particles Addressing Engineering’s Grand Challenges Viterbi School excels in all four student contests founder of the Redwood Center for Theoretical Neuroscience. Students from a variety of engineering schools across the country—not just the sponsoring institutions—competed in poster, trivia, design and video/essay contests. Viterbi School students won in all four categories:
Left to right are the co-hosts of the first Engineering Grand Challenges Summit, deans Yannis C. Yortsos (USC Viterbi) and Tom Katsouleas (Duke-Pratt), and President Richard K. Miller (Olin).
The first Engineering Grand Challenges Summit, co-sponsored by the Pratt School of Engineering at Duke, the Olin College of Engineering and the Viterbi School, was held early in March and concluded with a rousing summary address by Viterbi’s Dean Yannis C. Yortsos. In addition to summarizing the summit, Yortsos said the new 21st century engineer, or “Engineer 2.0,” is a leader, an innovator and an entrepreneur. “I will characterize it as engineering plus,” he said. “This evolution is manifested steadily, most spectacularly in health—engineering plus health, engineering plus biology—and earlier today, engineering plus law. “It’s an essential part of the NAE Grand Challenges,” he continued, “and indeed, engineering plus, as in enabling other disciplines, is now the norm.” The two-day event, held on the campus of Duke University, was an early and strong response to the National Academy of Engineering’s call last year to address society’s most pressing
FALL 2009 viterbi.usc.edu
environmental and societal challenges. The NAE challenges numbered 14, but the Summit consolidated those into sessions on energy, health, entrepreneurship, security, and the brain, as well as a panel focusing on “big ideas.” The summit drew more than 900 leading engineering, science, humanities and social science scholars from across the nation. More than 50 engineering deans attended. Leading federal government agencies, including the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy, the Department of Defense, the National Institutes of Health, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology, sent policymakers. More than 300 engineering students were also present. The summit’s speakers featured an impressive array of national engineering leaders and thinkers, including NAE President Charles Vest; Robert Socolow of Princeton; Robert Langer of MIT, recipient of the 2008 Millennium Technology Prize; Tom Byers of Stanford; and Jeff Hawkins,
• Farzana Ansari, biomedical engineering major, took third in the Video/ Essay Competition for Quenching the Thirst of Many, Community by Community, an essay and video about supplying clean water to poor and undeveloped regions of the world. • Meredith Hankins, a chemical engineering major, placed third in the poster competition for her entry Experimental Investigation of Non-Wetting Phase Entrapment in Counter-Current Subsurface Flows. • Dennis Krouse, a biomedical engineering major, led a five-member team that won the design contest; contestants designed miniature wind turbines using playing cards, popsicle sticks, superglue, tape and small wooden cylinders. The Viterbi team turbine generated twice as much electricity as any of the designs by other teams. • Ilya Golosker, a mechanical engineering major, won the trivia contest demonstrating broad knowledge that ranged from computer science to chemistry, mechanics, engineering, and “even a little bit of politics.” //