WTI’s Community-engaged and Transformational Scholarship (CATS) program fosters course-based project partnerships between MSU faculty and students and public agencies or other community-based organizations. CATS provides a framework for agencies to harness students’ ideas, creativity, and energy while at the same time offering students the unique opportunity to work for a real client and to produce a mutually defined outcome that addresses important community needs.
Dr. Sarah Church, Assistant Professor in Earth Sciences, has been an active participant in the program since joining MSU as a faculty member in 2019. Through CATS, she has partnered with the City of Bozeman to engage her undergraduate and graduate students on a wide variety of course-based projects, exploring a range of topics from planning processes, neighborhood character preservation, and stormwater management, to public outreach and communication mechanisms. This spring, Sarah received the MSU President’s Award of Excellence in Service-Learning in recognition of her outstanding track record of fostering student learning through real world community projects.
The West Region Transportation Workforce Center has released the University Partnership Playbook, a step-by-step guide for creating multi-project collaborations between public agencies and universities. The collaborations offer students hands-on transportation project experience within their university courses and provide agencies with added expertise and capacity for community-based projects.
A newly published book on training the next generation of transportation workers at all levels includes a chapter written by two WTI staff members. Empowering the New Mobility Workforce: Educating, Training, and Inspiring Future Transportation Professionals identifies strategies that education, industry, and government leaders can use to facilitate learning and skill development related to emerging transportation technologies and challenges.