The University of Idaho Water Resources Program will double the number of doctoral students in the program thanks to a five-year, $3.1 million grant awarded to the department by the National Science Foundation.
The award, granted by the Integrated Graduate Education Research and Traineeship Program (IGERT) will allow 24 doctoral students to focus on research in the Columbia Basin, among other research.
Jan Boll, principal investigator of the grant and director of environmental science and water resources, said the project is designed to look at the project from many angles.
“Our project is designed to go in (the Columbia Basin) and let us understand that overall basin’s system — hydrologically, socially, economically and from a legal perspective.”
The group of researchers will work with other universities in the Columbia Basin, including Oregon State University, University of Montana, University of Columbia and the University of Washington.
Researchers associated with the grant cannot work on the entire basin, but will focus on Idaho’s Snake River, Clearwater River, Coeur d’Alene River, Kootenai River and Salmon River, as well as the headwaters in Canada.
Internationally, there are plans to work with Chile, where the program will send three groups of graduate students for approximately three weeks each. The students will participate in an immersion course based around the waterways recently worked on in Chile.
Beyond Boll there will be four other principal investigators working on the program: Tim Link, hydrology professor at the College of Natural Resources; John Tracy, director of UI’s Idaho Water Resources Research Institute; Brian Kennedy, associate professor at the College of Natural Resources; and Manoj Schrestha, assistant professor of public administration and policy.
The grant money will be distributed by a steering committee composed of the principal investigators and members of various departments within UI. The grant stipulates certain quantities of money for specific things — the bulk of which will be for graduate student stipends, according to Barbara Cosens, law professor and water resources faculty member.
“Other aspects of the budgeting that go to program management, or some of the research aspects, that same (committee) would decide how to spend it,” Cosens said. “But it has to remain within the parameters of what NSF has provided money for.”
The first thing new doctoral students in the Water Resources Program will do is an internship that is involved with the Columbia Basin, which will give students the opportunity to be a part of interdisciplinary research.
UI has received two previous grants from IGERT. Both funded a program that dealt with landscape resilience in collaboration with a university in Costa Rica.
Jake Smith can be reached at [email protected]