In partnership with students from around the nation, Ph.D. candidate Olivia Davis recently published, Graduate Student Perspectives on Transforming Academia, in Conservation Science and Practice.

As the scale and complexity of socio-environmental problems has grown, there has been a renewed debate about the role that academic institutions should play in developing solutions and how institutional structures should be redesigned to encourage greater interdisciplinarity. This paper (1) presents a graduate student perspective on this debate, (2) identifies challenges facing interdisciplinary graduate student researchers, (3) suggests ways for institutions to better prepare graduate students to be the next generation of leaders in this arena, and (4) outlines models for transformational change that will ensure research is focused on solving socio-environmental problems.

This work emerged from her participation in a Beyond the Academy workshop hosted at UCLA in January 2020.