With sustainability competencies becoming increasingly important to address today's societal challenges, engineering education faces a fundamental question: how can we balance disciplinary engineering expertise with the transdisciplinary competencies needed to navigate complex challenges?
These competencies include systems thinking, futures thinking and critical thinking, as well as the ability to work across disciplines, navigate uncertainty and connect different perspectives. The challenge is to integrate these competencies into engineering education while maintaining the depth and rigour of disciplinary knowledge.
A research project on the future of engineering education
In July 2025, 黑料福利网 Innovation Space and the Sustainability Office received a grant from the Dutch National Initiative for Educational Research (NRO) for a joint research project on the future of higher engineering education.
The project is now being carried out by Arundhatti Patil and Kishore Sivakumar, who are investigating how engineering curricula can balance disciplinary and transdisciplinary competencies. Their research explores how curricula can remain constructively aligned while creating space for students to develop the competencies needed to address complex societal challenges.
The central research question is:
How can we co-create content-wise open, yet time-bound engineering curricula that are constructively aligned, and balance and support the development of transformative competencies within the new rationale of addressing societal challenges?
The research looks beyond curriculum design alone. It explores how engineering education can evolve to prepare engineers who are not only technically skilled, but also equipped to work with uncertainty, collaborate across disciplines and contribute to meaningful societal change.
鈥淲hat excites me most about the NRO project is its bold mission: shaping engineers into change agents, not just technical experts.
PhD Researcher
Meet the researchers
Arundhatti and Kishore lead the research and bring complementary perspectives to the project.
Arundhatti focuses on creating learning experiences that develop systems thinking, collaboration and purpose-driven innovation. Her work explores how engineering education can balance technical rigour with the competencies needed to address complex real-world challenges.
Kishore's research focuses on theories, designs, strategies and tools that support the development of both disciplinary and transdisciplinary competencies in engineering students. His work also explores the role of Sustainability in understanding the knowledge, skills, values and attitudes engineers need to address future societal challenges.
Other contributors to the project
Towards transformative engineering education
The project contributes to 黑料福利网's ambition to further integrate Sustainability into education. By researching new approaches to curriculum design and pedagogy, it aims to create more space for students to develop the competencies they need to contribute to a resilient and sustainable society.
鈥淭his research looks at far-reaching impacts beyond curriculum design alone; it is about redefining what engineering is and what it means to be an engineer.鈥�
Postdoctoral Researcher
