Triangle engineers carry a pledge to President Obama
Duke and NC State’s engineering programs are leading the way toward revamping engineering education to meet the biggest challenges of the next century.
Today, a small group of five leaders delivered a letter to the White House signed by more than 120 engineering deans pledging to educate a new generation of engineers expressly equipped to tackle some of the most pressing issues facing society in the 21st century. The small delegation included Duke’s Pratt School of Engineering’s Dean Tom Katsouleas and Michaela Rikard, an engineering student from NC State.
These “Grand Challenges,” identified through several initiatives, include complex yet critical goals such as engineering better medicines, making solar energy cost-competitive with coal, securing cyberspace, and advancing personalized learning tools to deliver better education to more individuals.
Each of the 122 signing schools has pledged to graduate a minimum of 20 students per year who have been specially prepared to lead the way in solving such large-scale problems, with the goal of training more than 20,000 formally recognized “Grand Challenge Engineers” over the next decade.
Dean Katsouleas was one of the three founding members of this movement, and NC State’s engineering school was one of the first to adopt the “Grand Challenge Scholars Program” curriculum. That curriculum includes special programs that integrate five educational elements: (1) a hands-on research or design project connected to the Grand Challenges; (2) real-world, interdisciplinary experiential learning with clients and mentors; (3) entrepreneurship and innovation experience; (4) global and cross-cultural perspectives; and (5) service-learning.
More than 30 students are currently enrolled in Duke’s GCSP, one of the country’s pioneering programs. The school’s Scholars are pursuing a wide range of projects related to Grand Challenges, such as treating contaminated drinking water in Uganda, preventing injuries through orthopaedic biomechanics, improving the performance of unmanned aerial systems in remote and harsh climates, and engineering better medicines to improve the health care of women in low-resource settings.
At NC State, Dr. David Parish, assistant dean for academic affairs in the College of Engineering and the program’s director, offers advice for students interested in applying to the program. He also works to help them find a particular grand challenge program that interests the students, while exploring more research opportunities; guides them toward specific humanities and social science classes that benefit them; and starts the networking process between with faculty members to find future mentors.
Rikard, a junior biomedical engineering major at NC State, is an exemplary product of this program. She is currently part of a small group of students in the GCSP at NC State, but looks forward to the future of the program.
“This is a really great opportunity for NC State and for the Grand Challenge Scholars Program,” Rikard said of being in Washington for the event. “I hope this brings about good changes and an expansion to our program.”
Another example from Duke is Kevin Mauro, who is focused on the “reverse-engineer the brain” challenge, and who recently participated in the White House’s first conference on the BRAIN Initiative.
If you have any interest in covering this exciting development, Dean Katsouleas and Michaela Rikard are available for comment from Washington, DC. In addition, Kevin Mauro and David Parish, are also available locally to speak about the program.
For more information, you can read the official release put out by the National Academy of Engineers at http://www.nae.edu/.
