ED23A-0850
A Decade of Graduate Climate Conferences for Training the Next Generation of Earth Scientists
Tuesday, 15 December 2015
Poster Hall (Moscone South)
Daniel A Rothenberg1, Sarah Rosengard2, Karl E Lapo3, Leah Johnson3, Tyler Rohr4 and Diamilet Perez-Betancourt1, (1)Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, United States, (2)Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Woods Hole, MA, United States, (3)University of Washington Seattle Campus, Seattle, WA, United States, (4)Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Earth and Planetary Sciences, Cambridge, MA, United States
Abstract:
Since 2006, the Graduate Climate Conference (GCC) has served as a unique forum for students from diverse fields (both in physical/life and social sciences) to share innovative research relating to the climate system and global change. Organized exclusively by graduate students for graduate students, the conference provides a nurturing environment for attendees to familiarize themselves with the bleeding-edge in climate research, foster scientific connections between and across fields, and initiate new interdisciplinary collaborations. Moreover, the conference’s single session format both ensures full exposure to the range of work being presented and provides presenters with a large and engaged audience. Here, we will both elucidate the history and objectives of the conference in addition to showcasing its impact on the younger generation within the climate science community via data and feedback collected from almost a decade of past participants. We will present results quantifying both the high scientific merit of the conference (i.e statistics on the amount of presented work that matriculated into peer reviewed publication, etc.) and the critical opportunity for professional development it provides (i.e. how many students gave their first serious scientific talk at the GCC, what sort professional collaborations developed at the GCC, post-doc fellowships and assistant professorships obtained by participants, etc.). The goal of this work is to illustrate how effective the GCC has been at connecting, educating, and nurturing the future generations of researchers from an extremely diverse set of backgrounds and to share with the community a successful model for future conferences both in the geosciences and the broader scientific community.
