The Shiley School of Engineering has been accepted to the National Academy of Engineering Grand Challenge Scholars Program (GCSP), according to engineering dean Sharon Jones. Jones credits associate engineering dean Mark Kennedy for much of the work needed to make the Shiley School’s membership a reality.
Shiley School engineering students will focus on five components of the GCSP’s mission:
- Hands-on Project OR Research Experience: Related to a Grand Challenge
- Interdisciplinary Curriculum: A curriculum that complements engineering fundamentals with courses in other fields, preparing engineering students to work at the overlap with public policy, business, law, ethics, human behavior, risk, and the arts, as well as medicine and the sciences
- Entrepreneurship: Preparing students to translate invention to innovation; to develop market ventures that scale to global solutions in the public interest
- Global Dimension: Developing the students’ global perspective necessary to address challenges that are inherently global as well as to lead innovation in a global economy
- Service Learning: Developing and deepening students’ social consciousness and their motivation to bring their technical expertise to bear on societal problems through mentored experiential learning with real clients.
The GCSP program is a combined curricular and extra-curricular program with five components that are designed to prepare students to be the generation that solves the grand challenges facing society in this century. The National Academy of Engineering (NAE), at the request of the National Science Foundation, convened a committee of leading technical thinkers to create a list of the grand challenges and opportunities for engineering facing those born at the dawn of this new century. The committee’s final conclusions were released on February 15, 2008, and were presented at a public event at the NAE in October 2008.
For more information, contact the Shiley School at x7292 or engineering@up.edu.