IUSE/Professional Formation of Engineers: Revolutionizing Engineering Departments | 19 513

Opportunity Information: Apply for 19 513

The National Science Foundation (NSF) grant opportunity titled "IUSE/Professional Formation of Engineers: Revolutionizing Engineering Departments" (often shortened to RED) is aimed at transforming undergraduate engineering education by changing how entire engineering departments operate, not just individual courses. The program grows out of years of NSF investment that have improved key bookends of the engineering curriculum: the first year, where many programs now use more hands-on engineering content, active learning, early design experiences, and intentional introduction to professional skills; and the senior year, where capstone design has become a major integrative experience that blends technical knowledge with professional judgment and communication. RED is based on the idea that despite these improvements, the middle of the curriculum (especially the sophomore and junior years) often does not consistently reinforce and develop the same professional and design-oriented competencies students need to succeed in capstone projects and in engineering practice. In other words, many students get an engaging start and a strong finish, but the pathway between them can still be fragmented or overly focused on isolated technical content without sustained attention to professional formation.

A defining feature of the RED program is its emphasis on departmental-level organizational and cultural change. Rather than treating educational improvement as the responsibility of a few enthusiastic instructors, RED pushes departments to rethink the structures, norms, incentives, and shared assumptions that shape what gets taught, how it gets taught, and what students are expected to become. The solicitation highlights that prior RED awards (19 projects funded between FY 2014 and FY 2016 by NSF directorates including Engineering, Education and Human Resources, and Computer and Information Science and Engineering) pursued ambitious approaches such as redefining what counts as core engineering knowledge, reorganizing course structures, creating new departmental systems, and building deeper collaborations with industry. Across those projects, a common thread is involving multiple stakeholders, including students, faculty, staff, and industry partners, in reconsidering what it means to deliver an engineering program that genuinely supports students in developing both technical competence and a professional identity as engineers.

For FY19, the program was organized into two project tracks designed to both spark new ideas and spread approaches that have already shown promise. The first track, RED Innovation, supports teams that want to develop new and genuinely revolutionary approaches and change strategies that can transform undergraduate engineering education. These projects are expected to push boundaries, proposing novel models for how departments can be organized and how learning experiences can be sequenced and supported across the entire major. The second track, RED Adaptation and Implementation (RED-A&I), is designed for institutions that want to take evidence-based organizational change strategies that have worked elsewhere and adapt them to their own local departmental context. This track recognizes that transformation is not one-size-fits-all, and that effective change often requires careful translation to fit a department's culture, constraints, student population, and institutional environment. Both tracks share the expectation that proposals will address cultural, organizational, structural, and pedagogical dimensions of change, with the end goal of creating departments where students are meaningfully engaged, steadily build technical and professional capabilities throughout the curriculum, and develop a durable sense of themselves as professional engineers.

The opportunity sits within NSF's broader Improving Undergraduate STEM Education (IUSE) initiative and aligns with the Professional Formation of Engineers (PFE) emphasis. That matters because RED is not meant to cover every kind of undergraduate STEM reform effort; it is specifically focused on transformation within engineering (and related areas such as computer science, as reflected in earlier awards) at the department level, and particularly on the department's disciplinary courses and program. The solicitation also makes a boundary clear: investigators with projects that are outside RED-A&I's scope are encouraged to look at the IUSE: EHR program, especially its Institutional and Community Transformation (ICT) track, which is geared toward research-driven change across institutions or across disciplines. At the same time, NSF explicitly prohibits submitting identical or substantively similar proposals to both RED and IUSE:EHR, which signals that applicants need to choose the best fit and tailor the work accordingly.

In practical grant terms, the funding mechanism is an NSF discretionary grant. The opportunity number is NSF 19-513, with CFDA numbers 47.041 and 47.076. The posting listed an award ceiling of $2,000,000 and anticipated about 6 awards. The original closing date for that cycle was January 24, 2019, and the opportunity was created on October 27, 2018. Eligibility is described broadly as "Others" with further clarification in the full solicitation, which is typical for NSF programs where eligibility can include a range of higher education institutions and potentially other organizations depending on specific requirements.

Overall, RED is best understood as a departmental transformation program: it funds engineering units that are ready to redesign the student experience across the full undergraduate timeline, strengthen the often-neglected middle years of the curriculum, and make coordinated changes to culture, structures, and teaching practices so that professional formation is not an add-on but a continuous thread running through the major.

• The National Science Foundation in the science and technology and other research and development sector is offering a public funding opportunity titled "IUSE/Professional Formation of Engineers: Revolutionizing Engineering Departments" and is now available to receive applicants.
• Interested and eligible applicants and submit their applications by referencing the CFDA number(s): 47.041, 47.076.
• This funding opportunity was created on Oct 27, 2018.
• Applicants must submit their applications by Jan 24, 2019. (Agency may still review applications by suitable applicants for the remaining/unused allocated funding in 2026.)
• Each selected applicant is eligible to receive up to $2,000,000.00 in funding.
• The number of recipients for this funding is limited to 6 candidate(s).
• Eligible applicants include: Others (see text field entitled Additional Information on Eligibility for clarification).

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