THE DIVISION OF GRADUATE EDUCATION AT NSF: SUPPORTING GRADUATE EDUCATION OF THE FUTURE

The Division of Graduate Education (DGE) is housed within the Directorate for Education and Human Resources (EHR) at the National Science Foundation (NSF). The goals of NSF’s investment in graduate education is to advance science and engineering research, to broaden participation to promote excellence in research, to build effective models of graduate education and workforce development, and to build the next generation STEM workforce. DGE promotes these objectives through funding mechanisms that support fellowships, traineeships, scholarships, and research while maintaining a focus on workforce development, educational innovations, cybersecurity, and broadening participation of underrepresented groups including women, minorities, persons with disabilities and veterans. Four programs are managed within the DGE portfolio, including the Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP), NSF Research Traineeship (NRT) Program, CyberCorps: Scholarship for Service (SFS) Program, and the EHR Core Research (ECR) Program. The GRFP, the oldest federal fellowship program that directly supports graduate students in STEM fields, is an instrumental program that selects, recognizes, and financially supports individuals early in their careers who demonstrate potential to be high achieving scientists and engineers. NRT is designed to encourage transformative models for STEM graduate education training and to ensure that today’s graduate students are being trained through interdisciplinary research to succeed in a wide variety of STEM careers. SFS seeks to increase the number of qualified employees working in the field of cybersecurity in the Federal, State, Local, and Tribal governments. ECR facilitates synthesizing, building, and expanding fundamental research in STEM learning, STEM learning environments, STEM workforce development, broadening participation and institutional capacity in STEM fields. As a leader of the Federal Coordination in STEM Education (FC-STEM) Graduate Education Interagency Working Group, DGE advocates for developing and implementing fundamental policies that will impact STEM graduate education by engaging various stakeholders who share the common goal of improving graduate student preparedness for a range of careers in the workforce. Ultimately, DGE strategically supports the NSF to ensure that the United States continues to play a leadership role in advancing science and engineering research and innovation.