We are glad you have chosen to visit our program via our
website. We hope that you will find it easy to navigate and
most of all, we hope you will find it informative. It is our
goal to provide an interdisciplinary program that will help
you reach your career
goals. In the Environmental Sciences PhD program, we
endeavor to be more than just an academic program simply
relaying information to students. Our interdisciplinary
faculty teach our graduate students the critical thinking
necessary to solve "real world" problems. Although
concentrations currently exist only in Chemistry and
Biology, due to the natural evolution and desire to
strengthen this program as well as further satisfy the
mission statement of TTU, a third concentration in
Computational Science/Mathematics is in the developmental
phase. At this point, involvement has been restricted to new
course offerings in statistics (developed by Math) and
collaborative research by TTU faculty in the field of
computational science. This concentration will primarily
emphasize statistics, algorithm development and modeling in
both the theoretical and observational realm in each of the
existing areas and will not represent a new program, but
rather a new area within the existing program. In addition,
our program focuses not only on the two available
concentrations (Chemistry and Biology) but also
environmental impacts on society and culture as well. For
this reason, course work in agriculture, geology and
sociology are included as core courses outside the selected
concentration. This prepares graduates for the anticipated
21st century workforce as dictated by studies
conducted by NSF and NAS. That might sound like a lot of
courses, but if you have a Masters degree in either Biology
or Chemistry, you can potentially complete your coursework
in as little as 25 hrs and the program in as little as three
years! The Environmental Sciences PhD at Tennessee Tech is a
research degree requiring an orally defended dissertation.
In order to be an effective interdisciplinary scientist,
it is essential to understand the impact of our human
endeavors on the environments we inhabit. This allows us the
ability to design an effective means of protecting human
health and wildlife habitat in the future and it also gives
us insight into a means of clean up due to the consequences
of past neglect. Here at TTU, faculty in Environmental
Sciences conduct research in a diverse array of research
areas all of which, in one way or another, effect the
environment in which we live and work
(Link to synopsis of research
efforts). The
interdisciplinary nature of our program allows the goals of
essentially any environmental problem to be investigated. We
hope you enjoy your visit!
