A Summit on Accelerating Engineering InnovationJune 1, 2006Sandia National LaboratoriesAlbuquerque, NMAccelerating innovation in engineering has been identified in several National Academies reports as a critical element in achieving the goals of the American Competitiveness Initiative set forth by the President. Creating the highly qualified and innovative workforce of the future is the challenge facing the engineering community today. As a DOE engineering laboratory, Sandia National Laboratories faces these challenges in meeting our national security missions. We see the need for entirely new engineering approaches to harness new knowledge frontiers and emerging high performance computing tools to create solutions that will allow the United States to maintain its leadership in the global economy. To meet these challenges, Congress envisions the creation of Discovery Science and Engineering Institutes, established around unique, state-of-the-art science and engineering capabilities created by DOE investments at its national laboratories. Of particular concern to Sandia is the next-generation engineering required to transform our nation’s leadership in nanoscience into engineered solutions for national security. We are exploring advanced concepts for engineering institutes where university faculty and graduate students would be co-located with national laboratory staff and industry researchers to focus on innovation in engineering as part of their graduate studies. Topical engineering institutes would collectively enable us to re-invent the way we engineer by developing new university curricula and engineering tools based on the most advanced capabilities and understanding the nation has to offer. These institutes would significantly contribute to providing the pipeline of new innovative engineers and scientists needed each year to maintain our leadership in the global engineering race. Sandia is hosting a summit that will bring together potential partners in academia, industry and the national laboratories to explore this vision. The event will include working sessions to explore and suggest critical transformational concepts in engineering education, engineering innovation in industry and the role of DOE investments and capabilities at the national laboratories. A specific focus for these discussions will be the needs associated with next generation nano-engineering and microsystems coupled with the role of high performance computing and simulation. The output of the summit will be a report that will address the following questions:
We invite you to participate in this effort. If successful, we can forge a path to accelerate our leadership in innovative engineering and
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