CHANGE Program Director: Jonathan Patz
CHANGE Assistant Director: Rob Beattie
Education and Outreach Programs Coordinator: Carmela Diosana, 608-265-0604
Nelson Institute Graduate Advisor: Jim Miller, 608-263-4373
A list of the faculty affiliated with the CHANGE program can be found on our searchable faculty directory.
Problems of global environmental sustainability and vulnerability have caught the attention of policymakers, the media, and citizens across the planet. There is an ever-increasing demand for researchers and professionals who can work on these topics. To become effective agents of environmental progress, students need interdisciplinary skills; training that incorporates humanistic, natural science, and social science perspectives and which can be applied to problems from the local to the global scale.
Assisted by funding from the National Science Foundation, the Nelson Institute has created a Certificate on Humans and the Global Environment (CHANGE) to aid in training graduate students to understand these complex issues. To accomplish this goal the CHANGE program involves faculty members in programs such as Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, Sociology, History of Science, Geography, Environmental Studies, Veterinary Medicine, and Population Health.
CHANGE is a 12-credit non-degree graduate certificate program or Ph.D. minor that supplements any graduate major on campus. It consists of a three-semester curriculum that prepares students to effectively devise solutions to interdisciplinary environmental problems. The CHANGE curriculum is unique because it trains students in professional communication and knowledge-management skills while exposing them to cutting-edge understandings of how human and non-human environmental systems operate.
CHANGE is administered by the Gaylord Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies (Nelson Institute) at UW-Madison. More information on the CHANGE program can be found on the Nelson Institute's Center for Sustainability and the Global Environmental CHANGE-IGERT website.
CHANGE welcomes applications from students in any graduate degree program at UW-Madison. CHANGE is not available as a stand-alone graduate degree. The CHANGE program does not have any course prerequisites, but prospective students should note that it is a cohort-based certificate. In other words, the CHANGE course sequence should be completed in three consecutive semesters.