University of Michigan
ER-18: Sustainability Research Incentives

The overarching goal of the Graham Doctoral Fellowship Program is to create a cohort of doctoral students who will ultimately engage in leadership roles within academia, industry, non-profit organizations, and government. To this end, the Graham Fellowship provides recipients with two-fold support: financial and intellectual. Each year, the Graham Institute competitively selects and admits six doctoral students into the Graham Doctoral Fellowship Program. As a recipient of this honor, each Graham Fellow receives up to $25,000 per year for two years to help support their doctoral-level research and studies. Applicants are reviewed by a strict set of criteria and considered only if their doctoral research projects are related to environmental sustainability and if they demonstrate significant leadership potential. On a broader scale, the Graham Doctoral Fellowship Program helps to create a "Community of Scholars," by which the Graham Fellows can collaborate, engage, and interact—both during their doctoral studies, as well as for years to come. During the fellows' period on campus, academic associations and multidisciplinary projects are cultivated through monthly seminars, annual retreats, workshops, and other Graham-sponsored forums.

Some research is conducted solely for gaining knowledge or understanding, while other research is conducted with a specific use in mind. The Graham Sustainability Institute is helping faculty researchers at the University of Michigan to pursue a combination of these two approaches through Integrated Assessment (IA). Integrated Assessment begins with a structured dialog among scientists and policy makers to establish a key policy question around which the assessment is to be developed. Researchers applying this methodology then gather and assess both natural and social science information to help policy makers answer that question. In partnership with researchers and key stakeholders, we have made available at least $2.5 million to initiate and support multiple IA projects on local to global scales. To that end, we solicit wicked sustainability problems that are ripe for addressing through Integrated Assessment.