NDSU biology professor helps build graduate student support system through NSF EPSCoR award

NDSU professor of biology Ned Dochtermann has received a National Science Foundation EPSCoR Graduate Fellowship Award of $1,113,000 for the project, “Understanding Organismal Resilience and Building Academic Resilience: The Fellowship in Organismal Resilience (FOR) Program.”

The NSF EPSCoR Graduate Fellowship program provides financial support for graduate students pursuing research-based master's or doctoral degrees in STEM fields at institutions located within EPSCoR jurisdictions, like North Dakota.

Dochtermann was interested in the EPSCoR graduate program because NDSU’s Department of Biological Sciences has already built an integrated support system that helps students become successful researchers. The next step: providing a similar system for graduate students.

“The missing piece was similar support for graduate students,” Dochtermann said. “Graduate students are typically supported by teaching activities and research funding—the latter of which can be highly uncertain. The EGFP allows us to both recruit high-performing students from NDSU and elsewhere and to provide strong support to them for the duration of their graduate careers.”

Dochtermann is an evolutionary biologist whose research focuses on how variations among individuals and relationships among traits influence evolutionary outcomes.

FOR is a fully funded graduate fellowship and participating students will be enrolled in NDSU’s Environmental and Conservation Sciences graduate program.

“One example of the research the EGFP fellows might pursue through the program would be having the students ask questions in my lab about how animal populations behaviorally respond to changing environmental pressures and how these behaviors evolve,” Dochtermann said.

Dochtermann added: “This has implications for how evolutionary change happens, including in response to shifting evolutionary pressures.”

The proposal for the EGFP focused on developing a graduate education plan that would be competitive with NSF and also serve as a recruiting tool for students. Dochtermann said many in NDSU’s biology department are already affiliated with the environmental and conservation sciences graduate program, enabling easy collaborations with other departments and colleges.

“We first looked at the areas of emphasis outlined by NSF and how members of the biology department and our colleagues across campus could best match those emphases,” he said. “Our other focus was assembling a plan for graduate education that would be competitive from the perspective of NSF and competitive for recruiting students.”

The FOR grant will be entirely directed toward student support with all funding going toward stipends and covering tuition and fees. Dochtermann noted how the program will allow NDSU to recruit recipients of Honorable Mentions from NSF’s Graduate Research Fellowship Program

“GRFP Honorable Mention recipients are highly talented students who have proposed innovative research programs and are competitive for funding support wherever they apply,” Dochtermann said. “The EGFP allows us to provide support that makes us more competitive in recruiting these students and in retaining our own students who receive honorable mentions.

“By recruiting these students and giving them the freedom to develop novel research programs, the FOR grant will build NDSU’s research capacity, bring really talented early career scientists to the university and state, and continue to build our graduate programs,” he added.

The FOR support allows participants to pursue innovative research, “increasing our ecological and evolutionary understanding of organismal resilience,” Dochtermann stated. “It’s also built with considerable professional development activities above those typically available to graduate students. This will hopefully lead to FOR participants being leaders in their research areas or even opening new research areas.”

Dochtermann said the initiative can play a vital role in strengthening and expanding NDSU's research infrastructure.

“Continuing EGFP support will allow NDSU to continue to recruit and support graduate students who already have demonstrated success in developing research programs. This has a long-term potential to keep building NDSU’s research infrastructure, which is a primary goal of all EPSCoR programs. I’m excited that the EGFP is supporting that from a more bottom-up than top-down approach. We know we have great faculty here who are doing fantastic work, and this would allow those faculty to keep bringing in great junior colleagues into their research groups. That can only benefit NDSU in the short and long term.”

This program is funded by NSF EPSCoR graduate award #2535290.