UPDATING THE GEOSCIENCE CURRICULUM TO ATTRACT STUDENTS AND PREPARE THEM FOR ENERGY TRANSITION CAREERS

Financial incentives and the reward system within research universities are designed to obtain external funding from external funding sources, gain the attention and respect of other academics, lead to publications and graduate students. Issues with this emphasis with respect to generating a workforce prepared to deal with challenges in the critical materials supply chain are numerous. This talk will focus on three areas of potential improvement. The selection of topics for theses are not based on industry and national needs, the resulting publications may not have applicability for commercial endeavors, and the students are not educated in related aspects of the supply chain beyond the focus of their sub-discipline.

This author thinks that there is always a need for purely fundamental academic research, but the proportion of such research should be balanced with questions of practical interest and commercial value. If the reviewers of proposals and papers are predominantly academics with limited knowledge of industrial needs, the successful proposal and papers will be biased in the direction of purely academic questions. Increased inclusion of industrial scientists in the review process would be one step towards addressing the problems of thesis topic selection and proposal/publication goals.