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

该项目由美国国家科学基金会工程萌芽计划理事会资助，旨在促进教学方法的发展，以提高学术研究人员制定具有潜在变革性结果的研究问题和想法的能力。技术-环境-能源-水-社会（TEEWS）大挑战沉浸式培训工作室旨在将问题制定和解决方案发现的成功创业过程转化为学术环境。作为为期8周的体验的一部分，圣母大学的20名研究生将接受变革性问题制定方面的培训，帮助他们扩展博士研究，以强调更广泛的社会影响。通过与非营利组织和社区组织的合作，研究生将获得独特的机会，直接为解决社区问题做出贡献。通过培养可转移和适应性强的技能，研究生将有能力将自己的职业生涯集中在以更广泛的影响为中心的、变革性的问题解决上，从而带来社会效益。此外，对更广泛的影响驱动型研究的关注可能会增加女性和其他未被充分代表的工程群体的参与和保留。这一方法的成功实施将为跨学科（科学、公共政策、经济学、法律、人文学科）、跨学习者（本科生、博士后、教师、社区合作伙伴）和跨机构扩展这一创新生态系统奠定基础。以社会、开放、情境化和有形的学习文化为特征的创新生态系统已被用于激励和创造创业环境中的创新条件，但通常不用于为在博士研究中嵌入基础问题制定提供学习环境。技术-环境-能源-水-社会（TEEWS）大挑战沉浸式培训工作室将与当地创业孵化器INVANTI合作，将一个成功的企业学习框架转化为问题制定和解决方案发现的学术环境。研究生将使用一个便利的过程与社区合作伙伴接触，以了解问题，确定障碍，并制定研究问题。一个新的研究生研讨会将提供系统工程、社区参与、以人为本的设计和融合科学方面的培训，为研究员们沉浸式的夏季体验做好准备。项目活动将包括：(1)创建一个创新生态系统，以提出变革性的研究问题；(2)开发和提供研究生跨学科整合研讨会；(3)利用和扩展跨学科研究文化来招募和指导研究生；(4)通过为期8周的沉浸式工作室体验培训大约20名研究员；(5)评估和完善培训计划。该项目的变革理论是，通过在创新生态系统中提供脚手架式培训和体验式学习，鼓励教师指导，并为持续接触广泛的接地、基于问题的研究提供文化支持，该项目将培养博士研究生制定、批评和完善变革性研究问题。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

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 women and other underrepresented groups 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.