Nicole Motzer

Dr. Nicole Motzer (she/her) was the Assistant Director for Interdisciplinary Science at SESYNC until 2021. In this role, Nicole facilitated synthesis research projects and meetings for dozens of teams and hundreds of scholars from across disciplines and around the world. She specialized in creating and leading first-of-their-kind training opportunities for graduate students to practice interdisciplinary socio-environmental research and build critical synthesis and collaboration skills. 

With a passion for furthering diversity, equity, and inclusion in science, she was an active interdisciplinary collaborator herself. Her projects at SESYNC included: 

• Co-developing a framework and methodology for interdisciplinary evaluation, for which Michigan State University’s Center for Interdisciplinarity offered her a visiting fellowship in 2019
• Co-creating a networked approach for graduate sustainability leadership training programs that integrates best practices and resources into a shared, open-access platform
• Co-leading a longitudinal study to advance outcomes for synthesis-based graduate education and research opportunities at institutional and national scales. 

The National Science Foundation and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation have supported additional interdisciplinary work of Nicole’s, while the National Academies sought her counsel on matters of convergence. 

Nicole earned a doctorate in Geographical Sciences from the University of Maryland, College Park in 2017. Her diverse research background ranges from assessing the effects of nature-based tourism on poverty and inequality in southern Africa, to investigating how food system regionalization and gender dynamics shape rural development processes in the Rocky Mountain West, to surveying trees on Maryland’s Eastern Shore and mapping invasive species in the Florida Everglades.

External Links:
https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=uzCEhZEAAAAJ&hl=en