About this Project

Carleton College building facade

Building Strong Geoscience Departments is a project focused on helping geoscience departments adapt and prosper in a changing and challenging environment. Through workshops, this website, professional society meeting sessions, and publications this project aims to stimulate discussions and disseminate community expertise on topics such as approaches to core content and curriculum, retaining and recruiting top faculty and students, and maintaining the department as a valued institutional partner. The Building Strong Geoscience Departments program is sponsored by the National Association of Geoscience Teachers, the American Geosciences Institute, the Geological Society of America, and the American Geophysical Union.

Jump down to Project PIs * Getting Involved * Contribute to Online Collections * Geodepartments Email List * As a Workshop Participant * Community Visioning * Download the Project Brochure

Project PIs

Randy, Heather, Geoff, and Cathy

Getting Involved

There are several opportunities for geoscience departments (or individual faculty members) to become involved with this project:

Contribute to Online Collections

Are you a faculty member working at the edges of geoscience, perhaps doing work that is multidisciplinary, unusually collaborative, using sophisticated technology and large data sets, utilizing a systems approach, or studying the applications of geoscience to societally relevant issues? Does your department have a particularly strong or interesting course, curriculum, or program? Do you have thoughts to share about how to mentor students, maintain a healthy faculty, or work within the larger institution? Submit a description of a faculty member, a course, a curriculum, a program, or your department for inclusion in our collections of profiles.
Are you an employer of geoscience graduates or a recently employed graduate? Do you have thoughts to share about the knowledge, skills and abilities employers are seeking? If so, please email Carol Ormand to find out how to contribute to our collection of employer and employee interviews.

Geodepartments Email List

The Geodepartments email list is an email list where members can post and receive announcements about relevant workshops and events at professional society meetings, as well as discuss issues that are important to the community. Join the email list or browse through the list archives to see the kinds of topics that have been discussed in the past. Note: you must join this list to post messages to it.

As a Workshop Participant

We convene several workshops and conference sessions each year for interested faculty members. Workshop participants are part of this research project, so we do analyze information submitted in application and registration forms, as well as materials created as a result of the workshop. Read more about participating in the research aspect of this project.

Community Visioning

Since 2004, several activities have contributed to our vision for the Building Strong Geosciences Departments project.

Download the Project Brochure. (Acrobat (PDF) 1.1MB Oct15 09)


This project is funded by the National Science Foundation. Early work was funded under the grants EAR-0331930, EAR-0331933, EAR-0614926, EAR-0614570, and EAR-0614393. Current work is being conducted under grants DUE-0817353 and DUE-0817265.

Disclaimer: Any opinions, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this website are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

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