Thanks for your comments and your important work, Brooke! I'd love to do a call with you to learn more about your project and brainstorm ways ERVA may be able to involve your graduate students (email: jennifer@uidp.net).

Diverse participation — including different backgrounds, voices and ideas — is vital to identify emerging trends and efficient solutions that benefit society. Thus, ERVA is taking an intentional approach to involving voices across the engineering community. Examples include involving core partners (UIDP, BTAA, and the EPSCoR/IDeA Foundation) whose membership spans across all U.S. states, including those that receive little federal R&D funding; an Advisory Board that is comprised of 50% women; visioning event participants who span career stages, races/ethnicities, and engineering and other disciplines; cross-sector Thematic Task Forces; and diverse Affiliate Partners, including those with an emphasis (such as AISES, IEC, SHPE, and WEPAN) on broadening participation. We welcome conversations with further groups and individuals who can enhance and extend these efforts and advance our collective mission.

Scott, great question. With a mission to enable the voices of engineering across all the many disciplines within it, we have really focused on growing out network of networks in our first year so we can deliver on identifying bold, new visions for engineering research. Going from zero to 100 has taught us first to focus on the inherent value of what we're doing when we connect with our network. Our volunteer leaders (96 in our first year across 5 standing and 2 ad hoc groups) are remarkably generous with their time because they believe this will have long-term impact on them, their work, their families, and our world. We are incredibly privileged to work with such thoughtful, engaged experts. Second, we remain vigilantly aware of how valuable their time is, so behind the scenes, we work hard to make it easy for them to engage and do what they do best.

Perhaps the biggest challenge is not knowing what we don't know. Every one of our partner organizations has its own constituencies, subgroups, and topical events, and it's not possible to take advantage of every opportunity to provide the right information at just the right time to put ERVA on their agenda.

We are tasked with identifying the future research directions where engineering can lead. But you never really know where the next great idea will come from. That's why we're looking for anyone interested in the future of engineering (whether they're engineers or not) to follow our work and get involved. The problems we're trying to address are complex and their solutions will require us to engage individuals across disciplines, career stage, sectors, geographies, and diverse backgrounds. We need a broad range of perspectives to do this work right.

Very interesting. Thanks for sharing the additional informational, Sandy. I appreciate the focus on inherent value. Makes a lot of sense. Thanks again!

Thanks Nidaa.  I am one of the ERVA Co-PIs.  The collaboration framework resulted from nearly daily meetings of the PI/Co-PI team, as well as a dozen or so supporters during the proposal writing phase, March - July 2020.  It is through these sessions that we came up with what we refer to as the "ERVA Engine."

As part of our team ERVA is subcontracting CREP (Center for Research in Educational Policy) at the University of Memphis to be the independent assessor of ERVA's activities - https://www.memphis.edu/crep/. There are short term assessments being performed (such as following each of our visioning events), as well as mid-term and long-term assessments.  The ultimate long-term assessments will be largely based on ERVA's products, which will be our reports that will be published following each visioning event (within 3-6 months).  The impact of these reports (tracking trends in Federal investment in Engineering Research, as an example) will be the ultimate metric to assess success.

Thank you again for your question! Edl

Hi Amy, thanks for taking the time to post your thoughts and questions. I am a Co-PI of ERVA and have worked in both academia and industry. Our strategy to get industry more involved is to host listening sessions with industry, identify key leaders who are actively working with universities, national labs, and others in the Science & Technology community.  According to the 2022 State of US Science and Engineering Report by NSF, most growth in US R&D performance and funding is attributable to the business sector. Fortunately many of us have worked together for years and understand the importance of R&D for the United States. 

Thanks so much, Iris. We are excited for the possibilities of nascent opportunities identified via ERVA's engineering research community crowdsourcing to benefit society. Involvement across stakeholders is critical, and we would love for ERN participants to join us in impacting national research priorities!

Back at you, Allison!

ERVA invites responses to the following question to be emailed to info@ervacommunity.org, as our search for visioning event themes to prioritize where engineering can lead is ongoing.

• What is the most important societal challenge (local, national, or global) that could benefit from interdisciplinary engineering fundamental research collaboration?

Thanks for visiting, Chris. In addition to what I shared with Brooke above, we employ open calls for participants in our visioning events and positions in our volunteer leadership. These are distributed via the network of networks approach Sandy mentioned and participants and volunteers are carefully curated to involve diverse voices. We are always looking to intentionally enhance our approaches. I would love the opportunity to reconnect and welcome suggestions based on your accessibility expertise. Please contact me at jennifer@uidp.net.