John Kramer to Mitchell Audience: His Center’s Goal is to Foster “Scholarship with the Potential to Inform Decisions”

John Kramer says he feels kinship with those at UMaine’s Senator George J. Mitchell Center for Sustainability Solutions who work to link knowledge with action, homing in on real world, place-based problems. His work has similar characteristics, but on a broader scale.

Kramer is Director of Interdisciplinary Science at the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center (SESYNC). SESYNC is dedicated to a research approach called synthesis, which seeks to produce fundamental knowledge about co-dependent human and natural systems.

“We’re kindred spirits in a lot of ways,” he told an audience at the Mitchell Center recently. But “we are a national/international center. We work on clusters of case studies. We work on integrating a variety of different kinds of topics to look for broader patterns, broader solutions and broader truths. As one of our board members has said, our goal, as a research organization, is to support the discovery of truth.”

SESYNC’s focus on multidisciplinary method sets it apart from other synthesis centers, Kramer said. Funded through an award to the University of Maryland from the National Science Foundation (NSF), SESYNC is designed to cut across disciplines and identify gaps in previous research. The center’s mission is not to produce internal research, but to support research and collaborations coming in from outside.

“Our charge is to bring together social, natural and computations scientists to address environmental problems,” he said. “And that intersection of those domains makes us fundamentally different than any other synthesis center that’s ever been funded.”

SESYNC exists to foster scholarly, management and policy communities. It brings together diverse groups in new, interdisciplinary collaborations to identify solutions to society’s most challenging and complex environmental problems.

The center works to empower interdisciplinary teamwork skills, build education programs and work toward “proactive steps to foster actionability,” Kramer said.

SESYNC funds “pursuits” or collaborative research that can include both university-based scholars and participants from the business, government and non-profit worlds. The center also offers funding for workshops, scholars in residence, postdoctoral fellowships and a lot more.

“We are a service organization,” Kramer explained. “We exist to serve a variety of communities in different ways. It is a place where people bring their data, aggregate that data and bring it together in new and interesting ways.”