NRT: Convergent Graduate Training Program on Coastal Resilience

About This Grant

Coastal regions house over 50% of the U.S. population, contribute more than 55% to the national GDP, and are expanding in population and economic importance. However, coastal regions also face escalating challenges such as increased rainfall, saltwater intrusion, erosion, flooding, and extreme weather events like hurricanes. These threats pose significant risks to the safety of coastal populations, infrastructure, properties, and economic stability. Addressing these issues demands an interdisciplinary approach that combines engineering, natural and marine sciences, data sciences, and social sciences. This National Science Foundation Research Traineeship award to the University of Miami will address these issues by training graduate students in the interdisciplinary field of coastal resilience. The project anticipates providing a unique and comprehensive training opportunity for 120 master’s and doctoral students, including 20 funded trainees. Trainees will gain interdisciplinary technical expertise and professional skills in coastal resilience, team science, leadership, and entrepreneurship. Through this project, NRT trainees will participate in internships, identify and research community-specific challenges, and design and implement viable solutions. This NRT will prepare forward-thinking STEM professionals with the breadth of expertise and interdisciplinary training needed to make long-lasting positive contributions that enhance coastal safety and resilience. Trainees will conduct research across a range of themes to test specific hypotheses. For example, to reduce the contribution of global carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, projects will focus on: genetic engineering of self-healing concrete; processing-structure-property relationships for novel cement-based materials; and nanomaterial synthesis using aerosol routes and nanomaterial characterization. Other projects will focus on: development of green and sustainable corrosion inhibitors for resilient coastal infrastructure, and coral interactions with sustainable concrete materials to inform artificial coral reefs for shoreline protection. This project takes a novel and convergent approach to graduate education, with an emphasis on experiential training, innovative new course development, and research rotations. The curriculum will leverage faculty expertise in the interdisciplinary areas of infrastructure engineering; marine, atmospheric, and earth science; materials science; coastal systems resilience; computational science; and psychology. The NSF Research Traineeship (NRT) Program is designed to encourage the development and implementation of bold, new, and potentially transformative models for STEM graduate education training. The program is dedicated to effective training of STEM graduate students in high priority interdisciplinary or convergent research areas through comprehensive traineeship models that are innovative, evidence-based, and aligned with changing workforce and research needs. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.