Socially and Environmentally Responsible Engineering (ESRE)
Empowering and training students to take on the global challenges that humanity is facing.
The National Academies of Engineering laid out, in 2008, a series of Grand Challenges to ensure
“Continuation of life on the planet, making our world more sustainable, secure, healthy, and joyful.”
Students Learning about Solar Power
Reused Project Parts for the Sustainability Store
Entrepreneurial Capstone Design
Students care about environmental and social issues. Furthermore, it is critical that students are prepared to take on great global problems that affect our lives, many of which will become more challenging in the coming years. To do so, we must work together with others – engineers working with those in public policy, communications, business, education, healthcare, etc.
This website concerns the more thorough integration of environmentally and socially responsible engineering concepts into the curriculum, beginning with undergraduate courses in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. The effort includes
- adding pertinent material into every required course in ME and CEE,
- assessment of the efficacy of these efforts in empowering students to take action, and
- building coalitions with other schools at UMD, to student groups and campus organizations, and beyond the university.
These pages discuss our work and provide links to related efforts.
Our specific vision at UMD is thus:
- a de-siloed engineering curriculum, teams of multi-disciplinary students
- a culture of working together on important problems,
- experiential learning, students actually doing things (rubber hits the road),
- company, student, other stakeholder involvement.
What we hope to achieve:
- engineering serving the community and the world,
- measurable competency, and
- a cultural shift.
Initial funding for our effort was provided by a small grant from The Lemelson Foundation, in conjunction with VentureWell, under their Engineering for One Planet framework. This is defined as the cross-cutting knowledge, awareness, and competence to design, build, implement, and manage engineering solutions that minimize negative environmental impacts and, ideally, are restorative to the planet.
Read more about the aims of Engineering for One Planet here.
The humanistic parts of engineering education can no longer be lower priority than the technical parts. Engineering students and the users of engineering must be connected. Serving people and the natural world must become an explicit responsibility of engineering education.
Our students must be readied to tackle global issues (social, environmental) with others.
