About the School
The University of Massachusetts Boston is "The Environmental Campus" of the five-campus University of Massachusetts system, and the School for the Environment (SFE) is the campus's premier interdisciplinary environmental school. SFE, together with departments across the campus and in collaboration with research institutes such as the Urban Harbors Institute; Collaborative Institute for Oceans, Climate, and Security, and Provincetown Center for Coastal Studies, energizes and facilitates the university's vision for national preeminence in environmental research and academic programs.
The School for the Environment integrates the natural and social sciences to generate and apply new knowledge about the quality of our environment and the sustainable use of its resources. It focuses on promoting integrated science, planning, policy, and education for understanding earth-system processes and managing complex interactions between human activities (e.g., urbanization) and natural processes (e.g., carbon cycling) in linked watershed and coastal marine systems. The school's strong transdisciplinary makeup (natural and social sciences within the same department) and its focus on linked watershed-coastal systems are unique in the country.
Department facilities include the Environmental Analytical Laboratory, Applied Geographical Information Science (GIS) Center, the Center for Coastal Environmental Sensor Networks (CESN), Green Harbors Project, and the Laboratory of Theoretical, Computational, and Observational Oceanography. In addition, the school houses specialized laboratories for earth, ocean, and environmental sciences, including state-of-the-art facilities for isotope counting, radiogenic and stable isotope analysis, organic geochemical analysis, elemental analysis, trace element analysis, radio isotope sample preparation, noble gas extraction and analysis, forensic environmental analysis, hydrogeology, coastal geology, environmental toxicology, benthic ecology and zooplankton analysis, as well as inshore/near shore research vessels.
