The profession of engineering has been, true to its latin root ingeniare, about invention. For the past one hundred years, about as long as most college of engineering programs have existed, the list of the most important engineering achievements has been dominated by devices: planes and spacecraft, cars and agricultural machines, lasers and PET scanners, to name a few from the NAE report of the last century. Almost a decade into the new century, another NAE committee has addressed the new engineering grand challenges and has come to a much deeper unfolding of invention: Their list includes making solar energy economical, preventing nuclear terror, advancing health informatics, clean water and reverse engineering the human brain. None of them are just devices. Nearly all address complex social issues that require innovative technology and a systems approach to solve but cannot be solved in a vacuum. They will also 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 challenges to “change the world,” and many of them are inherently global.

The University of Utah College of Engineering Grand Challenge Scholars Program (GCSP) is a new education model to prepare our engineering students to be world changers. While participating in this program, students will build a portfolio throughout their undergraduate experience encompassing five components:

Research experience: Project or independent research related to a Grand Challenge.
Interdisciplinary curriculum: Preparing engineering students to work at the overlap with public policy, business, law, ethics, human behavior, risk as well as medicine and the sciences. Examples that span these disciplines with a coherent theme are Energy and the Environment, Sustainability, Uncertainty and Optimization, etc.
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.

The University of Utah College of Engineering’s GCSP is endorsed by the NAE, and students completing their portfolio and graduating from the program will be designated ‘Grand Challenge Scholars’ by the NAE.