Brown's Center for Environmental Studies has two goals: to help students understand emerging environmental problems and to strengthen their competence in addressing them. As environmental science progresses and our policy analyses become more powerful, environmental problems become increasingly global, complex, and interconnected. The focus of the program is to prepare students to pursue their environmental career goals through the development of a master’s thesis project tailored to each student's needs. The small size of our program (approximately 8 students per year) provides the opportunity for students to work closely with faculty on applied research projects of mutual interest. Faculty have strengths in ecosystem science, environmental health, environmental law and public policy, marine science and policy at the state and federal levels, forest ecology, land change science, global change, risk assessment, remote sensing, hazardous and toxic materials management, and environmental regulation. Affiliated faculty with appointments in other units augment the faculty with strengths in environmental health, biology, geology, and sociology. Rather than beginning with traditional disciplines and searching for their application to environmental problems, this interdisciplinary program focuses on the problems of decision and action, learning to draw the necessary information from the disciplines that bear on these decisions.

Additional resources: Graduate students have access to resources in many cooperating departments, initiatives and institutes on campus (e.g. Ecology and Evolutionary Biology; Geological Sciences, Global Environment Program, Watson Institute for International Studies: Spatial Structures in the Social Sciences and Environmental Change Initiatives) as well as affiliated program off campus (e.g. Ecosystem Center, Marine Biological Laboratory. Office space is available for all students, in addition to full access to GIS and remote sensing laboratories and a fully equipped environmental chemistry facility.

Completion requirements: A.M.: Eight courses, including: one special topics seminar in the first semester; one course in environmental regulation or in environmental economics (if the student has no previous course work in this area), four courses on topics related to the focus of the thesis; year long thesis (counts as two courses).

ADMISSION INFORMATION

Admission requirements: Writing sample required.

GRE General: Required

GRE Subject: Not required

Financial aid: Financial aid is available through teaching assistantships and tuition scholarships (averaging 50% of tuition).

Application deadline: March 15