Following several years of discussion, the faculty voted in 2017 to move the QERM program from the UW Graduate School (where it had been administratively housed since its establishment in 1990) to the College of the Environment. During these discussions, it was often noted that if the College of the Environment had existed in 1990, QERM would have likely been placed there in the beginning due to the interdisciplinary nature of the college. (The College of the Environment was not established until 2010.)

Our move to the College was not just administrative, but also a literal – we packed up our boxes in our long-time stomping grounds in Loew Hall, and moved to our new home in the Ocean Teaching Building along the waterfront in the South Campus area. The new space includes an administrative office for the QERM Academic Advisor, office spaces (with views of the water!) for the incoming first-year students, a shared conference room/group working space, and most importantly, a kitchen for the program’s long-standing soup tradition.

With both the Center for Quantitative Science (CQS) and the Quantitative Ecology and Research Management (QERM) programs now located within the College of the Environment, the two programs were administratively united in early 2019. The decision to combine the programs was based on already existing administrative and faculty overlaps of the two programs in addition to their long, interconnected histories that can be traced back to the late 1960s with the establishment of CQS in 1968 and the Biomathematics Program in 1969 (see the CQS/QERM historical timeline here). The main goal of this change was to strengthen and build upon the unique, interdisciplinary education and research opportunities that both programs provide for undergraduate and graduate students applying quantitative methods to issues in the fields of life sciences.

The reorganization establishes the Center of Quantitative Science as the umbrella (or the administrative oversight) for both QERM and the Q SCI undergraduate minor and courses. In early 2019, CQS/QERM launched a new website that reflects this new organization.