Graduate Program
Our Philosophy 
Degree Program
Areas of Study:
Urban Ecology
Global Public Health
Climate and Society
Environment & the Media
Integrated Marine &
Terrestrial Management
Regulatory Regimes
Courses
The Abess Center's Ph.D. in Environmental Science and Policy program will enable students to tap into synergistic research networks across a range of schools and colleges at the University of Miami, including the College of Arts & Sciences, the Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science, the Miller School of Medicine, the School of Law, School of Communication, School of Architecture, and the College of Engineering. The graduate program draws upon existing interdisciplinary collaborations that have been created by the Abess Center.
Our graduate program targets top caliber students whose demonstrated skills and interests bridge science and societal needs and who seek the theoretical and analytical skills to address complex, human-environment problems from academic and applied perspectives. During the first year, students will receive training in the fundamentals of the methods and theories of environmental and physical sciences, with an emphasis on the possibilities and constraints for integrating science and policy into problem-based research. Students will then focus on core areas that best address their interdisciplinary research problem, with guidance from relevant faculty from across the UM community.
The Environmental Science and Policy graduate program was formulated in response to increasing societal demand for academicians and practitioners at the Ph.D. level with interdisciplinary training aimed at addressing complex problems concerning the impact of human activity on the environment. It takes particular advantage of the unique dynamic social-ecological systems of South Florida and Latin America, and of faculty with extensive field experience throughout the hemisphere as well as international ties. In an era in which governmental and non-governmental agencies have made funding of environmental research a top priority, demand is increasing for PhD level scholars and practitioners trained with an interdisciplinary perspective. Students at the Abess Center are ideally positioned to gain such a perspective.
Integrative Approaches and Themes
UM’s location in southern Florida and in the city of Miami affords it a natural field laboratory in which to analyze thematic, methodological and policy questions at the intersection of a number of forces: the terrestrial-coastal ecosystems spanned by the Everglades; the urban-ecological system embodied in urban, peri-urban and suburbanizing Miami; local-global connections in migration patterns, political-economic and climatic-hydrological regimes; and science-policy linkages evidenced in the city’s climate, water and health management policies, land use and zoning patterns, and ecosystem conservation/restoration initiatives.
In the graduate program, opportunities for research include investigations into:
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Urban Ecology, particularly the ecology of coastal cities;
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Global Public Health, particularly the challenges posed by changing migration flows and pathogen vectors;
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Climate & Society, including the implications of sea level rise for coastal cities, extreme events, and the complexities of energy policy and socioeconomic development considerations;
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Environment & the Media, particularly finding effective ways to inform the public about the results of research and their policy implications;
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Integrated Marine & Terrestrial Management, developing strategies that include architectural considerations, energy-use systems, transportation, and dimensions of health, environment, and migration;
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Global Regulatory Regimes, addressing the new types of and transport of polluting substances and developing approaches that integrate cutting-edge scientific methods with the creation of forward-looking laws, negotiation and dispute-resolution techniques, and institutional arrangements in the U.S. and internationally.
The program’s core curriculum covers the role of formal (legal) and informal (traditional) institutions in structuring social-ecological interactions across multiple scales; transboundary resources/systems and challenges to adaptive management; feedbacks of changing social-ecological systems through invasive species, ecosystem resilience, human health and well-being; system degradation and restoration; the role of the media and information in influencing cultural attitudes and practices vis-à-vis adaptation/mitigation strategies; biodiversity impacts of landscape management and conservation regimes; and the role of infrastructure and markets in transforming connectivity and resilience of social-ecological systems.
DEGREE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE PHD
Completion of the Ph.D. will take approximately five years. In most cases, students are supported by research assistantships that include tuition remission and a monthly stipend. All students are also required to serve satisfactorily for one term as teaching assistants in the Abess Center undergraduate program.
Opportunities for graduates are available in a range of prestigious institutional settings; an increasing number of leading universities are developing academic programs and centers that span disciplines, as are independent think-tanks and well-funded research centers and non-governmental organizations.
Prerequisite
Students admitted into the program must have earned a Bachelor's or Master's degree in an appropriate field.
Core Courses and Credit Requirements
Students must complete 12 credits worth of coursework in the following core courses:
ESP 601 – Interdisciplinary Environmental Theory
ESP 603 – Interdisciplinary Environmental Methods
ESP 605 – Interdisciplinary Environmental Policy Analysis
ESP 607 – Interdisciplinary Environmental Decision Analysis
They will also participate in a two-credit interdisciplinary seminar series (ESP 610).
By the end of their second semester, students must submit a proposed group of additional courses, totaling at least 18 hours, related to their research interest and intended dissertation research area. This group of courses requires approval of both the student's advisor and the Director of Graduate Studies.
To attain the Ph.D., students must take a minimum of 60 credits, of which at least 26 must be for coursework taken while in residence at the University of Miami. (Students entering the program with a Master's degree in a related field may be given credit for up to 24 course credits.) Students must accrue at least 13 credits worth of dissertation research.
Examinations
All Ph.D. students will be given written and oral comprehensive examinations following the conclusion of the core series of courses, usually at the end of the first year. A majority of the examination committee must be members of the graduate faculty of the University. In the event of failing to pass an examination, students are required to retake and pass the examination within one calendar year. By the end of their second year, students must present and defend a research proposal. Following successful completion of the comprehensive examination and research proposal defense, the student may apply to candidacy for the degree. Any student who fails to be admitted to candidacy for the degree within this two-year period can be dismissed from the program.
Dissertation
By the end of the first year, students should form a four-member dissertation committee; by the end of the second, write and defend a research proposal. Students may proceed with the dissertation after the dissertation committee has been appointed and the Director of Graduate Studies and the Graduate School have accepted the dissertation proposal. The dissertation must be an investigation of a substantial scholarly topic and bridge both scientific and policy aspects of the topic area. A final oral defense of the dissertation is required.
Areas of Study
The world is rapidly urbanizing; urban growth has been particularly strong in coastal regions that are especially vulnerable to climate change, disease vectors, and other challenges. Urban ecology is a fundamentally interdisciplinary arena that bridges basic and applied research, with strong science-policy linkages. The University of Miami’s schools and departments of Architecture, Anthropology, Biology, Chemistry, Geography, Geological Sciences, International Studies, Law, and Marine and Atmospheric Sciences have core faculty expertise that bridges the natural and social sciences for training in urban ecology. A fundamental goal of the Abess Center’s Urban Ecology focus is to understand how public policy, including globalization, migration, local zoning and planning, and city structure, influence historical and current patterns of growth and consumption. The spatial structure of physical, ecological and socio-economic processes in cities influence material and energy flows in their regions, with implications for climate, ecosystem services, economic flows and human health. Miami serves as a natural laboratory for testing research designs and developing comparative studies with other coastal urban cities. Methodologies and insights from the aforementioned natural and social science departments/disciplines are joined to aid understanding of process-pattern linkages, predict future trends and chart alternatives to improve urban environments and promote a higher quality of life for residents. Students will analyze the complex relationships among human and natural processes in urbanizing environments — of coastal cities like Miami at the interface of terrestrial ecology and marine systems, sensitive to climate change, labor and migration flows, impacted first by pathogens and other vectors, and culturally heterogeneous.
One of the greatest challenges of epidemiology and public health is to monitor and control infectious disease outbreaks throughout the world. Diseases such as Malaria, Dengue Fever, West Nile Virus, Lyme Disease, Ebola, HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis, Hepatitis B, Plague, Leishmaniasis, and scores of other known and emerging infectious agents have caused recent concern in the public health community, particularly as the number of professionals in the area of infectious disease epidemiology and control has dwindled in the past two decades. The US and other developed nations do not live in isolation. The threat of emerging and re-emerging disease is a major national and international concern. Although the biology of most pathogens is understood, there is a lack of coordinated mechanisms to implement the science and practice of disease ecology and control for solving real-world infectious disease problems. The National Research Council considers this to be one of the eight major priorities for research funding and one of the major challenges to the environmental science in the decade ahead. The area of global public health serves as a vital link among basic science, medicine, information sciences, public health practice and policy. It provides an interdisciplinary approach for understanding risk and predicting the dynamics of pathogen transmission. In a practical sense, the science of global public health brings together disciplines and experts that help operationalize public health strategies for controlling disease outbreaks. This challenge is particularly acute in coastal cities, entry points for people and pathogens, wherein patterns of migration and settlement may lead to spatial clustering of health/disease outcomes. Coastal cities are a major point of defense in this struggle to contain the spread of virulent diseases. This theme benefits from existing research synergies among the Abess Center, the Department of Epidemiology and Public Health, and the departments of Geography, Biology, Mathematics, and the Institute for Theoretical and Mathematical Ecology.
Another focus of the proposed graduate program centers on the relation between climate and human behavior. Climate impacts resulting from a warming earth, natural variability associated with the El Niño/La Niña phenomena, and extreme weather events all pose scientific and societal challenges in terms of anticipating, preparing for and responding to these multi-timescale events. Climate hazards and the human response to them are as much affected by our scientific understanding and perception of these complex air-sea-land interactions as by the climate dynamics themselves. Thus, social vulnerability and mitigative and adaptive capacity in the face of climate change are strongly mediated by legal, socioeconomic, policy, psychological, epidemiological and cultural factors, including housing and construction codes, environmental risk perception and health management/delivery. This theme draws on UM’s breadth and depth in interdisciplinary climatological and meteorological research addressing risk management in the human health, fisheries, agriculture, water management, natural hazards and coastal zone sectors. Faculty from RSMAS, Miller School of Medicine and Geography contribute to the climate and society theme with their analysis of both climate trends and hazards, while faculty at the Schools of Law, Architecture and the College of Engineering focus on the legal, material and aesthetic aspects of the built environment that influence the mitigation of vulnerability and development of more resilient urban systems.
The media play a major role in influencing public perception of environmental problems and solutions. Effective understanding of the global and local drivers of consumption and risk perception require cross-cultural understanding of the interpretation of print and visual media. Complementing an understanding of the media’s influence in environmental issues is a pressing need to create effective communication strategies and products for education, entertainment and warning. Successfully communicating probabilistic scientific information is a particularly critical and challenging endeavor. Drawing on UM’s School of Communication, whose expertise spans the theoretical and technical dimensions of information sharing, this concentration will prepare a new generation of students for the hybrid role of scientist-communicator, a position for which the current generation of academics is under-equipped. Core contributions provided by the School of Communication will be augmented by offerings of the departments of Anthropology, Sociology and Psychology, whose collective expertise provide insights into individual and group processing of environmental information.
Integrated Marine & Terrestrial Management
Humans depend on marine and terrestrial ecosystems for a multitude of goods and services. These systems are at risk due to overexploitation and reduction in habitat. Abess Center research in this area is focused on developing ecosystem management strategies that ensure long-term environmental sustainability, guided by the following principles: ecological processes, economic activities, and social interactions are inherently spatial; tradeoffs are intrinsic to systems with multiple management objectives; stakeholder experience and beliefs influence the formulation of management objectives and the design of management plans; and management plans must be adaptive to changing environmental and social conditions. Training will address the general and sector-specific issues in harvesting approaches (e.g., fisheries, agriculture, forestry), non-living resources (e.g., mining, energy extraction, water management) and waste management (e.g., pollution control, zoning and infrastructure). Thematic and methodological courses in Biology, RSMAS, Geography, Law and Mathematics enrich the marine and terrestrial management core focus, and students benefit from local, national and international research opportunities with faculty from these departments and schools.
International and national legal systems have lagged significantly behind our technological advances in detecting, monitoring and modeling environmental threats. Existing efforts to protect the environment are hampered by concerns over economic consequences and by a long history of failure to anticipate side effects. Policy oriented students will be trained by legal scholars who work on global scale issues (e.g., nuclear proliferation, toxic waste, the Law of the Sea) in the context of cutting-edge scientific potential (e.g., likely future environmental threats such as the widespread release of endocrine-disrupting chemicals, emerging common property activities such as deep ocean drifting aquaculture) and policy responses (e.g., large scale ecosystem restoration efforts). Natural science-oriented students will be educated about legal constraints and possibilities, allowing them to design more explicit and realistic policy relevant research agendas. The global focus that is inherent in transboundary pollution and resource management cases will be complemented by training in decision-making, negotiation and arbitration approaches that are applicable at multiple sociopolitical scales and to diverse sectors. This training will include recognition of the de jure and de facto institutions that are often ignored, exacerbating inequity and inefficiency in resource management.
Application -- Available late November 2009
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