Engineering programs at Duke and North Carolina State University are leading a national effort to revamp engineering education to meet the biggest challenges of the next century. Dean Tom Katsouleas of Duke’s Pratt School of Engineering and Michaela Rikard, an engineering student from N.C. State, were part of a five-person delegation that delivered a letter to the White House Monday signed by more than 120 engineering deans.The deans are pledging to educate a new generation of engineers expressly equipped to tackle some of the most pressing issues facing society in the 21st century. These "Grand Challenges" were identified through several initiatives and include 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 people.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 N.C. State’s engineering school was one of the first to adopt the Grand Challenge Scholars Program (GCSP) curriculum. The curriculum integrates five educational elements: (1) hands-on research or a design project connected to the identified 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 enrolled in Duke’s Grand Challenges Scholars Program, which is one of the country’s pioneering programs. Duke's GCSP scholars are pursuing a wide range of projects related to Grand Challenges, such as treating contaminated drinking water in Uganda, preventing injuries through orthopedic 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 N.C. State, 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. He guides students toward specific humanities and social science classes that benefit them and starts the networking process to help students find faculty mentors. Rikard, a junior biomedical engineering major at N.C. State, is an exemplary product of this program. She is part of a small group of students in the GCSP at N.C. State, but looks forward to the future of the program.“This is a really great opportunity for N.C. 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.” Duke student Kevin Mauro, is focused on the challenge to “reverse-engineer the brain,” and recently participated in the White House’s first conference on the BRAIN Initiative.For more information, you can read the official release put out by the National Academy of Engineers [http://www.nae.edu/Projects/MediaRoom/20095/130169/134046.aspx].
