GRAND CHALLENGES
FOR ENGINEERING

Imperatives, Prospects, and Priorities

SUMMARY OF A FORUM

Prepared by Steve Olson
for the

NATIONAL ACADEMY OF ENGINEERING

THE NATIONAL ACADEMIES PRESS

Washington, DC

www.nap.edu

THE NATIONAL ACADEMIES PRESS    500 Fifth Street NW    Washington, DC 20001

NOTICE: The subject of this report is the forum titled Grand Challenges for Engineering: Imperatives, Prospects, and Priorities held during the 2015 annual meeting of the National Academy of Engineering.

Opinions, findings, and conclusions expressed in this publication are those of the forum participants and not necessarily the views of the National Academy of Engineering.

International Standard Book Number-13: 978-0-309-43896-4
International Standard Book Number-10: 0-309-43896-9
Digital Object Identifier: 10.17226/23440

Copies of this report are available from the National Academies Press, 500 Fifth Street NW, Keck 360, Washington, DC 20001; (800) 624-6242 or (202) 334-3313; www.nap.edu.

For more information about the National Academy of Engineering, visit the NAE home page at www.nae.edu.

Copyright 2016 by the National Academy of Sciences. All rights reserved.

Printed in the United States of America

Suggested citation: National Academy of Engineering. 2016. Grand Challenges for Engineering: Imperatives, Prospects, and Priorities. Washington: National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/23440.

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Preface

Engineering has long gravitated toward great human ambitions: navigation of the oceans, travel to the moon and back, Earth exploration, national security, industrial and agricultural revolutions, communications, and transportation. Some ambitions have been realized, some remain unfulfilled, and some are yet to be determined.

In 2008 a committee of distinguished engineers, scientists, entrepreneurs, and visionaries set out to identify the most important, tractable engineering system challenges that must be met in this century for human life as we know it to continue on this planet. The committee received thousands of inputs from around the world to determine its list of Grand Challenges for Engineering, and its report was reviewed by more than 50 subject-matter experts, making it among the most reviewed of Academy studies. The 14 Grand Challenges for Engineering are to

Make solar energy economical

Provide energy from fusion

Develop carbon sequestration

Manage the nitrogen cycle

Provide access to clean water

Improve urban infrastructure

Advance health informatics

Engineer better medicines

Reverse-engineer the brain

Prevent nuclear terror

Secure cyberspace

Enhance virtual reality

Advance personalized learning

Engineer the tools of scientific discovery.

The Grand Challenges were not ranked in importance or likelihood of solution, nor was any strategy proposed for solving them. Rather, they were offered as a way to inspire the profession, young people, and the public at large to seek the solutions.

In 2010 a plan was put forth to prepare engineering students to think about careers devoted to addressing the Grand Challenges. Called the NAE Grand Challenge Scholars Program, it was the first specific action taken toward achieving solutions to the challenges on a global scale.

In 2013 the first Global Grand Challenges Summit was held in London, cosponsored by the Royal Academy of Engineering, the Chinese Academy of Engineering, and the US National Academy of Engineering in their first joint effort. In September 2015 a second Global Grand Challenges Summit was held in Beijing, with more than 800 attendees invited by the three academies. The third Global Grand Challenges Summit, to be hosted by the NAE in the United States in 2017, will be held in conjunction with a new FIRST Robotics international event aimed at engaging the world’s youth on projects tied to one or more of the Grand Challenges.

The Grand Challenges are not targeted to any one country or corporate sector. Rather, they are relevant to everyone in every country. In fact, some of them bear on the very survival of society. If solving these challenges can become an international movement, all will benefit.

For the forum of the October 2015 NAE annual meeting, 7 of the 18 committee members who identified the challenges in 2008 were invited to offer their perspectives on them now:

• Alec Broers has chaired the Select Committee for Science and Technology for the United Kingdom’s House of Lords; before that he was president of the Royal Academy of Engineering (2001–2006). A pioneer in nanotechnology, Broers was the first person to use the scanning electron microscope for fabrication of microminiature structures.
• Farouk El-Baz is a research professor at Boston University and director of the school’s Center for Remote Sensing. He was supervisor of Lunar Science Planning for NASA’s Apollo pro-

• gram, and from 1978 to 1981 he was science advisor to President Anwar Sadat of Egypt.

• Wesley Harris is Charles Stark Draper Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics at MIT and was previously the associate administrator for aeronautics at NASA. He has contributed to research on unsteady aerodynamics, aeroacoustics, and rarefied gas dynamics.
• Calestous Juma is a professor at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and director of its Science, Technology, and Globalization Project. He is the former executive secretary of the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity and founding director of the African Centre for Technology Studies in Nairobi.
• Dean Kamen is founder of the DEKA Research & Development Corporation. His inventions include the wearable infusion pump, the insulin pump for diabetics, an advanced prosthetic arm for the Department of Defense, and the Segway.
• Robert Socolow is codirector of Princeton University’s Carbon Mitigation Initiative, a multidisciplinary investigation of the use and treatment of fossil fuels in a carbon-constrained world. He has been on the Princeton faculty since 1971 as professor of mechanics and aerospace engineering.
• Jackie Ying is founding executive director of the Institute of Bioengineering and Nanotechnology in Singapore and editor in chief of Nano Today, a journal covering the field of nanoscience and technology. Previously she was a professor of chemical engineering at MIT.
• The moderator was Dan Vergano, a science reporter for BuzzFeed News and adjunct professor at New York University’s Washington, DC, campus, where he teaches journalism.

Now is a good time for reflection on the Grand Challenges for Engineering. Has there been progress on solving them? Do changing global circumstances call for rethinking the challenges? Are we going about them correctly? Hence the theme of this meeting.

C. D. Mote, Jr.
President
National Academy of Engineering

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Contents

I The Grand Challenges Revisited

The Need for Global Collaboration

New Environmental Awareness

Small Solutions to Big Problems

The Fusion Puzzle

Transcending Disciplinary and National Boundaries

Innovative Water Discovery

Envisioning Engineering Anew

II Discussion with Forum Participants

Preparing Young People to Solve the Grand Challenges

The Fifteenth Grand Challenge?

The Role of the US National Academy of Engineering

APPENDIXES

A Forum Agenda

B Panelists’ Biographies

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