Building Strong Geoscience Departments > About this Project

About this Project

Carleton College. Photo by Tom Roster.

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. Building Strong Geoscience Departments is also a sponsored activity of the National Association of Geoscience Teachers.

Project PIs

Cathy Manduca (Carleton College), Heather Macdonald (College of William and Mary), Geoff Feiss (College of William and Mary), and Randy Richardson (University of Arizona) are the PIs on this project.

Getting Involved

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

Contribute to Online Collections

Submit a description of your department for inclusion in our collection of program profiles, or send us your recruitment poster for inclusion in our collection of recruitment posters from departments around the country. Follow the links to find out how to contribute.

Geodepartments Listserv

The Geodepartments listserv is an email list where members can receive announcements about relevant workshops and events at professional society meetings, as well as discuss issues that are important to the community. If you would like to join the list, click here to go to the sign up page. You can also browse through the list archives to see the kinds of topics that have been discussed in the past.

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 this aspect of the research project on this page.

Community Visioning

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

Download the Project Flier. (Acrobat (PDF) 98kB Oct26 06)


This project is funded by the National Science Foundation. The original work was funded under the grants GEO-0331930 and GEO-0331933 and current work is being conducted under grants GEO-0614926, GEO-0614570, and GEO-0614393.

Terms of Use for information on this website.
SERC Privacy Policy


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.


      Next Page »