EAGER Germination: Project Confluence: Engineering and Science to Address Community Needs

Arizona State University, Scottsdale AZ

Investigators

Abstract

Many communities across the US face persistent environmental and energy challenges, particularly those who have high proportions of minority or socioeconomically disadvantaged individuals. Community groups may have limited access to engineering and scientific expertise that could help their efforts to address these challenges. This award to Arizona State University will fund an integrated set of efforts to build the skills, resources, and knowledge of engineering and science academic researchers to enable them to conduct research and development (R&D) in support of underserved communities. A key goal of the research is to test whether collaboration with community groups increases the ability of academics to formulate societally impactful research questions. Importantly, underserved communities stand to derive benefit through having academic researchers work with them to identify and address critical questions for their communities. This project will create approaches and resources for establishing interactions between engineers and scientists and underserved communities with the goal of identifying research needs. Primers and resources on effective collaboration with community groups will be developed and incorporated into an online knowledge-sharing and collaboration platform. In parallel, collaborative technological and scientific needs assessments (CNAs) will be conducted involving both academic researchers and community groups. Importantly, the structure of these CNAs is designed to emphasize community assets and avoid simply focusing on problems or deficits in the community. The CNAs are anticipated to lead to the creation of R&D roadmaps which address important environmental and energy challenges faced by underserved communities, and which can be leveraged for subsequent collaborative work. An important corollary goal will be to determine whether this process impacts the ability of academic researchers to germinate transformative research ideas that address important societal challenges. Self-efficacy of researchers with respect to this question will be assessed through pre- and post-CNA surveys that use a modified version of the Engineering Professional Responsibility Assessment (EPRA) expanded to include the work of scientists. Additionally, empirical testing of question formulation capacity and question value will focus on analysis of responses to a prototype R&D road-map related to community group needs. Positive outcomes in this study would lay the foundation for scaling on a national level, particularly given the planned establishment of an online platform for communicating resources. 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.