Dr. Jessica Graybill is an Assistant Professor in the Geography Department at Colgate University. Her interdisciplinary pedagogy and research is in Urban Ecology, Urban Political Ecology, and Urban and Environmental Issues of the Former Soviet Union. Publications include The Rough Guide to Interdisciplinarity: Graduate Student Experiences (2006) and Continuity and Change: (Re)Constructing Geographies of the Environment in Late Soviet And Postsoviet Russia (2007).
Category: People
Vivek Shandas
Dr. Vivek Shandas is an associate professor in the Nohad A. Toulan School of Urban Studies and Planning, and an associate researcher in the Center for Urban Studies at Portland State University. He is also the founder of the newly established Sustaining Urban Places Research Lab (SUPR Lab) which focuses on three substantive areas of investigation: (1) examining feedback between environmental change and human behavior; (2) developing community-based indicators for measuring the social and environmental conditions; and (3) characterizing the relationship between urban development patterns and environmental quality. His collaborative approach to research pursue to address pressing societal challenges.
Beate Scholz
Dr Beate Scholz is director of Scholz – consulting training coaching. She has worked as strategy consultant, project facilitator and coach since 2003 (until April 2008 in addition to her position at the German Research Foundation, DFG). Her company focuses on supporting universities, research organizations and governments in designing, implementing and evaluating concepts and strategies for research career development and international research collaboration. Training and coaching of individual investigators and researchers’ teams in view of research career development issues and strategic acquisition of research funds completes the professional portfolio of Beate Scholz.
From 1997 until 2008 Beate Scholz worked for Germany’s central research funding organization, the DFG, where she headed the Research Career Strategy division, beginning in 2001. She was involved in developing Germany’s Excellence Initiative, namely the Graduate Schools Programme.
During her professional career Beate Scholz has conducted various surveys and evaluations, e.g. on behalf of the European Science Foundation’s European Alliance on Research Career Development, on the AFR Programme (funding outstanding PhD candidates and postdocs) of Luxembourg’s Fonds National de la Recherche in 2010 and on ‘Cross-border research collaboration in Europe’ on behalf of the European Heads of Research Councils and the European Science Foundation in 2009.
In addition, she has gained considerable experience as reviewer in selection panels for doctoral programmes and junior research groups on behalf of the German Helmholtz Association and two Irish Research Councils and in chairing the international management committee of the European Young Investigator Award. Moreover she is a member of the global network of experts ‘Forces & Forms of Change in Doctoral Education Worldwide’, based at the Center for Innovation and Research in Graduate Education at the University of Washington in Seattle, USA. She is a demanded expert by the European Commission, where she currently serves as member and rapporteur to the Expert Group on the Research Profession.
Beate Scholz holds a PhD in Modern Italian History from the University of Trier. She studied history, political sciences and international economics at the Universities of Trier, Reading/UK and Cologne and carried out research in Italy and Austria
Director
Maresi Nerad is the founding director of the Center for Innovation and Research in Graduate Education (CIRGE) and Professor for Higher Education, in the Leadership in Higher Education Program, College of Education, at the University of Washington, Seattle.
A native of Germany, Dr. Nerad received her doctorate in higher education from the University of California, Berkeley; directed research in the central Graduate Division of UC Berkeley for 15 years; spent 2000 as Dean in Residence at the Council of Graduate Schools, the professional Association of US Graduate Deans, in Washington, D.C; joined the University of Washington (UW) in Seattle in 2001, and opened CIRGE in 2002.
Dr. Nerad has served on many national and institutional doctoral education reviews including the German Excellence Initiative (2006, 2011), the U.S. National Research Council (2002-3) to examine the Methodology for the Assessment of Research Doctorate Programs. She served and still serves on US and international advisory boards, such as International Advisory Committee for Science and Engineering of the US National Science Foundation (NSF) (2011- 2013); the Presidential Innovation Broad of the University of Bremen, Germany (2014-19), the Graduate Academy of the Goethe University of Frankfurt (2011-16); and undertakes formative and summative research for flagship interdisciplinary doctoral programs of NSF (IGERT/NRT), the German Excellence Graduate Schools (Materials MAINZ), or the European Commission (UNIKE).
She has written and edited 5 books and published numerous articles on doctoral education. The latest book appeared 2014, Globalization and it Impact on the Quality of the PhD, Sense Publishers, and received the outstanding publication award from the American Education Research Association (AERA) SIG 168 in 2015.