Challenges to an engineer are like patients to a physician. Challenges are the reasons engineers need to exist and the inspiration for coming to work each day. Without the challenges, we couldn’t provide the solutions. After all, providing solutions is where engineers excel.

The National Academy of Engineering (NAE) is in the midst of a world-wide, public brainstorming session with the stated goal, "to determine the ’Grand Challenges for Engineering’ during the next 100 years." The NAE has assembled an 18-member committee—which includes an esteemed list of "leading technical thinkers," including professors, government advisors, innovators, researchers, and business leaders—and has built a robust website to support their goal.

I spent well over an hour on this website, pondering the suggestions and statements of the contributors. Many of the topics of concern rang true with me: solve the energy crisis, focus on sustainable construction, and improve our collective infrastructure. Furthermore, many issues from other engineering disciplines sparked my interest: nanotechnology, space travel, and quantum mechanics.

In addition to the hard science topics, many commented on the softer issues, such as the challenge of training and educating future engineers, including attracting young people into the profession, as well as combating the perception that engineering services and engineers are commodities.

The challenges are vast and quantifying them is no small task. Charles M. Vest, president emeritus, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and an NAE member, remarked, "Looking ahead to 2020, about 15 years, and setting goals should be a ’piece of cake.’ But to gain some perspective, look back about 15 years, and think about what was not going on in 1990. There was no World Wide Web. Cell phones and wireless communication were in the embryonic stage. The big challenge was the inability of the American manufacturing sector to compete in world markets. The human genome had not been sequenced. There were no carbon nanotubes. Buckminster Fullerines had been around for about five years. We hadn’t even begun to inflate the dot-com bubble, let alone watch it burst. And terrorism was something that happened in other parts of the world. So predicting the future, or even setting meaningful goals, is risky, even on a scale of a mere 15 years."

The committee has been charged with "creating a list of the grand challenges and opportunities for engineering facing this new century." Along with this deliverable, they will also examine existing innovations—as well as those that are under development—that could assist in the solution to each challenge on their list. The committee will seek opinion from experts in engineering and science and has also invited the public to contribute.

So, if you are up for contemplating the grand engineering challenges of our future, visit www.engineeringchallenges.org. You can choose to educate yourself on what others believe the greatest challenges will be, or you can contribute to the dialogue.