Purdue University

Purdue University is a public research university in West Lafayette, Indiana and is the flagship campus of the Purdue University system. The main campus in West Lafayette offers more than 200 majors for undergraduates, over 69 masters and doctoral programs, and professional degrees in pharmacy and veterinary medicine.

Purdue University hosts the Purdue Climate Change Research Center (PCCRC), a collaborative hub for interdisciplinary research on climate change. From its inception, the PCCRC challenged itself to build a community of researchers working with the perspective that human and natural systems should be studied as an integrated whole. PCCRC brings together faculty, postdocs, students and professional staff from 23 departments across 8 of Purdue’s academic units to address the challenges and complexities of climate and related global change. Research teams are exploring the causes and impacts of climate change, improving predictive models to project future climate conditions, and pursuing novel ideas for mitigation and adaptation.

The PCCRC supports the ambitious, innovative ideas of researchers by breaking down disciplinary and administrative barriers to help ideas take shape. This is done in a variety of ways that include consulting with individual faculty members about opportunities, providing seed funding to explore high-risk interdisciplinary research, offering experienced guidance to support and develop a project or program, and by convening as many opportunities for cross-disciplinary conversations as possible—this is where new ideas are sparked, and take shape.

The university also supports the Indiana Climate Change Impacts Assessment - Putting global change into local perspective.

This interdisciplinary is reflected across the university. Purdue's Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences is highly interdisciplinary department that collaborates with other departments on campus, including the Department of Political Science, to provide a multitude of perspectives from which to tackle challenges in the geosciences. The department is developing four strategic initiatives in the areas of Energy and the Environment, Severe Weather Science, Planetary Exploration, and Geodata science.