In October, 2006, Stony Brook University announced the creation of a new center, the Consortium for Inter-Disciplinary Environmental Research (CIDER). This initiative was undertaken to bring together the many faculty at the university from diverse disciplines, housed in many departments, to create synergistic collaborations that could address large, complex environmental issues. The participants (faculty, postdoctoral investigators, and graduate students) in CIDER are formally associated with existing academic departments at Stony Brook University, including departments in Arts and Sciences, Engineering, the Medical School, and the School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences. However, all participants also see the value in working across disciplines, not necessarily reflective of traditional academic separations, to form multi-disciplinary teams of researchers that can tackle the complexities of large environmental problems. Thus, individuals in the natural and medical sciences collaborate with social scientists and engineers to pursue large research programs. Such teams are required to develop new research centers for environmental research at Stony Brook, and as well provide new and exciting educational opportunities for the next generation of environmental researchers. A description of the type of research that CIDER will pursue is given in CIDER Research.

In addition, CIDER will sponsor inter-disciplinary environmental lectures from leading researchers and will periodically initiate workshops to address new research directions.