Solving the Grand Challenges

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In February 2008, a committee of 18 internationally recognized scholars from myriad disciplines unveiled the National Academies’ Grand Challenges for Engineering: 14 specific challenges critical to sustaining our current way of life, subdivided into broad categories of sustainability, health, vulnerability and joy of living.

The first two categories represent challenges that, if left unsolved, would be detrimental to the survival of our current way of life. The fundamental driver for these challenges is population growth and industrialization of developing countries. To see the stressors being placed on the planet, one only has to examine world population figures from the United Nations:

1950: 2.5 billion

1970: 3.6 billion

1990: 5.2 billion

2010: 6.9 billion

By 2025, the U.N. estimates, more than 8 billion people will be on the Earth. The challenges of waste management, infrastructure, water supply and traffic management will dominate daily life. Global energy consumption will double or triple in some developing countries. Alleviating these stressors will require a higher level of thinking and collaboration, coupling the rigorous rules of inductive and deductive reasoning found in traditional engineering disciplines with the creative aesthetics of the arts and humanities.

Ohio State’s College of Engineering is uniquely positioned to address these challenges. The college is organized along eight strategic thrusts that align well with the grand challenges: Advanced Materials; Energy, Sustainability and the Environment; Mobility and Transportation; Computation and Information; Power and Propulsion; Bioengineering; Manufacturing; and Design. Half of the college’s future investments will occur in the first four areas. As one of the nation’s truly comprehensive universities with agriculture, engineering, business, law, architecture and medical schools, Ohio State provides faculty with the breadth of resources to address the challenges.

Researchers in our college have demonstrated remarkable success in addressing the Grand Challenges, with primary advancements in these areas:

Make Solar Energy Economical: To make photovoltaics affordable, we must reduce manufacturing costs by using bulk silicon, polycrystalline materials, advanced third-generation photovoltaic techniques and low-cost second-generation thin film techniques. At Ohio State, at least seven faculty research groups are working on 3G photovoltaics, with collective funding in excess of $3 million per annum from competitive federal and industrial sources.

Provide Access to Clean Water: Ohio State researchers have pioneered membrane development using interfacial polymerization. Compared to standard membranes, these membranes double the fresh water produced from both seawater and brackish water. Recent advances have led to the development of supported liquid membranes with strip dispersion for the removal and recovery of heavy metals, including chromium, copper, zinc and strontium, from wastewaters, and on hydrogen purification membranes for application to fuel cells.

Develop Carbon Sequestration Methods: Carbon sequestration diminishes the effects of global warming by developing techniques for CO2 capture and storage. According to a recent U.S. Department of Energy report, Ohio State’s chemical looping technology is a leading process for efficient CO2 capture at the plant, involving a series of reactions that convert coal into hydrogen or syngas with the aid of chemical intermediaries. Ohio State researchers have patented the process, called “coal-direct chemical looping.”

Engineer Better Medicines: Ohio State has been a national leader in the development of advanced cell separation and detection techniques. One project identifies and separates cells based on specific immunological markers. In collaboration with the Cleveland Clinic Foundation, our researchers have developed new, patented immunomagnetic instruments. Applications include human stem cell separation for bone marrow transplants; isolation/separation of rare cancer cells circulating in human blood; and identification and separation of genetically engineered cells with specific phenotypes.

I’ve highlighted only a few of our accomplishments in this short letter. In the following pages, you will find a host of Ohio State research projects and initiatives involving all 14 Grand Challenges. I am confident that it will become clear to you, as it has to me, that our College of Engineering is making significant progress toward solving these challenges.