Training for Science that Matters: Integrating Social Sciences at the NOAA Center for Coastal and Marine Ecosystems

Training students with wide-ranging research interests to understand the human dimension and its essential role in scientific research is key to educating the next generation of NOAA Coastal and Marine Scientists for the agency mission workforce. A collaborative of six universities and the NOAA Education Partnership with Minority-Serving Institutions, the NOAA Center for Coastal and Marine Ecosystems (NOAA CCME) has integrated core social science competencies across the curricula that align with NOAA mission-related research priorities. Moreover, through a multi-disciplinary program of formal education, center-wide core competencies, intensive experiential training, and research, the NOAA CCME exposes all students to social science concepts and methods.

All NOAA CCME students are required to demonstrate knowledge of integrating natural and social sciences through application of socioeconomic data, tools, stakeholder engagement, and community communication approaches. The training and scientific research are primarily centered on the NOAA CCME focal themes: Place-based Conservation, Coastal Resilience, and Coastal Intelligence. This presentation will explain how these focal themes, along with faculty members, have guided student project development needed to incorporate the social sciences, ensure alignment with NOAA priorities, engage NOAA scientists as mentors, and gain experience at a NOAA workplace under a NOAA mentor.

NOAA CCME faculty work with NOAA partners to implement the Center-Wide Core Competency course (CWCC), an intensive week of hands-on training comprised of field, classroom, and laboratory sessions for each focal area that all students attend early in their NOAA CCME fellowship. The CWCC uses a problem-based learning activity as well as a social science curriculum to address real community-level issues that arise in the context of conservation, resilience, and data science activities.

Engaging faculty and students at six institutions distributed across the nation to function as a unit on such a difficult problem as social science integration has proved to be a significant challenge. This presentation will discuss the challenges of coaching students doing biophysical science to address the human dimensions; testing various processes for facilitating the engagement; as well as enhancing each partnering institution’s ability to reach the NOAA EPP/MSI populations the CSCs seek to develop. Florida A&M University leads the NOAA CCME in partnership with Bethune-Cookman University, California State University – Monterey Bay, Jackson State University, Texas A&M University–Corpus Christi, the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, and NOAA. The Center is funded by the NOAA Education Partnership with Minority-Serving Institutions.