NSF and The Lemelson Foundation have announced a new joint initiative to support the integration of environmental and social sustainability into the education of future engineers. Lemelson will provide up to $3 million over three years to support qualified engineering education projects through the NSF Research in the Formation of Engineers program. To support a sustainable future, projects may focus on addressing societal challenges; developing case studies and sustainability engineering content; exploring engineering identities and beliefs about sustainability; integrating sustainability with engineering design; and other areas.

Shown above, a UAV-based hyperspectral imager measures the spectral signature of the river, while students in the water below collect rocks from inside of each white ring (see photo's bottom left for an example) so the students at the table in the background can scrape algae off the rocks and collect it for biochemical processing in the lab. The algae samples are processed in a lab to provide ground-truth data for training and validating algorithms to estimate parameters such as chlorophyll content from the spectral images.

Credit: Joe Shaw, Montana State University