Engaging in Interdisciplinary Environmental Research

Julie Padowski: Thanks, everybody, for for coming to this session. As you guys might have seen in the advertisement, part of what we’re doing here is just talking a little bit about the Center for Environmental Research, Education, and Outreach. And its role it plays in supporting interdisciplinary environmental work. Just to familiarize you with this, if you have not, had any meaningful contact with CEREO before, but then the bulk of this hour will be a panel discussion, from faculty who have projects supported through CEREO

Julie Padowski: And we tried to pick three very different types of projects, both in terms of their focus, their funding mechanisms, and their disciplines. So, we’ll have them talk a little bit about the projects that they are, working on, and then we’ll have some time for Q&A about just, you know, how we do interdisciplinary work in the academic sphere, some of the challenges we face and some of the opportunities that we have, too.

Julie Padowski: So I’m going to turn it over to Sasha McLarty. She’s the new co-director for the Center for Environmental Research, Education, and Outreach. She’s an assistant professor in Civil and Environmental Engineering and does quite a bit of interdisciplinary work. Although specializes in groundwater remote sensing and modeling.

Julie Padowski: So, Sasha.

Sasha McLarty: All right. Yes, I will do my, Welcome to everybody. Thank you for joining today. Our hope is that we can continue to engage with you all in different ways. But let’s start off by just going over the basics of what CEREO is. First off, CEREO is a systemwide center under the Office of Research.

Sasha McLarty: That means that we don’t just work in Pullman, but we work across the full WSU system, satellite campuses and here locally. One comment on that is that we are always open to ideas and suggestions, especially about how to engage that systemwide focus. So we have some ideas of things that are coming up, to try to build out both our local and satellite presence, but open to suggestions, especially from those of you not located in Pullman.

Sasha McLarty: One thing that sets CEREO apart, we think, is that we are really here to support proposal and idea development throughout every step of the process. So we want to start off just by fostering interest in interdisciplinary environmental research. If you’re here today, that means that you already have that interest, hopefully, or you’re curious about it to some extent.

Sasha McLarty: So everything from just sparking interest in this type of work to then figuring out how to connect and build up strong teams. So as you’ll see soon, we have a broad CEREO network that we can leverage and love to leverage to build out strong interdisciplinary teams. So even if you have no idea about how to go start an interdisciplinary project, we can help you just connect to the correct people to flesh out the idea that you’re interested in and build that strong team.

Sasha McLarty: You can also come to us to help facilitate collaborations that are ongoing. So if you have a colleague, you always talk about how you want to work on a project together, but don’t really know how to go about that, we can help facilitate those collaborations from idea development. Again, further enhancing team connections. One of our greatest strengths is how to administer projects that get pretty complicated.

Sasha McLarty: So a lot of interdisciplinary work ends up with people from multiple different units, multiple different colleges from across the WSU system. And so we have administrative support that is specially trained and skilled and practiced in how to do the administrative side of project management. When we’re dealing with these complex cross unit projects. And ultimately our goal is to advance research.

Sasha McLarty: So we leverage education and engagement and outreach all in support of producing better research. We kind of think that the the larger the grant, the more money going toward a grant, the more you really need to have tightly linked engagement, education, outreach, multidisciplinary work, all working toward advancing research. So CEREO loves to work with people at any step in this progression of, actions that you need to take to do interdisciplinary environmental research so you can step in any way, any one of these bullet points and stick with us throughout any of the remaining bullet points all the way through completing a project.

Sasha McLarty: Right now, our CEREO leadership is jumping around. Here’s our current CEREO leadership. So Julie is bringing the institutional knowledge and I’m bringing the fresh brain, hopefully with enough coffee. Jacqueline is our administrative assistant, and she’s the one who will really help on the administering grants, helping develop the budget and working in that cross unit frame. And then Anna James is working specifically on one of the projects that you’ll hear about the Rivers, Watersheds, and Communities NRT Program.

Sasha McLarty: In addition to the pictures you see, we also have an executive committee and a slightly larger advisory committee. These are people with representatives from across different units on campus and beyond Pullman, and they help brainstorm different ideas and activities that CEREO can, can pursue in support of research with you all. And then we have a large list of CEREO affiliates.

Sasha McLarty: These are faculty, staff, students, and community members who have participated in some way in CEREO supported projects. So hopefully today we’ll have a few more people to add to that list. Our goal, our mission is to really support and advance interdisciplinary environmental research on campus. Again, we use education and outreach in support of research initiatives, and sitting within the Office of Research means that we get to have our hands in all of the different colleges, all of the different units on campus.

Sasha McLarty: Here is an example of members of our CEREO community, not just in individual disciplines and units at WSU, but a number of the different project partners that we have. You can see not just locally in Washington, but also project partners across the region, across the country and including project partners not represented here, but internationally. So our goal really is to be a hub, bringing together and advancing research teams around environmental interdisciplinary work.

Sasha McLarty: Present company excluded, I’m sure. But often there’s a stereotype that, you know, you have a… researchers might have a hammer and they look for questions to answer with that hammer. I’m a modeler, so I’m going to find things to model. CEREO is really a question driven center. We want to help you develop the right questions to answer interesting problems related to environmental work.

Sasha McLarty: We take a systems approach and we really try to flesh out the team to flesh out the science questions that look at the system as a whole, the people who live in an area, the ecosystem needs of a region. And so we then pull in and help you pull in the right tools, the right people to answer questions that are relevant to society.

Sasha McLarty: So we get rid of that hammer, and we take that systems approach. Here’s just a list of a whole lot of acronyms. I’m sure you all love acronyms, but what we wanted to highlight here first is just the dollars that CEREO has helped to bring in through research over the past few years, and the primary thematic areas where we have worked on these projects.

Sasha McLarty: So this bright green color here is projects that are primarily related to climate and climate change work in orange, we have wildfire work. Water is in bright blue. And then food, energy, water projects are in this… I don’t know what color that is. And as we look forward into this upcoming year and the next few years, we’re really looking to expand upon these primary themes where CEREO has been working.

Sasha McLarty: Education and training, again, is in support of research. But we’ve had, a range of different activities focused both for graduate student training and also faculty training. A big favorite of, many participants are these data carpentry and software carpentry workshops, where we can have attendees who have never coded in any language before, and then they can leave with some facility in using R or Python, and just have more confidence in those coding skills that really are relevant to all disciplines now, and not just the, the hard sciences.

Sasha McLarty: You’ll hear more about the Rivers, Watersheds, and Communities Project and the certificate program associated with that. And then for outreach, you can see here that just everyday outreach. We have our CEREO website and weekly newsletters. If you’re not yet signed up for those weekly newsletters, we encourage you to sign up for those. We make announcements about funding opportunities that are coming up, and interesting seminars, job openings.

Sasha McLarty: There’s really quite a wide range of activities that get included in that. We periodically have seminars and town halls and these are just other initiatives on sustainability across campus. C2R2 is Climate Change Related Research Working Group. So we have an upcoming activity for that called Climate and Coffee. So we’ll be doing some outreach and networking around those interested in working on climate change related issues.

Sasha McLarty: And then again through the RWC project, rivers, watersheds and communities, we’re sort of piloting efforts to enhance community-engaged research, both for faculty and for grad students. So when you work with us, one of the core benefits is just the ability to connect into a large network of other researchers interested in pursuing interdisciplinary environmental work. So you just show up, say what you’re interested in, and we really help connect and facilitate collaborations on, topics that you’re interested in.

Sasha McLarty: And then we also work the full spectrum from pre award to post award management. A lot of these larger interdisciplinary grants are administratively very complicated. And so we help ease that burden again both pre-award and post-award. And it’s important to mention here that the F&A that you would receive in your research role goes to you as the researcher in your unit and not to, not to CEREO.

Sasha McLarty: So now I’d like to turn it over to our panelists. Today we have Doctor Jan Boll, Julie will be talking about one of the projects she’s working on, and also Doctor Harrison and I don’t… I think I’ll turn it over to you all to do your own screen share. So we can popcorn style. Whoever wants to go first.

Jan Boll: Well, thanks for that introduction there, Sasha, that gives a good content… context for a presentation like I have. I am the PI of this Rivers, Watersheds, and Communities Program. It is part of the National Science Foundation Research Traineeship program. And we have a website and a lot of the details are there at: before WSU.edu, you just type NRT-RWC and there it is. A little bit about that program at NSF.

Jan Boll: This is quite a comprehensive program. Not easy to score success. It is about graduate students in master’s and PhD programs to get them ready for different types of careers within a specific research team. And it’s developing skills, knowledge and competency. So that’s what the training component is. And this is also about an innovative evidence-based model. So it’s not that you just do something that you’re already doing.

Jan Boll: You’re trying to come up with something that is relatively new and maybe paradigm shifting. And you also have to propose a strong research theme, and it says of national priority. And you have to kind of figure out what that is by understanding, a little bit of what NSF is doing, which is something CEREO knows a lot about.

Jan Boll: So our program started in 2021. We actually had three tries at this. So in 2019 and 2020, we had proposed this, and in 2021 we did get it as a $3 million grant over five years. And our research team is focused on river systems. The water quality in river systems. And we’ve reasoned that if you have a problem in the rivers, then you look upstream and then you get to the contributing areas, which are the watersheds, and if you want to do anything about it or understand the problem, then you are going to deal with those either affected by it or those able to offer solutions or a combination of those two.

Jan Boll: And those are the communities. So that’s how we came up with the rivers, watersheds, and community component. And our driving piece is environmental or ecosystem health, but also human health. So we’re also trying to make a connection to the the College of Medicine and Nursing in this particular program. One component also with NRTs is that they want you to institutionalize aspects of the traineeship.

Jan Boll: So this is not a five year grant and then say, “Thank you. That was fun.” You know? You’re focusing on something that changes within the university. So we have four components here that I listed as bullets. One is community-engaged scholarship. The second one is student-centered mentoring. We’re trying to visualize what we do with communities using what’s called a living atlas.

Jan Boll: And as Sasha already noticed on her slides, we have one certificate in place right now, it’s a ten-credit certificate that the trainees and students in the program can earn. So our goal is to actually get in with communities. And communities can be more than a geographic location of a group of people. Can also be people that work within a nonprofit or with an agency, and try to understand what problems they’re working on and see if our work, our science, our research, can get on the same level with them and come up with solutions together.

Jan Boll: So you can sort of see it in the schematic on the right. It’s very interdisciplinary. As you will understand, dealing with water quality is one specific area, potentially environmentally, but dealing with what goes on in watersheds and communities bridges lots of other disciplines. So you can see I started listing a few, in on the bottom of the slide, but there are already quite a few other disciplines that have been added to the program, to the students that we have attracted.

Jan Boll: We currently have three cohorts of students in the program. We’re also looking for students who are just interested in our certificate. We are at 21 students at the moment, and we are still recruiting for one more cohort. So if you’re sitting there, you’d like a student in our program, please get in touch. But I think this work…

Jan Boll: This sort of meeting is also a little bit about, “What is it like to write proposals like this?” So instead of going into the nuts and bolts of the project, I wanted to give you a little bit of a feel as to what it was like to do this. So I think the first thing is team formation. That seems to be so important when you write these interdisciplinary, complex proposals.

Jan Boll: We had three proposal attempts. So the team didn’t change. It didn’t stay the same. It changed slightly with each attempt. But it’s also because our thematic focus shifted a little bit with each time we did it. But looking at this team, it’s not just a few people. You can only put five people on the PI list.

Jan Boll: You can put four more people on the non-senior personnel list. You have an external evaluator we put in, personnel that connects us to communities who have either they’re in Extension or they are Native American programs. And they give us kind of a connection that we may not have ourselves. We did this under CEREO, directly, because of CEREO being under the Office of Research.

Jan Boll: We got administrative support from that. And then you’re dealing with all the different departments, schools, units, where our participating faculty, you know, reside. And this goes like Sasha says, this is systemwide. So Vancouver, Tri-Cities, Pullman, even Everett and Puyallup were all connected. And now we’re also trying to connect to Spokane. So we’re doing it absolutely a systemwide.

Jan Boll: And then I thought back about, okay, so what are some of the ingredients for doing this successfully? I think clearly you need a strong idea or set of ideas not only to impress the NSF in this case, but also the people who are part of this, your team members who are working on this. And that takes a little bit of time, that takes brainstorming.

Jan Boll: So it needs time for brainstorming and idea generation. It also is important that if you’re working as a team, that you get to know each other. You don’t necessarily have to become friends, but you need to understand each other’s disciplines, each other’s jargon, and kind of the ways of working together. So communication is critical. And this is not to be just on the shoulders of the PI, it is amongst the people involved.

Jan Boll: And the thing that also is really strong is you need to understand the program, in this case the NRT program. With three tries doing this, it meant that we had lots of opportunity to talk to program officers, but we also were able to do, the webinars that they, that they put on every year and slowly get a good sense as to what is it that they want.

Jan Boll: And we also actually offered ourselves up as reviewers, of proposals in this program. So we get this understanding and it helps a lot. We in this case, I think we had a successful proposal because our team performed wonderfully as an interdisciplinary team. We had CEREO as a support group around the proposal. I have a slide on that in a minute.

Jan Boll: And we also had good support from those departments, schools, and colleges, which I think, again, everybody understands that we’re trying for something fairly unique. We were the first NRT at WSU. So that was also really well received. So a question that, that, that we’d like to answer with this is, “So what did CEREO then do for us?” And I thought back, well, CEREO obviously helped us develop a very complex budget.

Jan Boll: This is not just… The complexity is not just because you try to put all the pieces together. You’re dealing with lots of different units in the university, and they all get their money sent to their unit separately. And the F&A follows with that money. So that is definitely a… I would say it was a bit a bit of work, organizing the team meetings to get together to understand the brainstorming process, but also to get together and figure out how to put this all together.

Jan Boll: Lots of meetings. Part of it was done during Covid: made it a little bit extra challenging. CEREO also helped with making sure that all the proposal documents are in good order and that they are coming in from everybody participating and then uploading those, those documents on the NSF website. And lastly, also important as our way that WSU is organized, there is an eREX that needs to go out and all approvals have to happen in a timely manner so that this thing arrives at NSF on time.

Jan Boll: So there’s a lot of details. And as a PI, if you have to do all those details in addition to writing a really strong proposal, you’re just going to be driving yourself crazy. So I survived because of CEREO and I also was able to focus mostly on proposal writing and writing the summary. So I think in a way that’s, I think what should be happening with these big proposals.

Jan Boll: Well, then maybe the other question is, “What are some challenges and barriers that come with interdisciplinary work?” Well, I’ve already alluded to some of this, but I thought about, okay, the proposal is… there’s a writing phase and then there’s a performing phase when you actually get to success. And so there are different aspects of interdisciplinarity, I think, that come in with it.

Jan Boll: And as part of the performing, since we do community engagement, actually the term is transdisciplinary because you start working with nonacademic actors as well. So the NRT, as I mentioned, is also key on institutionalizing aspects of the program. So now you have to figure out how to grow roots within the university system, the institutional changes that need to happen sometimes to to get that to go.

Jan Boll: Obviously it’s really helpful to make that very clear to everybody involved in the beginning, when you get your nice letters or you get your kudos for getting the proposal, but sometimes those people also leave the university and a new people come in places of those those who said yes to it. So you have to constantly work on the system, to do that.

Jan Boll: But when it comes to the writing phase, I think it’s meeting NSF’s goals. And it also means integrating the disciplinary perspectives. And so you can write… you can write a paragraph and send it to your teammates who are all from different disciplines. And probably if it’s changed hands 3 or 4 times, you get a paragraph back that looks very different.

Jan Boll: And sometimes you may not like it. So you may have to keep working that type of writing. So that’s really interesting. It can be very it’s more time consuming, but it’s also really rewarding at the end. The other part is when you get the project now you have to meet project goals. You still need to deal with the disciplinary aspects.

Jan Boll: You deal with dealing with departmental and school cultures because you’re dealing with the the rules and the procedures that they have. And you add students to that, and with the students come the mentors. So all of that now starts to become a very interesting group dynamic. And I haven’t even added the projects that students do with community engagement involved.

Jan Boll: So it becomes very complex. So maybe my earlier slide had communication, communication, communication on it. That’s really what what is super important. And probably a little bit of an open mind and some flexibility on the part of the team, which we are learning to do. It’s a learning process. So finally, the last question here is, “What advice would we have for others to get into this?”

Jan Boll: Well, probably very clear: get CEREO involved and start early. I think our university should probably, in the case of the NRT, I think it’d be very helpful if we even started early vetting the the proposals. That gets selected because it takes six months or more to really get a good proposal off. Really understand the RFP.

Jan Boll: That means understand the program, in this case, the NRT program at NSF. Pick your best team and the best team is lots of different attributes. You certainly want to be able to work together very well. You want to be right, you know, represent the right disciplines that that your research team needs. So that’s that’s a clear thing to do.

Jan Boll: And sometimes you have to be honest to each other like we are not the right team. Let’s fix it. Let’s change it for the better of chances of this proposal. And brainstorm on some big ideas. This is what NSF likes, big ideas. And so you want to be able to step step it up on that level. And then as I mentioned, communication, communication, communication.

Jan Boll: So that’s where I’ll stop it.

Sasha McLarty: Thanks, Jan. And next let’s invite John Harrison from School of the Environment Vancouver. John, if you’re able to share your screen, that would be great. And I figured out my camera. So hello everybody.

John Harrison: That was a terrific intro. And the Rivers, Watersheds, and Communities project is a really nice poster child for CEREO. And a really wonderful opportunity. If you have a student or a prospective student, it’s a good thing to get involved in. I am here, presumably because I’m the principal investigator on another CEREO project, that is funded by NSF’s Dynamics of Integrated Socio-Environmental Systems program.

John Harrison: It’s a project we’re calling DAMS. It is focused on dams and dam management and ecosystem impacts. And DAMS, in our case, stands for Dams as Adaptive Management Systems and as Jan was talking, I put the URL for our website in here in case you want to learn more about the project. That’s good idea. All right. So DAMS is a four-year project, NSF funded. $1.6 million.

John Harrison: And it is, funded by the DISES program, which is, no longer in existence. But if you go to their website, you’ll find that there are 4 or 5 programs at NSF now that they recommend you look into if you’re interested in interdisciplinary research. And in the case of DISES, what they were looking for is what they call transdisciplinary or convergent research.

John Harrison: In collaboration, often with stakeholders or within a community-engaged component. And transdisciplinary differs from interdisciplinary in that… in NSF parlance, in that, transdisciplinary research requires the questions that you ask, really, are questions that can only be answered by an interdisciplinary group and really conceived of by an interdisciplinary group, which is different than, you know, putting chocolate and peanut butter together and getting a Reese’s peanut butter cup, or can or it’s different than, than, collaboration by staple, which is something that they’re really interested in avoiding.

John Harrison: And, getting beyond. And the project goals in our case were to provide useful guidance to communities of stakeholders seeking to enhance environmental sustainability of reservoir systems, dams and reservoirs, and also to generate novel insight into how these systems work. And here, systems in our project refers both to reservoirs and to, their management. The research team at WSU, consists of, co-PIs from three different departments, including the School of the Environment, the School of Economic Sciences, and the Department of Biological Systems Engineering.

John Harrison: And we’re now in year three of four of the project. And it is, a real joy to work with these folks. The research questions, the convergent questions that we set out to answer, initially, in this project were, as shown here, in these two rectangles at the top and bottom of this diagram.

John Harrison: We are interested in how and to what extent the differences in the degree of discretion exercised by reservoir operators affect the biophysical outcomes within reservoirs and river systems. And then, the reciprocal question is how and to what extent do management dependent environmental system outcomes, effect rule-setting, exercise of discretion and decision outcomes? And the way we envision these two sets, these two questions, interacting, is that we’re interested in how, exercise of discretion by reservoir managers results in different environmental outcomes.

John Harrison: How their priorities in terms of reservoir management and things like electricity generation, out of stream water use, and in-stream flows affect environmental response variables like greenhouse gas emissions, algal blooms, and invasive species. And then how new knowledge about these interactions then feeds back into the community of practice. The reservoir operators that make decisions about how reservoirs are operated and how much discretion, they have in that operation decision space.

John Harrison: And so that’s, that’s a little bit about the project that we’re involved in. But I think what folks here are most interested in are the questions that we were asked to answer, as part of this talk. And the first of those is: “What role did CEREO play in our project and why was this helpful?”

John Harrison: And I think, you have to go back quite a ways to understand the, the true, influence of CEREO on this work. We didn’t just magically write a proposal, to the NSF DISES project. I was knocking around in a number of collaborative interdisciplinary projects that were supported by CEREO for many years prior to writing this proposal, and that helped us to identify the appropriate group of people at WSU, to put together an effective proposal to this NSF program.

John Harrison: And these included, large interdisciplinary projects like BioEarth; the Watershed… the Watershed Integrated Systems Dynamics Modeling Program, or WISDOM; Innovations at the Food-Energy-Water Interface, or InFEWs, program. I was a co-PI on these projects and then used the connections that were developed and the experience that I’d had with people that had participated in these projects over the years to put together a team that could address this interdisciplinary set of questions that DAMS is focused on.

John Harrison: And that was supported or stimulated in part by a small seed grant from CEREO to one of the co-PIs on the DAMS-DISES project, Steve Bollins way back in 2015, 2016. Importantly, there was protected time for me as the PI on the grant to, develop those ideas into a full blown proposal to NSF.

John Harrison: One thing that Jan didn’t mention that I think is really important in these kinds of projects is that there is a person that can stitch together the different perspectives and expertise of project participants into a narrative that’s compelling to reviewers who review a proposal like this. Otherwise, it does read like collaboration by staple.

John Harrison: There was a CEREO seed grant that supported some of my time on this earlier on. But, ultimately, WSU Vancouver came up with a teaching buyout for me to help write this proposal. And this supported, me to organize meetings amongst program participants. And ultimately, this led to the submission of our first submission of this proposal in 2017.

John Harrison: As with the NRT program, there were a number of unsuccessful submissions before we finally met with joy in 2021 and the project was funded and we were off to the races and doing this work. And one nice side benefit of a large NSF funded project like this is it provides a group with the cachet that is needed to argue to other agencies that you’re the right group to do related work.

John Harrison: And so there have been a number of spinoff projects from this, including a nice, three quarter of $1 million project funded by the US Bureau of Reclamation to look at how dam removal on the Klamath River affects greenhouse gas balances and carbon storage and and mobilization as a result of the restoration effort that’s going on down there.

John Harrison: And then, another kind of neat little project on which Alex who… Alex Fremier, who is on the call too I see, is involved is, an effort that is in the final stages of being evaluated by the Allen Foundation for funding is, Natural Climate Solutions program. And both of these projects grow out of this interdisciplinary effort and the work that we put into it.

John Harrison: And just to emphasize the importance of CEREO in supporting this work. Because that’s the question at the top of the slide here. At every point along the way here, CEREO has been an important contributor in helping to support our efforts. All right. So challenges and barriers to interdisciplinary work that we do, things that work well… Interdisciplinary work tends to attract great people who are interested in big ideas, which is fun.

John Harrison: We have a lot of exciting conversations and ideas to work on. The work that comes out of this is often important and high impact, because people that are focused on their little areas, don’t have the time, energy and effort to stitch together these, these big… or the answers to big questions. So, there’s an opportunity to do, important work.

John Harrison: And, it’s an opportunity to do use-inspired basic research. And this is something that I think is consistent both with, WSU’s land-grant mission and something that I’ve been interested ever since I was a PhD student. So the idea is that, through interdisciplinary work, we’re often operating in what we call Pasteur’s Quadrant here.

John Harrison: It’s, not just, use-driven work and it’s not just basic science, but it’s at the intersection of these two. It’s doing basic research that also has real-world implications, and can be used, it’s often policy-adjacent work. Something that, I think, WSU is, very well poised to support and do as a land-grant institution. Challenges: We… none of us have enough time.

John Harrison: And interdisciplinary work takes extra time. We have to, learn different languages associated with different disciplines. You have to figure out who the right people are to work with and other disciplines. That you might not be familiar with. So it takes extra time. There are limited external funding opportunities, although I think that’s improving. As indicated by the development of multiple programs that sort of filled the DISES niche at NSF.

John Harrison: There are often discipline-specific language barriers that you have to understand and overcome. For example, the term “efficiency” has very different meanings in econ and ecosystem science. And, there’re things like this that you just have to clarify with your colleagues as, as you’re going through this process. Discipline-specific expectations for scholarly success are often different.

John Harrison: And that’s something that you have to learn about and, and understand and deal with. There’re different cultures of graduate training, and different, sort of timelines for graduate training, even, that come into play often. For example, in econ, students take a year of classes before they even get involved in research, whereas in, some of some other disciplines, students are encouraged to dive right in.

John Harrison: And so, figuring out how to pair a budget with that kind of, requirement, is something that people don’t always, consider when they’re writing these proposals. There are institutional barriers that we need to navigate. Things like discipline-specific expectations, needs for tenure, and graduate student success. I… there’re, there’re constantly, questions and and discussions about where ICR goes and, and the perception of where it goes can often be as important as actually where it goes.

John Harrison: And so being clear to people upfront about where ICR from a group like CEREO goes, it can, head off some of those problems, before they become problems, I think. So that’s something to think about. What advice? I was asked, what advice do I have for others interested in leading large interdisciplinary proposals or projects? I, I, those of you who saw me talk about this last year, I apologize, but, this this hasn’t changed very much a little bit, but I’d like to refer to these as a seven P’s.

John Harrison: As Jan said, it’s important that your proposal fits to the program. And so getting to own the RFP as John said, is really important. And often that means talking to a program officer. You can get a lot of important insight, over the phone that you might not see in a written RFP. So don’t hesitate to reach out.

John Harrison: Persistence, resilience. Or, you know, you might say, stubbornness, bull headedness, maybe even, is important, in these, in, in, in these, proposals and programs. Because as Jan said, they are often very competitive. You need to be patient, with your collaborators and have collaborators that put up with your guff too, that’s important.

John Harrison: And, it’s it’s useful to have preliminary data, which in our case was supported by CEREO seed funding. And, that often is, is key in differentiating successful proposals from proposals that get round filed for one reason or another. Protected time for proposal development and writing. There used to be a CEREO fellowship.

John Harrison: I don’t know if that still exists. I don’t think so. But, I took some time in my sabbatical, for example, to focus on the, DISES proposal, and I think that was important. Padowski and Boll, were important contributors. That’s the sixth P here, I guess. Now it’s Sasha. So Padowski and McLarty, I guess.

John Harrison: And Julie and Jan were generous enough to provide late stage feedback on one of our drafts. And that was useful. And then it provided us with a reality check on how truly interdisciplinary our proposal was. And we made some changes at the last minute that helped there and then the last thing for, Vancouver is that we’re a primarily undergraduate institution.

John Harrison: So here that’s not as relevant to those of you in Pullman, but the I guess the take home here, for those of you there, is that you use whatever advantage you have. And in our case, we were able to distinguish ourselves because we are a PUI. But, there are other things that make, other units and WSU attractive and competitive and it’s worth highlighting those things.

John Harrison: So takeaways: Interdisciplinary environmental research is not fast, easy or for the faint of heart. And it is essential, scientifically and personally rewarding and a whole lot of fun. So I’ll leave it there.

Sasha McLarty: So, what a great way to end. And I have to say, I love your Dams logo. I think you win that logo competition. So Julia, do you want to do a quick version and then we can open it up to questions? And while you’re sharing your screen, I’m just going to share the flier for the upcoming event that will have, just so I don’t forget.

Julie Padowski: Yeah. So I’ll try and make this real fast. One of the things that you guys might have noticed across these three is that there’s a lot of water themes. Water happens to have been a very successfully funded topic. We are very interested in anything environmental though. So we do a lot of partnerships with folks from Ag, from Forestry, from Ecology.

Julie Padowski: It’s not necessarily representative of the current set of funded projects, but I don’t want you to walk away from this thinking we only do things related to water because we we are very diverse in what we’re interested in. So I’m sure you guys are well aware of now that, you know, wildfire regimes are changing in especially in the western US and in particular for Washington and Oregonians, where, a lot of our big cities get water from these, pristine forested watersheds.

Julie Padowski: The potential reality for fire is, quite problematic. In case you had never really thought about it before, for those of us who get our water from surface water. So Seattle and Portland, a lot of the cities on the west side of the Cascades, when fires burn through these forests, they really have some profound changes to the hydrologic and ecosystem systems, ecosystem services that these watersheds provide.

Julie Padowski: So they change streamflow, they change soil stability, they change vegetation dynamics. And in particular, if this is where you’re getting your drinking water can have a lot of negative, impacts on water quality in particular, but also water quantity. And so, you know, I’m going to talk about two projects real briefly here. But they kind of stemmed from this needs assessment that we did through CEREO, back in 2019, where we reached out to 200-ish water utilities in Washington, Oregon, and Idaho to just kind of get a finger on the pulse of is fire a concern to you guys, which you can see.

Julie Padowski: Yes. And then, you know, how are you guys dealing with fire? How are you making decisions about how you do this? Management. And a lot of them said, “I have… I don’t know.” And so this left us with a lot of space, to have some very successful projects funded. So I’m talking about two today, one is funded by the Forest Service, the other’s by NASA.

Julie Padowski: The Forest Service project is really academic in nature. It includes folks from forestry, soil science, economics, sociology, ecologists. The NASA team is a really, end user driven project and involves a lot of utilities and the Forest Service. The three of us, Washington State, University of Idaho, and University of Nevada are kind of the core team that kind of bridges between these two projects.

Julie Padowski: So it’s been an interesting set of collaborations. This particular project, the Forest Service one is huge. It’s about $15 million. It has four main areas in which it does its work. So it does, some work trying to better understand what impacts wildfires have had in these forests and on drinking water quality through empirical field data collection, through modeling, through direct work with water utilities to assess their treatment technology capabilities, and through some socio economic analysis.

Julie Padowski: It covers both Washington and Oregon in scope, and does everything from very local scale up to regional scale assessments. It involves probably on the order of something, like 50 or more people at this point. The other project is this NASA project. It’s from the Applied Water Resources Program. And it is a smaller project, but still pretty big, that has a lot of diversity in its sense of its community-engaged partnerships.

Julie Padowski: So it partners with I think it’s now nine different water utilities. And we’re helping integrate a coupled biophysical–hydrological model that helps water utilities by building an online interface, do some scenario analysis, which can help them better plan for, any potential negative consequences of fire on their water supplies. And so as part of this model refinement, we’re working on building out this decision support tool in, really close partnership with, our nine utilities.

Julie Padowski: So that’s been a fun one. And so in the interest of leaving some time for questions, I’m going to just put up my reflection questions here. I don’t think I have anything left to say that John or Jan didn’t already say, you know, I think CEREO well, I’m, like, intimately involved in CEREO. You know, one of the things that’s really nice about using this center for some of the grants that I write are all of those things that the other, the other two panelists mentioned, the pre-proposal support, both in terms of wrangling budgets and paperwork, but also in terms of conceptual contributions and and team building in particular.

Julie Padowski: CEREO quite a few years ago put a lot of effort into coordinating folks doing fire research, which is what ultimately led to some of these projects that helped build out the two that I just talked about. Challenges or barriers. You know, John mentioned, challenges and, you know, the disciplinary vocabulary that we have.

Julie Padowski: I would just like to emphasize that, you know, when you do interdisciplinary work, you’re often dealing with diverse and large teams, and that takes a special skill set, to, keep everyone happy and keep everyone going in the right direction. So a lot of bureaucracy, as, everybody has mentioned, in terms of managing across units, across colleges, and that, you know, these things combined can really, you know, put up some challenges in terms of really doing some deep integration on the, kind of core concepts that you develop.

Julie Padowski: And so my advice is to start early, like Jan and John were both saying, you know, it takes some time. It often takes some time to get these ideas funded. And so working early and often with some of your partners is helpful. You know, that strong core integrated idea is a thing that really, helps your proposal shine

Julie Padowski: When up for competition at these federal agencies. And so, you know, putting a lot of effort into, developing that integrated idea, I think is one of the key successes that has helped a lot of these different CEREO proposals get, supported proposals get funded over time. And that, you know, if you’re going to do this, forming a small, trusted team of people to help you, write and work through these ideas is just so helpful.