The National Academy of Engineering Grand Challenge Scholars Program
The National Academy of Engineering's (NAE's) recently released list of 14 Grand Challenges for Engineering in the 21st century is a call to action and a means of focusing society's attention on opportunities and challenges affecting our quality of life.
The NAE Grand Challenge Scholars Program is a combined curricular and extra-curricular program with five components that are designed to prepare students to solve these grand challenges facing society. These are challenges to “change the world.”
Energy and Environment
- Make solar energy economical
- Provide energy from fusion
- Develop methods for carbon sequestration
- Manage the nitrogen cycle
- Provide access to clean water
Health
Security
Learning and Computation
- Reverse engineer the brain
- Enhance virtual reality
- Advance personalized learning
- Engineer the tools of scientific discovery
Nearly all 14 challenges address complex social issues that require innovative technology and a systems approach to solving them, but they cannot be solved in a vacuum. They also will require engineers to shape public policy, transfer technical innovation to the market place and to inform and be informed by social science and the humanities.
These are ambitious tasks that will require a new generation of engineers that will collectively:
- Create new capabilities
- Provide pragmatic solutions for basic human needs
- Develop new entrepreneurial opportunities
- Reinvent human interactions
- Transform systems thinking
- Be the architects of a sustainable society
- Be mindful of unintended consequences
- Connect technology with society