About Us

The primary mission of CEREO is to support students, faculty, staff, administrators, and community partners throughout and beyond the WSU system in advancing interdisciplinary, environmental scholarship and engagement through grant-funded projects. 

CEREO provides this support by creating flexible, collaborative structures that bring thought leadership, convene and support multi-, inter-, and transdisciplinary research projects, and build integrated opportunities for research, education, and outreach.

Work with researchers and communities

CEREO works system-wide to harness the creativity and expertise of researchers and community partners who are addressing pressing interdisciplinary, environmental challenges. CEREO has spent decades cultivating relationships and building trust with communities across the Pacific Northwest. This groundwork has yielded fruit as our funded project portfolio demonstrates impactful research outcomes that advance science and support communities. CEREO-supported researchers and students continue to build networks, co-generate new ideas, and initiate cutting-edge projects through these connections.

Use integrative frameworks to build research capacity

To support the breadth of research interests and topics that come to CEREO, our Center relies on systems thinking approaches and community engaged scholarship strategies to work dynamically with research teams. For those working with CEREO, we offer an array of pre- and post-award support depending on the needs of the team. We specialize in helping PIs build strong teams and develop compelling projects for a range of private, state, and federal funding agencies. Researchers who partner with us on grants can also leverage CEREO for a variety of project support needs, from all-hands meeting planning, to building interdisciplinary vocabulary across the project, to hosting workshops designed to effectively and equitably co-produce science across disciplines and partners. In addition to activities directed toward individual research teams, we also support trainings and opportunities for broad audiences including through seminar series, workshops, and programming language working groups. To learn more about our services, check out our Working with CEREO page.

Help advance environmental sustainability

CEREO encourages researchers to engage across a wide range of pressing interdisciplinary, environmental challenges. Many of our PIs work with CEREO to develop research plans aimed at understanding complex interactions between human and natural systems. CEREO supports researchers through programmatic opportunities, such as our Climate Change Related Research (C2R2) initiative or through researcher-driven ideas.  Our Center currently supports research grants exploring wildfire threats, drought, ecosystem restoration, water quality degradation, resource governance issues and more.  To learn about our existing research portfolio, check out our Research and Educational initiative pages.