Grand Challenges Graduate Communities
An Accelerator for Interdisciplinary Research and Professional Impact
As the intellectual heart of Discovery House, the newest UMD graduate housing facility, the Grand Challenges Graduate Communities will create something rare in graduate education: a sustained, interdisciplinary research ecosystem where students and faculty work side by side to confront the defining problems of our time. (GC)2 is an accelerator for ideas, for mentorship, and for public impact. Making Discovery House a home for discovery, (GC)2 will produce networks of scholars whose collaborations will extend far beyond a single college or even beyond UMD as a campus, building a foundation for breakthroughs we cannot yet imagine. By investing in (GC)2, we invest in the future leaders, researchers, and innovators who will shape a more just, resilient, and technologically responsible world.
The Grand Challenges Graduate Communities - (GC)2 - are designed to revolutionize graduate education, moving past disciplinary silos to build lasting research networks able to tackle humanity’s most pressing issues. Located within the newly constructed Discovery House graduate housing, (GC)2 will bring together small, carefully curated cohorts (between 15-20 per community) from all across campus to focus on a grand challenge theme.
Graduate education is at an inflection point. The challenges facing society cannot be solved through disciplinary expertise alone. At the same time, graduate students are seeking deeper mentorship networks with faculty and peers, greater interdisciplinary engagement, and clearer routes to real-world impact. Universities across the nation are rethinking graduate training, but few have the infrastructure, faculty breadth, and institutional commitment that the University of Maryland brings together at this moment. With the opening of Discovery House and the university’s strategic focus on grand challenges and reimagining learning, we are uniquely positioned to launch a model that meets the urgency of this era: a community-based accelerator where interdisciplinary research, professional purpose, and cross-campus collaboration converge.
For students accepted into one of our (GC)2 communities as a “Grand Challenge Graduate Scholar,” the advantages of participating will profoundly alter their educational experience and provide career-advancing outcomes. Since there is not a formal curriculum for any of the communities, participation is a complement to, rather than a distraction from, their core research. As Grand Challenge Graduate Scholars, students will experience:
- High-Value Collaborative Research: Collaborate with other dynamic student peers from different academic backgrounds to co-author grant applications, co-author research articles, or produce innovative business ideas that will move the needle on a grand challenge. This model expands each student’s methodological breadth and research community beyond their home department.
- Expanded Mentorship and Committee Access: Find faculty mentors from across the campus who work on topics they care about but are outside of their home department and even their home college. Here, students may easily identify a range of scholars on campus who can readily serve on their thesis or dissertation committees and help mentor their research through a unique disciplinary lens.
- Tangible Research Support: Have access to Graduate School funds specifically pitched for each (GC)2 community in order to pay for conference attendance, research travel, and (GC)2 awards for exemplary research.
- Professional Development: Engage in career-focused activities, including speaker series, interdisciplinary lectures, and dedicated workshops focused on academic support and career development.
- Community and Belonging: Find community and peer support that expands the graduate school experience beyond any single lab or departmental cohort. By building intimate community connections, student retention, satisfaction, and mental health will be positively impacted.
While the (GC)2 communities will build on UMD’s status as one of the nation’s top universities for living-learning programs, it will be intentionally distinct from the existing undergraduate models. Rather than adding coursework or creating community through team building activities, (GC)2 is a research-driven framework that integrates directly into students’ existing scholarly work, supporting rather than competing with their primary academic commitments. Community in (GC)2 is created through shared intellectual pursuits and professional development, recognizing that graduate students are advanced scholars whose sense of professional belonging emerges from meaningful academic work.
Each (GC)2 community will be led by a Faculty Fellow who will serve as a dynamic leader of these interdisciplinary collaborations. The Faculty Fellow, who serves in a non-residential role, will help shape the range of research experiences available to the community, link the community with a network of campus mentors, bring in the best national and international experts on the topic, and help guide students through their approaches to tackling the grand challenge.
Three inaugural (GC)² communities will launch in Fall 2026, each led by a Faculty Fellow selected through a competitive application process. The communities were chosen for their interdisciplinary reach, the strength of their founding Fellow, and their capacity to represent the breadth of grand challenge themes that UMD is uniquely positioned to address.
AI and Knowledge
This community — formally titled explAIn: Human-AI Sense-Making — centers on one of the most urgent and underexamined questions of our moment: What does it mean to explain and understand something in the age of artificial intelligence? Rather than treating AI as a tool, the community interrogates it as an epistemological challenge, examining how human and machine reasoning can work together in ways that are transparent, rigorous, and intellectually coherent.
The community draws from philosophy, research methodology, computer science, the social and health sciences, and the arts. A key institutional priority is establishing a formal connection between this community and the Artificial Intelligence Interdisciplinary Institute at Maryland (AIM).
Faculty Fellow: Peter Steiner is a quantitative methodologist specializing in causal inference and the implications of AI/ML for knowledge generation, and his courses regularly draw graduate students from 10+ departments across campus.
Department: Human Development & Quantitative Methodology, College of Education
Future Cities
This community envisions the cities of the future as neither purely engineered nor purely planned — but co-designed with the communities who inhabit them, shaped by artificial intelligence, real-time data systems, and emerging technologies that can model risk, optimize resources, and surface inequities invisible to traditional approaches. Students will work at the frontier of engineering, data science, public policy, planning, and public health to translate technological possibility into infrastructure that is smarter, more sustainable, and more equitable.
The community will operate through a cohort-based “Future Cities Studio” model, culminating each year in a public-facing portfolio of student-produced toolkits, dashboards, policy memos, and implementation plans.
Faculty Fellow: Qingbin Cui brings extensive connections to federal, state, and local government partners through his work on Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) implementation, giving the community immediate access to applied challenges that will energize students and produce research with real-world consequences.
Department: Civil & Environmental Engineering, A. James Clark School of Engineering
ASCEND Fellows: Advancing Solutions for Challenges at the Nexus of Food, Water, Energy, and Health
The ASCEND Fellows will develop innovative solutions to some of the world's most pressing challenges at the nexus of food, water, energy, climate, and human health. Working across a diverse ecosystem that includes industry, government, academia, professional organizations and global partners, Fellows will gain hands-on research experience while tackling real-world problems that impact communities locally and worldwide. ASCEND Fellows will develop leadership, critical-thinking, core consulting and problem-solving skills while expanding professional networks toward the goals of future internships, collaborations, and career opportunities.
A defining feature of the approach is its formalized PPP governance framework, with a Scientific Advisory Committee and structured project selection, giving students direct experience working within real-world cross-sector coalitions. This community is (GC)²’s primary home for sustainability — a major grand challenge theme with broad student interest across campus.
Faculty Fellow: Wendy Sanhai brings more than 30 years of experience leading large-scale partnerships across the FDA, NIH, Pfizer, Deloitte, and academia, along with an extensive record of mentoring graduate and professional students across sectors.
Department: Robert H. Smith School of Business