LAUNCHING AN UNDERGRADUATE EARTH SYSTEM SCIENCE CURRICULUM WITH A FOCUS ON GLOBAL SUSTAINABILITY: THE LOMA LINDA UNIVERSITY EXPERIENCE

The vision of the School of Science and Technology (SST) at Loma Linda University (LLU) is to develop an interdisciplinary approach to doing science that bridges the social, biological, earth, and health sciences. It will provide opportunities for undergraduate, graduate, and professional students to apply new tools and concepts to the promotion of global service and citizenship while addressing issues of poverty, health and disease, environmental degradation, poverty, and social inequality.

Recently we became a partner in the NASA/USRA ESSE21 Project (Earth System Science Education for the 21st Century). We bring to that consortium strengths and experience in areas such as social policy, sustainable development, medicine, environmental health, disaster mitigation, humanitarian relief, geoinformatics and bioinformatics. This can benefit ESSE21, the NASA Earth Enterprise Mission, and the wider geosciences education community by demonstrating the relevance of such tools, and methods outside the geosciences.

Many of the graduate and undergraduate students who will participate in the new program come from around the world while many others represent underserved populations in the United States. The PI and Co-PIs have strong global as well as domestic experience serving underrepresented communities, e.g. Seth Wiafe from Ghana, Sam Soret from Spain, Stephen Dunbar from the South Pacific, and Robert Ford from Latin America and Africa. Our partnership in implementation will include other institutions such as: the MyCOE (My Community, Our Earth) community http://www.geography.org/sustainable/, the California State University, Pomona, Center for Geographic Information Science Research, ESRI, Inc., the University of Redlands, Center for Environmental Studies, and CEEMaST (Center for Education and Equity in Mathematics, Science, and Technology.) Our presentation in brief will outline our plans, progress to date, lessons learned, and seek feedback on how to improve.