Graduate Studies Program

Are you ready for the future?

Singularity University’s mission is to assemble, educate, and inspire leaders who strive to understand and facilitate the development of exponentially advancing technologies in order to address humanity’s Grand Challenges. The Graduate Studies Program is a 10-week interdisciplinary summer program for top graduate and postgraduate students and entrepreneurial leaders worldwide. With the support of a broad range of leaders in academia, business, and government, we are stimulating groundbreaking disruptive thinking and solutions aimed at solving some of the our most pressing challenges.

Academic Tracks

During the program participants learn about the various exponentially growing cross-disciplinary technologies in the following 10 tracks:

Techcnology Tracks	AI & Robotics Nanotechnology Networks & Computing Systems Biotechnology & Bioinformatics Medicine & Neuroscience
Resource Tracks	Futures Studies & Forecasting Policy, Law & Ethics Finance & Entrepreneurship
Application Tracks	Energy & Ecological Systems Space & Physical Sciences

Learn more about the curriculum for each track here.

109+ Team Projects

Each year for Singularity University’s Graduate Studies Program, we select a set of team projects that have the potential to positively impact 1 billion people within a decade, leveraging exponentially advancing technologies. Each team project includes 10-15 international and interdisciplinary students.

The five team projects for our 2010 Graduate Studies Program are:

Sustainable Watter Assets:
Holistic alternatives to capital-intensive infrastructures

The crisis in water and sanitation is one of the greatest human development challenges according to the UN, NAE, and others. More people die from the lack of clean water than war. According to the UN, one billion people lack access to safe drinking water, 2.4 billion to adequate sanitation. A 2015 UN Millennium Development Goal is to reduce by half the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water. Household water use accounts for a small fraction of the need for clean water. The water needs of agriculture and industry are 20 times larger than personal water usage. The problems of access to clean water are linked to issues of energy, development, pollution, transportation, industrialization, infrastructure, and policies. This project will examine the opportunities presented by exponentially accelerating technologies such as biotechnology, nanomaterials, sensors, etc. to address needs for clean water. Opportunities will be examined across a variety of scales, from the regional or community scale to the residential level.

Food for Cities:
Opportunities in controlled-environment agriculture and vertical farming

By the year 2050, the world population is expected to have grown by another 3 billion and nearly 80% of the total population will reside in urban centers. In order to feed the increase in population, an estimated 1 billion hectares of new land (about 20% more land than is represented by Brazil) will be needed to grow enough food if traditional farming continues as it is practiced today. In order to accomplish this dramatic increase in food production, new technologies are needed which increase the efficiency of large-scale food production while simultaneously eliminating current practices which are disastrous to the environment causing problems such as the release of CO2, the disruption of the nitrogen cycle, and the contamination of water and ecosystems.

Home Energy Use:
Off-the-grid, stand-alone, carbon-neutral, residential energy systems

Close to 3 billion people, almost half the world population, do not have continuous and reliable access to electricity in their homes. Almost 90% of the energy produced and sold commercially still comes from three main fossil fuels: coal, oil, and gas. None of these is clean and renewable, nor are they cheap enough to afford by the majority of these 3 billion people. In addition, traditional energy distribution grids require complex electrical networks which are incredibly expensive to install and maintain and which take too long to build. The challenge becomes to rethink traditional and expensive centralized fossil fuel-based energy distribution networks and move to inexpensive decentralized networks — ideally, point-of-use systems — based on renewable or carbon-neutral energy sources.

To Boldly Stay:
Extending humanity into the solar system

Rapidly and cheaply robotically scout the Moon, Mars, asteroids, and other deep-space destinations to find safe and interesting sites for humans to visit. Understand the space-resources available to humans enabling us to one day “live off the land.” Understand the hazards that places pose in their local environment, as well as prevent hazardous encounters with Earth. Synthesize robotic and human exploration, exploiting the strengths of each. Look at new designs, new materials, and new technologies that will transform not just where we can go but what we can do when we get there.

Upcycle:
Waste reduction and reprocessing into useful products

Images of people living and working in a landfill-dominated landscape are a stark reminder that in the next decades the amount of products that human use and discard will grow exponentially. These products are filling our landfills, contaminating our waters, increasing the atmospheric CO2 concentrations, and wasting energy and raw materials. In order for us to make significant reductions in CO2 emissions and environmental contamination, we are going to have to rethink how we make and use things. The idea of closing the recycle loop is simple enough. Rather than dispose of products at end-of-life, the products are re-purposed, re-processed, or re-manufactured into new products. This project focuses not just on reductions of what goes to landfills, but on a systematic approach to product design to ensure that the landfills are not needed in the first place.

Program Timeline

During the 10 weeks, the students strive to achieve the following:

Week 1	Weeks 2-5	Weeks 6-10
A deep understanding of the field	Exponential Technologies Impact Report	Actionable Output
What has been tried? What has worked, and what has failed? What is the primary challenge? What technology is needed?	Students then learn about all of the fields in exponential growth and strive to understand what is in the lab today, where we are heading for the next 5 -10 years, and how this technology will be useful to address the Grand Challenge in that timeframe.	Output takes a few forms. First is a report on how the technology will be applicable to each Grand Challenge over a 10-year period, and second, what companies or research programs/NGOs should be started.

Tuition & Admissions

Tuition

Tuition for the 10-week program is USD$25,000. This includes housing, food, and tuition.

Scholarships

A limited number of partial and full scholarships are available.

Application Process

Fill out the online application here
Qualified individuals will be asked to submit additional information, including official transcripts

Application and Admission Deadlines

The 2011 Graduate Studies Program will be in session for a 10-week period from approximately the middle of June through the end of August. The admissions schedule for 2011 is as follows:

Application Deadline*	Section	Notification of Acceptance	% of 2011 Class Accepted
November 1, 2010	Round 1	December 1, 2010	10%
December 1, 2010	Round 2	January 15, 2011	30%
January 15, 2011	Round 3 (Recommended deadline for international applicants)	February 15, 2011	50%
February 15, 2011	Round 4	March 15, 2011	70%
March 15, 2011	Round 5	April 15, 2011	100%

*You are encouraged to apply early. This will enable us to accept you early or, if you are missing something from your application, to notify you with time to correct the error.

Location & Campus

Singularity University’s Campus is located at NASA Ames Research Park at Moffett Field in Mountain View, California. We are right in the heart of Silicon Valley.
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Videos

We release a selection of some of our lectures from our world-class faculty online for free at our YouTube Channel. Highlights include: