Achievement

Timothy Hildebrandt, our IGERT program’s first graduate, received a postdoctoral fellowship at the Center for Asian Democracy at the University of Louisville. Tim’s interdisciplinary training in our IGERT was critical to his receiving this postdoctoral position, which are rare for political scientists. The Center for Asian Democracy seeks to support research on the emergence of democratic institutions that is not only academically rigorously but also well-grounded in reality. Tim’s training in our IGERT gave him grounding in reality unlike most of his peers in Political Science. IGERT enabled Tim to conduct his field research on environmental NGOs, which are considered an important antecedent to democracy, in Yunnan, China. Additionally, his training in our IGERT in disciplines outside political science, such as ecology, helped inform his research, helping him better understand the science and complexity of issues that these nonstate actors have sought to solve.