Biodiversity science seeks to describe life on Earth, promote the ecological and evolutionary importance of biodiversity, and identify and integrate multiple dimensions of scientific approach from genetic to taxonomic to functional. But with more than 7 billion people on the planet -- and only a small number of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) professionals -- science is simply not equipped to capture information on Earth’s biodiversity before it disappears. In response to the unprecedented loss of species and habitats -- as well as the goods and services they provide to people across the globe -- we need new approaches to practicing biodiversity science and new mechanisms for mentoring the next generations of biodiversity scientists. Extending the frontiers of biodiversity science is crucial, both for science to keep pace with the demands of the global population and for today’s students to be immersed in the beauty of discovery and practicality of solution-finding. This session highlights an ongoing collaboration between students and faculty and showcases a novel model of synthetic, interdisciplinary, and collaborative graduate education -- the distributed graduate seminar -- with specific application to biodiversity science. Talks will focus on extending the dimensions of biodiversity; scaling up to large datasets, global approaches, and social networking; exploring the challenges of the microbe-macrobe divide; and tackling the sticky wicket of biodiversity in highly managed ecosystems.