Advancing Geoscience Research through CIDER

Barbara Romanowicz¹, Marc Hirschmann², Louise Kellogg³, Michael Manga¹, Sujoy Mukhopadhyay³, Bruce Buffett¹

1 Dept. of Earth and Planetary Science, Univ. of California Berkeley, 301 McCone Hall, Berkeley, California 94720, USA
2 Dept. of Earth Sciences, Univ. of Minnesota, 310 Pillsbury Drive SE, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55455, USA
3 Dept. of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Univ. of California Davis, One Shields Ave., Davis, California 95616, USA

With growing technical sophistication in the earth sciences and increasing specialization within its subdisciplines, geoscientists face an organizational problem when we want to tackle grand research challenges that span many disciplines. How do we bring the various fields together to leverage their individual strengths and create something more than the sum of the parts? This is the problem that CIDER (Cooperative Institute for Dynamic Earth Research) attempts to solve.

CIDER is an institute “without walls” that brings together experts from a wide range of disciplines with the goal of advancing understanding on grand challenges that require a multidisciplinary approach and engages geoscientists at all levels to look at the entire Earth as a system. It has been funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) since 2003, most recently through the Frontiers in Earth Systems Dynamics (FESD) program.

Manuscript received 29 Dec. 2016; Revised manuscript received 10 Apr. 2017; Manuscript accepted 10 Apr. 2017; Posted online 8 May 2017

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