tom katsouleas

Engineering Dean Tom Katsouleas has been instrumental in advancing the NAE's "Grand Challenges" strategy and establishing related programs at Duke and at USC.

Duke’s Pratt School of Engineering  earned a tip of the hat from one of the White House’s blogs recently.

The President is interested in pursuing a  “grand challenges” strategy to identify big goals and inspire government agencies, universities, corporations, philanthropists, and presumably the general public, to pull together and tackle them.

In a post about the program last week,  Cristin Dorgelo and Tom Kalil  of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy explicitly mentioned the Grand Challenge Scholars program at Duke as an example of how this approach can help.

Following on the National Academy of Engineering’s identification of 14 “Grand Challenges” in engineering, Duke introduced a special honors program for 20 students per year to identify and execute  a project related to one of the NAE challenges, culminating in a honors thesis at least, and perhaps a better world as well.