Seeram Ramakrishna, former Dean of the National University of Singapore's Engineering Faculty, and Venky Narayanamurti of Harvard University present how the world is changing in population shifts, urbanization, the global economy, and technological advances. This presentation also shows the challenges that engineering students and educators face in an ever changing world. This presentation gives a short description of these challenges and a need for a global engineering deans council.

Engineers are ever more important in today’s global context. Engineers are faced with tackling problems such as: food supply, cleaner environment/water/energy, affordable healthcare, changing demographics Improve the quality of life, security, climate change, sustainable development, and others.

In addition, there are many challenges that engineering deans face in today’s environment. Deans are faced with delivering locally pertinent and globally relevant engineering education, making engineering more attractive, improve the quality of teaching and learning, develop adequate funding models, facilitate partnerships between engineering schools and industry, recruit and retain quality faculty members, and improve the quality of governance practices of engineering schools.

A global engineering deans council brings together deans from around the world to explore how to tackle these problems and offer experience in order to bring effective engineering education in today’s changing world.