cost-intensive training courses were more easily
tackled by joining resources of different research schools. In the following, we
present a number of selected activities.

2.1 Introductory Courses

Throughout the duration of the ESSReS program a series of courses were
conducted, covering most of the scienti

c fields within the research school par-

ticipating institutes. In the first year, a set of lectures was organized to address the

basics of the respective fields in order to provide an overview of the various

methodologies. The aim was to create a common scienti

c language by bridging the

various eld-speci c approaches to a common understanding of how to address