NLI: Research: LEAPS - Leading the Engineering Profession Towards Sustainability Through Purpose, Belonging, and Creative Problem Solving

Engineers today are asked to solve some of society's most complex problems, including climate change, resource scarcity, and the widening gap between environmental limits and human need. Yet many engineering graduates enter the workforce trained mainly in narrow technical skills, without the tools to think broadly about the social, environmental, and ethical dimensions of the problems they are asked to solve. This project will study how sustained exposure to sustainability-focused engineering education, grounded in the national Engineering for One Planet framework, shapes the way undergraduate engineering students think, design, and see themselves as professionals. The research will follow students at Drexel University, where a distinctive five-year cooperative education model places students in industry roles throughout their degree, offering a rare opportunity to see how classroom learning holds up, or breaks down, once students face real workplace pressures. By tracking students across multiple years and two engineering departments, the project will identify which educational experiences most effectively build students' sense of purpose, belonging, and creative problem-solving ability, and how industry experience through co-op either strengthens or weakens that development. This work directly supports the National Science Foundation's Research in the Formation of Engineers program, which funds research into how individuals develop the knowledge, perspectives, and professional identities that define engineering practice. The findings will benefit engineering educators and institutions nationwide by providing evidence-based, adaptable teaching tools and a replicable model for embedding sustainability across an engineering curriculum, helping prepare a generation of engineers equipped to address the complex environmental and social challenges defining the profession's future. This project, Leading the Engineering Profession Towards Sustainability Through Purpose, Belonging, and Creative Problem Solving (LEAPS), will investigate how sustained engagement with the Engineering for One Planet (EOP) framework shapes undergraduate engineering students' professional identity, sense of purpose and belonging, and creative problem solving, and how Drexel University's cooperative education model moderates that development. The three-year mixed methods study will address four research questions: how EOP-aligned competencies develop across the undergraduate experience and where the most significant gaps occur (RQ1); how cumulative EOP exposure relates to students' sense of purpose, belonging, and professional identity, and whether that relationship varies by stage of study (RQ2); how co-op work experiences moderate the development of EOP-aligned competencies and sustainability-informed identity, and under what conditions industry exposure erodes or consolidates students' sustainability values (RQ3); and how cumulative EOP exposure relates to students' creative problem solving, including problem framing and the design of solutions to sustainability challenges (RQ4). The research will follow a “map, intervene, and refine” sequence across two engineering departments, Mechanical Engineering and Mechanics and Civil, Architectural, and Environmental Engineering, using two parallel strands: a longitudinal panel of approximately 25 students followed through repeated interviews and co-op transitions, and a cross-sectional survey administered to students at all undergraduate levels at three points across the study. Senior design artifacts will provide an independent, naturalistic measure of creative problem solving and sustainability integration. Findings from Year 1 will inform the design of modular, EOP-aligned teaching interventions piloted in Year 2 and refined in Year 3, culminating in a scalable micro-credential pathway and an open-access teaching framework. The interdisciplinary research team, spanning environmental engineering, mechanical engineering design, and education and creativity research, will partner with the EOP Network and the Kern Entrepreneurial Engineering Network (KEEN) to disseminate validated instruments, rubrics, and modular teaching units to programs beyond Drexel. Expected contributions include new empirical evidence on how sustainability-centered education and workplace experience jointly shape engineering identity and creative capacity, along with practical, adoptable tools that other institutions can use to strengthen sustainability integration in their own engineering curricula. This project is funded through a joint partnership between the National Science Foundation and the Lemelson Foundation. 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.