About our program

The University of Alaska Fairbanks offers the Resilience and Adaptation Program (RAP), a graduate program to train scholars, policy-makers, community leaders, and managers to address issues of sustainability in an integrated fashion. This program prepares students to address a major challenge facing humanity: To sustain the desirable features of Earth's social-ecological systems at a time of rapid changes in all of the major forces that shape their structure and functioning.

Program Elements

• Interdisciplinary graduate training is available at the PhD or Masters level
• The program is open to students at the University of Alaska and other universities
• Global-local interactions of social-ecological systems in a rapidly changing North serves as the overarching theme in education and research
• Training integrates ecology, economics, anthropology, and other relevant disciplines to address sustainability in a systems framework
• Students are trained in a disciplinary strength with additional training in a range of natural and social sciences
• Students receive hands-on research experience in a field outside their parent discipline
• Numerous interdisciplinary research opportunities are available, particularly in the areas of
  • Climate-Disturbance-Human Interactions,
  • Food Security
  • Adaptive Resource Co-Management
  • Forestry
  • Sustainable Fisheries
  • Alternative Energy
  • Wildlife and Subsistence Resources
• Social-ecological resilience theory, adaptation, vulnerability, and transformation provide frameworks for understanding the implications of change in an integrated approach
• Alaska Natives seeking the PhD are encouraged to apply
• Opportunities to participate in circumpolar research activities of the International Polar Year.
• The program trains students for careers in academia, government, non-government organizations, and management to address issues of sustainability in an integrated systems framework

Fellowship support
NSF-funded "traineeships" (fellowships) are available to PhD students of RAP. Additional funding is available to both PhD and Masters students as teaching and research fellowships through participating departments.