University of Utah
AC-10: Support for Sustainability Research

Global Change and Sustainability Center (GCSC) hosts three programs that promote interdisciplinary sustainability related research:
1) GCSC Student Research Grant program
Applications for research funding are solicited biannually and a rotating interdisciplinary faculty committee reviews and selects awardees. Projects are required to be interdisciplinary and relate to sustainability and/or global change.

2) GCSC Travel Grant program
Funds to help support student travel to professional meetings to present their sustainability research. Since 2013, the GCSC has awarded $201,650 in sustainability student research funding to 205 students from 16 different departments. Awardees are required to present their work at an annual Environment and Sustainability Research Symposium held at the University of Utah.

3) GCSC Graduate Fellowship program.
Aimed at recurring outstanding and diverse graduate students to the University of Utah whose research focuses on sustainability themes. From 2021-2022, the GCSC funded 37 graduate fellows.
URL: Student Research and Travel Funding: http://environment.utah.edu/programs-projects/student-funding/

Wallace Stegner Center for Land, Resources & the Environment (S.J. Quinney College of Law)
Offers an array of awards and fellowships to students in Environmental and Natural Resources Law.
URL: http://www.law.utah.edu/research/stegner/stegner-awards-and-fellowships/

Global Change and Sustainability Center (GCSC) Programs
The GCSC is an interdisciplinary hub catalyzing research on global change and sustainability at the U of U. We create a collaborative interdisciplinary research community that generates and disseminates the knowledge required to address the urgent need for adaptation, mitigation, and resilience in response to current global change. Uniting faculty across departments, we advance innovative research through engagement and training. We incubate leaders, initiate, and deepen faculty relationships, and expand and share knowledge. We facilitate new approaches to responsible management and viability of natural, social, and economic systems, working towards a future where humans and ecosystems thrive. Created in 2009 by faculty as a program to serve students, faculty and members of the academic community, the center is primarily oriented to faculty needs, contributions, and innovation. The mission, activities, and investments made by the GCSC are driven by the urgent need for new transdisciplinary solutions to complex sustainability challenges. Our culture of inclusivity and partnership welcomes a diversity of perspectives and approaches to research. Central to building relationships between differing perspectives is a sense of humility, openness, and respect. We work to support current research, connect research to practice, and empower the next generation of scholars with broadened perspectives. The GCSC provides institutional support for graduate fellowships, interdisciplinary student research and travel, hosts multiple events per year to convene the interdisciplinary community, and offers an Interdisciplinary Graduate Certificate in Sustainability and Graduate Certificate in Hydrology and Water Resource Management.

Wilkes Center for Climate Science and Policy
The Wilkes Center is an interdisciplinary center that aims to provide transformative, integrative, and cutting-edge science, education, entrepreneurship, and practical solutions to tackle climate change in Utah, the United States, and the globe.
URL: https://wilkescenter.utah.edu/

Wallace Stegner Center for Land, Resources & the Environment, Research Fellows Program (S. J. Quinney College of Law)
The Stegner Center’s Research Program was established to provide objective legal and policy analysis relating to Western public lands and the natural resources they contain. Our legal and policy analysis combines with option-centered advice to inform a wide range of public land management decisions.
URL: http://www.law.utah.edu/research/stegner/

NEXUS
Created in 2018, the INterdisciplinary EXchange for Utah Science (NEXUS) is an interdisciplinary research institute at the University of Utah. NEXUS welcomes researchers across the University of Utah who desire to collaborate on research projects concerning society's grand challenges, including (1) social disparities & physical / mental health, (2) climate change, the environment and well-being (3) communicating science to the community (4) suicide/violence (5) families and health and (6) opioids. At NEXUS, collaborations will be sparked through joint research resources, faculty exchange programs, faculty mentoring programs, interdisciplinary summer workshops, interdisciplinary conferences, pilot grant program and graduate and undergraduate training programs. NEXUS provides an environment at the University of Utah for interdisciplinary collaborations that spans departments and colleges, providing training in a wide variety of research methods and innovating new statistics and methods across diverse research fields.
URL: https://nexus.utah.edu/

In 2021 the Office for Faculty published a new University of Utah RPT template that acknowledges interdisciplinary scholarship (see attached PDF).

This has been adopted by many colleges and departments and currently out of 64 departments, 18 of them have published promotion / tenure guidelines or policies, either through the department or college that give explicit positive recognition to interdisciplinary scholarship.

Librarians at the J. Willard Marriott Library are assigned as liaisons to all departments in order to provide curriculum support, library collection building, information literacy instruction and subject-specific research assistance. In the 2021-2022 academic year, a librarian was embedded in the Sustainability Office in order to assist with campus sustainability projects and documentation of Campus as a Living Laboratory. Campus librarians have created a wide variety of online research guides on sustainability topics, including a resource list to support revision of the University’s Climate Change Action Plan. Databases to support environmental and sustainability studies include Gale in Context: Environmental Studies and GreenFile (EbscoHost). The James E. Faust Law Library also offers Environmental Law Report and E&E News (which includes Greenwire and Climatewire). Since most sustainability-related journals are bundled into research databases, the J. Willard Marriott Library provides a list of generic databases that are specifically useful to support Environmental & Sustainability Studies, as well as a free Interlibrary Loan service for faculty, staff and students to get materials that are not in library collections. In 2016 the Marriott Library created a "Sustainability U" sub-collection within the USpace institutional Repository to create a digital archive for student words, reports and other documentation of sustainable change on campus.

SOURCES

Global Change & Sustainability Center
URL: http://environment.utah.edu/

Wallace Stegner Center for Land, Resources & the Environment
URL: http://www.law.utah.edu/research/stegner/

Sustainability Research Guides
URL: https://campusguides.lib.utah.edu/

SustainabiltyU (institutional repository)
https://lib.utah.edu/digital-scholarship/sustainability-U.php