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Recent studies of graduate education in science and engineering recommend a new pathway for graduate education, emphasizing interdisciplinary interactions, to prepare a versatile workforce that will be able to contribute in a global environment. The National Science Foundation Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship Program (NSF IGERT) has funded over 100 projects addressing this need. As these projects progress it is important to assess their successes, best practices and common difficulties. This paper describes one NSF IGERT project, "Graduate Training in Optical Molecular Bio-Engineering," at the University of Texas at Austin, the integrated approach used to carry out its assessment, and how results of the assessment have been used to help achieve the goals of the program. We find that the total number of interdisciplinary scholarly activities (presentations, publications, funded research proposals and patent applications) reported by IGERT faculty and students rose steadily throughout the period of the IGERT award. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]