INTRODUCTION

Introduction

The engineering education community has demonstrated an intense interest in developing personnel who can address large scale, “important” problems. Such challenges rarely adhere to traditional boundaries. Transformative engineering research comes from a combination of creativity, intellectual curiosity, and technical depth in one or more disciplines is a prerequisite to the transformative work that the best graduate programs seek to catalyze. Our team will use human-centered design as the underlying methodology to research, prototype, and test specific ways to increase the transformative research among engineering graduate students. 

This website presents the progress and findings from our research project which focuses on engineering research in graduate schools. To better understand research at graduate programs, our team decided to ask the stakeholders themselves. Through interviews with undergraduate and graduate students, department heads, and administrators across the nation, we have explored social, economic, and personal factors that constrict transformative research at graduate programs. Our team has identified themes that successfully captured the mindsets of various American engineers.  We brainstormed hundreds of ideas to solve the unmet needs of our users.