Robert Nesmith
Institute Communications and Public Affairs
During its October meeting at West Georgia College
in Carrollton, the Board of Regents of the University
System of Georgia approved two new doctoral degrees
for Georgia Tech.
In keeping with the Institute’s vision of reducing
barriers between educational programs, both degrees
are interdisciplinary at their cores.
Approved were a Ph.D. in International Affairs, Science
and Technology (IAST), to be housed in the Sam
Nunn School of International Affairs, and a Ph.D.
in Computational Science and Engineering (CSE), housed
in the College of
Computing. Both units plan to inaugurate their programs
in fall 2008.
According to Sam Nunn School of International Affairs
Chair and Professor William Long, IAST continues the
school’s mission of providing a technological
background to policy and international affairs. Long
says he anticipates applications for the school’s
inaugural Ph.D. program, in the works for five years,
will be online by mid-November.
“We’re the only international affairs school
of this size—500 undergraduates and 75 in our
professional master’s programs—at a major
technological university,” Long said. Because
of this relationship, the school has the ability to
grant its international affairs graduates a unique expertise
in the sciences and technology.
The new degree follows in the footsteps of grants started
in 2003 by the MacArthur Foundation, which enabled the
school to create fellowships for research scientists
and engineers to study international security policy.
Long says that now the school also can provide graduate
students from science and engineering disciplines with
a degree in international affairs.
“We’re not only providing technical answers
to policy problems, but we’re giving science and
engineering graduates the opportunity to understand
their research in the scheme of policy and its implications
to international affairs,” he said, adding that
this new degree is relevant to the Institute’s
21st-century mission of interdisciplinary study and
contributes to the School of International Affairs’
overall research mission.
“During the Cold War, scientists advised policy-makers.
We need that even more today,” he said. Degree-holders
will be prepared for advisory and research roles in
international security (“not only nuclear proliferation”)
and homeland security, as well as comparative politics,
economic growth and development, and social scientific
research methods.
“We’ll turn out a unique graduate who can
understand the two different worlds [of technology and
international affairs],” Long said.
Housed in the College of Computing, CSE is a cooperative
effort between the colleges of Computing, Engineering
and Sciences.
“We began developing the degree in fall 2005,
shortly after the formation of the Computational Science
and Engineering Division,” said Richard Fujimoto,
Regents’ Professor and Chair of the Computational
Science and Engineering Division of the College of Computing.
“An interdisciplinary faculty committee, including
representatives from the College of Computing, College
of Engineering and the College of Sciences, was formed
to develop the degree program. Because the program involves
eight academic units, it was indeed quite an undertaking,
but we had a dedicated group of faculty committed to
seeing this through to completion.”
Described as the “first and only degree program
of its kind in the state,” it was not modeled
after any existing program. To design the new degree,
Fujimoto said the faculty committees worked backward,
starting with some “prototypical graduates.”
By looking at several leading individuals in the field
today, the committee then developed the program necessary
to reach that end. According to Fujimoto, the core of
the program contains five classes, four of which are
new. All had been offered as special topic courses,
to which the response, he said, has been good.
“In many other cases, the core is constructed
from existing classes. We wanted to establish computational
science as a discipline. Computation has gone from a
‘nice-to-have’ aspect of research to a ‘must-have,’”
Fujimoto said. “It’s such an instrumental
component of research. With this, we’ll bring
computational thinking to the graduates’ coursework,
which will in turn produce a group of scientists and
engineers who have a new mindset regarding research.”
This degree joins three other interdisciplinary courses
in the College of Computing: Algorithms, Combinatorics,
and Optimization; Bioengineering; and Bioinformatics.
By providing a platform for educating students in areas
such as high-performance computing, modeling, computational
data analysis, and simulation and modeling, Fujimoto
says the new degree program helps to “fulfill
the College’s mission to foster interdisciplinary
research related to computing.”
The CSE program also will benefit faculty by attracting
new students who have interests in interdisciplinary
research that combines computation with mathematics,
engineering and science—in short, students who
may not at one time have applied to Tech.
“For students, it opens up new career opportunities
by combining computation skills and knowledge with expertise
in engineering or the sciences,” Fujimoto said.
“We surveyed existing Georgia Tech students and
recent graduates, and 29 percent of those responding
to the survey expressed interest in enrolling in a graduate
degree program in CSE, and ‘increased employment
opportunities’ was cited as a principal reason
for interest in the program.”
Fujimoto says this kind of interdisciplinary program
promotes research “in the seams,” or research
at the edge of disciplines, which is very rich for discovery—and
beneficial for the Institute.
“This program significantly enhances both Georgia
Tech’s and the College of Computing’s existing
strength in high-performance computing and computer-based
modeling,” Fujimoto said. “It will make
Tech much more competitive in attracting the most talented
CSE students from the U.S. and abroad.”
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