Louisiana Tech undergrads have gained another top-shelf interdisciplinary education opportunity.
The Gulf Research Program (GRP) of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine recently added six colleges and universities — including Tech — to its Gulf Scholars Program (GSP), a five-year, funded pilot program that prepares undergraduate students to address pressing environmental, health, energy, and infrastructure challenges in the Gulf Coast region.
The addition of this fifth cohort — Tech, Alcorn State, Millsaps College, Texas Southern University, Ole Miss, and South Florida — expands the GSP network to 30 institutions across the five Gulf States, marks the final cohort of the pilot phase of the program, and sets the stage for an extensive network of higher education partners working toward a more resilient and sustainable Gulf region.
“Because of all these social and environmental challenges of our region, the great thing the program allows is for all of our five colleges to engage,” Dr. Jennifer Hill, associate professor of Biological Sciences in Tech's College of Applied and Natural Sciences and director of Tech’s Gulf Scholars Program, said. “The program is framed around integrated education across multiple disciplines informing students and the community of the interdisciplinary nature of our regional challenges.
“This is very much a team effort with faculty from various disciplines on the steering committee,” Hill said. “This program is designed to be engaged by the entire University community.”
As a participant in the GSP, Tech will develop a unique educational curriculum consisting of place-based courses, workshops, and an internship program that includes major research, service-learning, or creative project in partnership with a local or regional organization to address our region’s complex environmental, social, energy, and resilience challenges.
In working to find solutions for the region and planet — and therefore for people — students and faculty might explore anything from recycling programs to health disparities to construction materials that better contend with flooding.
“There are so many different things that we need big solutions for,” Hill said. “And we want to find solutions by engaging the public, our alumni, and the community, not just working behind the scenes in our labs. We’re working to engage in a way that we’ll have active solutions.
“I’m a scientist and ecologist; I am not an economist, so on my own I don’t have the answers,” Hill said. “This is why we want all disciplines involved, to feed off each other, to help each other learn and solve. Our students are hungry for his information and engagement. While this program isn’t all about coastal problems, the program initiatives will help us get them into our (Gulf) environment more, see what these challenges for the coast and the people there look like up close. We want to make our students more civilly engaged in all the issues we are facing. The more informed they are, the more active they’ll be in making needed change.”
An undergrad and internship initiative commissioning between eight to 13 interns annually, the program officially begins next academic year, funded with $600,000 by the GRP.
The National Academies’ Gulf Research Program is an independent, science-based program founded in 2013 as part of legal settlements with the companies involved in the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster. The GRP’s mission is to develop, translate, and apply science to enhance the safety of offshore energy, the environment, and the well-being of the people of the Gulf region for generations to come. It supports innovative science, guides data design and monitoring, and builds and sustains networks to generate long-term benefits for the Gulf region and the nation.