Planting the Seeds for Ecology Program

A newly established interdisciplinary program granting Duke's first Ph.D. degrees in ecology has received about 30 applicants ‚ "a delightfully large number" ‚ for its Fall 2000 inaugural class of "six to eight" graduate students, said program director William Schlesinger.

Approved by the Board of Trustees in December after several years of planning, the

Duke University Graduate Program in Ecology will provide "a forum to unify a subject that's been disaggregated on this campus for a long period of time," said Schlesinger, a James B. Duke professor of botany.

Up until now, graduate students interested in ecology had to structure their training so they could receive doctoral degrees in an area where Duke had a formal department, such as a Ph.D. in zoology or botany.

"This is the wave of the future," added Lewis Siegel, the dean of the Graduate School. "In many fields, the ability of interdepartmental, interdisciplinary programs to grant Ph.D.s seems to be the best way to get the best graduate students here and to make faculty resources available at the cutting edge."

Both men said that while the National Research Council rates Duke's ecology faculty as the third best in the nation, the fact that those first rate researchers and teachers are spread among a number of departments has interfered with graduate student recruitment.

"Students looking in at Duke from the outside on the World Wide Web or by going through catalogs didn't know where to send their applications," Schlesinger said. "There were ecologists in various places, the Nicholas School of the Environment, botany, zoology, biological anthropology and anatomy, the Pratt School of Engineering and other departments, but there was no unified forum.

Some applications got sent to the wrong places and never got re-routed., and sometimes faculty never saw them or thought they were meant for someone else, said the botany professor , who himself has a dual appointment in the Nicholas School. "And over the years I saw some really spectacular applications fall through the cracks in that kind of fashion."

Siegel said the Graduate Program in Ecology is modeled on two others that offer Ph.D.s through interdisciplinary training outside a traditional academic department: the University Program in Genetics and the University Program in Molecular Cancer Biology.

Since Siegel became dean in 1991 "we have created from scratch no departmental Ph.D. programs," he added. "The really new programs have been these interdisciplinary ones. The two we have have been highly successful, and I assume ecology will be highly successful too. I think the focus on interdisciplinary doctoral training is where we're going."

Details of the new Graduate Program in Ecology are available on-line at < www.ecology.duke.edu>. The initial faculty will include 13 with primary appointments in the Nicholas School, six from the department of zoology, four from the botany department, and two from the department of biological anthropology and anatomy.

Members of this multidisciplinary faculty will teach two core courses requires for all the programs students. The first will be Population, Community and Behavioral Ecology, and the second Physiological Ecology and Ecosystem Science.

"The core courses we create will allow every student in the program, whatever background they came from, to develop a certain base foundation,"Schlesinger said. "They're new; they'll be offered for the first time in the fall of 2000."

Graduate students will be able to choose among 24 other courses as well and are required to complete at least eight. They will be expected to attend weekly research seminars and will be strongly encouraged to complete at least two tutorials or laboratory experiences with a different faculty member, each averaging about 12 weeks long.

During the first year, ecology graduate students are also expected to select a faculty adviser to help guide them in their doctoral training. Following standard practice, they will be guaranteed financial support from the program for the first two years. Support after that becomes the responsibility of the department or division where their faculty adviser has his or her primary appointment.

At the end, students can choose to receive either a Ph.D. in ecology or a doctorate awarded through a participating department or division as was the case in past times. If they elect to pursue a departmental doctorate, they will also receive a certificate of graduate study in ecology.

Schlesinger said the first sign of the new program is a series of lectures during the spring 2000 semester which began Jan 12 with a talk by Judy Meyer of the University of Georgia's Institute of Ecology. A past president of the Ecological Society of America, her talk explored the ecology of urban areas, an emerging new theme.

Schlesinger's own ecological research investigates ecological questions ranging from why grasslands are changing into desert scrub lands in Southern New Mexico to how extra atmospheric carbon dioxide affects the growth rates of trees and plants in Duke Forest.