Research Initiation: Student and Industry Perspectives on the Role of Environmental Sustainability in the Professional Formation of Biomedical Engineers

About This Grant

EEC 2508612 - Public Abstract Achieving environmental sustainability is one of the greatest challenges facing society. Engineers are critical to pursuing this goal because of their central role in creating new technologies. The challenge of achieving environmental sustainability is particularly acute in the current healthcare system and the associated medical technology industry, which require large amounts of energy and produce large amounts of waste. Biomedical engineers are broadly involved in developing and implementing new medical technology and therefore have the potential help achieve environmental sustainability in the healthcare field. This project will provide an understanding of the extent to which biomedical engineering students recognize environmental sustainability as an engineering problem, and how they interpret it with respect to their professional responsibility in the medical technology industry. There have been increasing efforts to incorporate elements of environmental sustainability into engineering academic programs. This project will contribute to this effort and will strengthen the United States workforce in the medical technology industry by studying how engineering students perceive sustainability as part of their career preparation. It will also explore the needs and expectations of the medical technology industry so that the academic preparation of engineers can be aligned with these needs. This project will therefore support the goals of the Research Initiation in Engineering Formation (RIEF) program by studying the professional formation of engineers and augmenting the community of researchers in the field. Results from the project will inform curriculum development in engineering to meet the evolving needs of industry, in direct alignment with NSF priorities to advance national health, strengthen the domestic workforce, and fuel economic prosperity. This project will identify how undergraduate biomedical engineers perceive environmental sustainability as an element of their professional identity and future careers in the engineering industry, specifically in medical technology. The study is theoretically grounded in Social Cognitive Career Theory and will leverage a qualitative design to answer three main research questions: 1) How do undergraduate biomedical engineering students understand the responsibility of environmental sustainability as related to their professional formation and careers as engineers?, 2) How do undergraduate BME students develop interest in the area of environmental sustainability as part of their engineering career?, and 3) To what degree are undergraduate engineering students’ outcome expectations related to environmental sustainability in alignment with the needs of the engineering industry? This mentored project will collect data from both undergraduate engineering students and industry professionals. The project team will analyze student data using a priori and emergent thematic analysis and will identify similarities and differences in the outcome expectations of students and professionals as related to sustainability. The findings will inform how engineering educators design and frame sustainability content in the undergraduate curriculum, including mapping skills and outcomes that are identified as needs by the medical technology industry. The intellectual merit of this project lies in its specific contribution to our understanding of the role of environmental sustainability in influencing engineers’ self-efficacy, outcome expectations, and career choices. The broader impacts derive from its potential to achieve desired societal outcomes by aiding in the development of engineers who are responsive to one of the greatest challenges of our age: achieving environmental sustainability. Collectively, the results of the project will inform how engineering curricula are developed and will lay the groundwork for future work to align engineering education with the needs of industry to train the United States engineering workforce to meet current and emergent challenges. 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.