EAGER GERMINATION: Immersive Training Studio for Technology-Environment-Energy-Water-Society (TEEWS) Grand Challenges

This project is funded through the NSF Directorate for Engineering Germination program, which seeks to foster the development of pedagogical approaches to increase the ability of academic researchers to formulate research questions and ideas with potentially transformative outcomes. The Immersive Training Studio for Technology-Environment-Energy-Water-Society (TEEWS) Grand Challenges aims to translate a successful entrepreneurial process for problem formulation and solution discovery to an academic setting.

As part of an 8-week experience, 20 graduate fellows at the University of Notre Dame will be trained in transformative problem formulation, helping them expand their doctoral research to emphasize broader societal impacts. Through partnerships with nonprofit and community organizations, graduate fellows will be given the unique opportunity to directly contribute to solving community-sourced problems.

By cultivating transferable and adaptable skills, graduate fellows will be empowered to focus their careers on broader-impacts-centered, transformative problem solving, with consequent societal benefits. Moreover, the focus on broader impacts-driven research may increase engagement and retention of students in engineering. Successful implementation of this approach will lay the foundation for scaling this innovation ecosystem across disciplines (to science, public policy, economics, law, humanities), across learners (to undergraduates, post-docs, faculty, community partners), and across institutions.

Innovation ecosystems characterized by a social, open, contextualized, and tangible culture of learning have been used to inspire and create the conditions for innovation in entrepreneurial settings, but are not commonly used to provide a learning environment for embedding grounded problem formulation in doctoral research. The Immersive Training Studio for Technology-Environment-Energy-Water-Society (TEEWS) Grand Challenges will partner with INVANTI, a local startup incubator, to translate a successful entrepreneurial learning framework for problem formulation and solution discovery to an academic setting.

Graduate fellows will use a facilitated process to engage with community partners to understand the problem, identify barriers, and formulate research questions. A new graduate seminar will provide training in systems engineering, community engagement, human-centered design, and convergence science to prepare fellows for the immersive summer experience.

Project activities will include: (1) creating an innovation ecosystem for formulating transformative research questions, (2) developing and delivering a graduate transdisciplinary integration seminar, (3) leveraging and expanding a transdisciplinary research culture to recruit and mentor graduate fellows, (4) training approximately 20 fellows via an 8-week immersive studio experience, and (5) evaluating and refining the training program. The project’s theory of change is that by providing scaffolded training and experiential learning in an innovation ecosystem, encouraging mentorship from faculty, and offering cultural supports for ongoing exposure to a broad range of grounded, issue-based research, the program will train doctoral graduate students to formulate, critique, and refine transformative research questions.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.