Grand Challenges Graduate Communities
Source: https://gradschool.umd.edu/grand-challenges-graduate-communities Parent: https://gradschool.umd.edu/funding
An Accelerator for Interdisciplinary Research and Professional Impact
The Grand Challenges Graduate Communities - (GC)2 - are designed to revolutionize graduate education, moving past disciplinary silos to build lasting research networks able to tackle humanity’s most pressing issues. Located within the newly constructed Discovery House graduate housing, (GC)2 will bring together small, carefully curated cohorts (between 15-20 per community) from all across campus to focus on a grand challenge theme such as sustainability, the ethics of AI, threats to democracy, or global health crises, to name a few.
Graduate education is at an inflection point. The challenges facing society cannot be solved through disciplinary expertise alone. At the same time, graduate students are seeking deeper mentorship networks with faculty and peers, greater interdisciplinary engagement, and clearer routes to real-world impact. Universities across the nation are rethinking graduate training, but few have the infrastructure, faculty breadth, and institutional commitment that the University of Maryland brings together at this moment. With the opening of Discovery House and the university’s strategic focus on grand challenges and reimagining learning, we are uniquely positioned to launch a model that meets the urgency of this era: a community-based accelerator where interdisciplinary research, professional purpose, and cross-campus collaboration converge.
For students accepted into one of our (GC)2 communities as a “Grand Challenge Graduate Scholar,” the advantages of participating will profoundly alter their educational experience and provide career-advancing outcomes. Since there is not a formal curriculum for any of the communities, participation is a complement to, rather than a distraction from, their core research. As Grand Challenge Graduate Scholars, students will experience:
- High-Value Collaborative Research:Collaborate with other dynamic student peers from different academic backgrounds to co-author grant applications, co-author research articles, or produce innovative business ideas that will move the needle on a grand challenge. This model expands each student’s methodological breadth and research community beyond their home department.
- Expanded Mentorship and Committee Access: Find faculty mentors from across the campus who work on topics they care about but are outside of their home department and even their home college. Here, students may easily identify a range of scholars on campus who can readily serve on their thesis or dissertation committees and help mentor their research through a unique disciplinary lens.
- Tangible Research Support: Have access to Graduate School funds specifically pitched for each (GC)2 community in order to pay for conference attendance, research travel, and (GC)2 awards for exemplary research.
- Professional Development: Engage in career-focused activities, including speaker series, interdisciplinary lectures, and dedicated workshops focused on academic support and career development.
- Community and Belonging: Find community and peer support that expands the graduate school experience beyond any single lab or departmental cohort. By building intimate community connections, student retention, satisfaction, and mental health will be positively impacted.
While the (GC)2 communities will build on UMD’s status as one of the nation’s top universities for living-learning programs, it will be intentionally distinct from the existing undergraduate models. Rather than adding coursework or creating community through team building activities, (GC)2 is a research-driven framework that integrates directly into students’ existing scholarly work, supporting rather than competing with their primary academic commitments. Community in (GC)2 is created through shared intellectual pursuits and professional development, recognizing that graduate students are advanced scholars whose sense of professional belonging emerges from meaningful academic work.
Each (GC)2 community will be led by a Faculty Fellow who will serve as a dynamic leader of these interdisciplinary collaborations. The Faculty Fellow, who serves in a non-residential role, will help shape the range of research experiences available to the community, link the community with a network of campus mentors, bring in the best national and international experts on the topic, and help guide students through their approaches to tackling the grand challenge.
As the intellectual heart of Discovery House, the Grand Challenges Graduate Communities will create something rare in graduate education: a sustained, interdisciplinary research ecosystem where students and faculty work side by side to confront the defining problems of our time. (GC)2 is an accelerator for ideas, for mentorship, and for public impact. Making Discovery House a home for discovery,(GC)2 will produce networks of scholars whose collaborations will extend far beyond a single college or even beyond UMD as a campus, building a foundation for breakthroughs we cannot yet imagine. By investing in (GC)2, we invest in the future leaders, researchers, and innovators who will shape a more just, resilient, and technologically responsible world.
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