The NAE Grand Challenge Scholars Program educates engineering undergraduates to have the technical expertise, breadth of knowledge, and the social, ethical, and environmental awareness to successfully pursue leadership positions in addressing the NAE Grand Challenges for Engineering. In addition to the engineering requirements for their degree, students who complete the program create a portfolio with the following five components:
- Global education experience
- Service learning
- Entrepreneurship
- Broad general education, including behavior, economics, and policy
- Hands-on research or project related to one of the Grand Challenges
Upon completion participating students receive the designation of NAE Grand Challenge Scholar on the transcript from their home institution with the imprimatur of the NAE.
The NAE released a list of 14 "Grand Challenges for Engineering" that must be addressed in order to achieve a sustainable, economically robust, and politically stable future for our children and our children's children. These challenges range from the most basic of human needs (provide access to clean water) to the extraordinary (reverse engineering of the brain). Thematically, the 14 challenges are initiatives for improving the human condition by identifying safe and clean energy resources; providing for human health, nutrition and security; restoring and reinventing infrastructure for urban habitation; advancing computing power and capabilities; and developing new tools for teaching, learning, medicine and scientific discovery.
The Grand Challenges Scholars program is a combined curricular and extra-curricular program designed to prepare students to work on these problems whose solutions could dramatically improve quality of life around the world.
