No longer the "me generation," American engineering students are actively taking on some of the world's toughest problems.

A Cornell-based national engineering service organization took some of its many stories of students and professional engineers working to improve the lot of some of the world's poorest communities, many in the developing world, to New York City in May.

Eight Cornell students and alumni from the College of Engineering and the Johnson Graduate School of Management spent their spring break in Umuahia, Nigeria, setting up a project to turn biomass waste into energy. Among those in Umuahia receiving instruction in adobe brick making were, from left, Regina Clewlow, M.Eng. '02 CE, director of ESW, and Jo Pak '05 CE.

The group, Engineers for a Sustainable World (ESW), hosted students and supporters from across the United States at the Mezzanine Conference Room, 30 Rockefeller Plaza. The event, which was both fund-raiser and a call for volunteers, featured students recently returned from Bosnia, South Africa, and Nigeria describing their community-service engineering projects that have made a big difference in people's lives by enabling self-help, making the projects sustainable.

Founded at Cornell in 2002 as Engineers Without Frontiers, the organization now has a presence on more than 80 campuses in the United States and includes more than 1,000 students and professional engineers. Current projects being funded by ESW include a rural water-supply project in Honduras, a composting-education project in Bosnia-Herzegovina, and computer training in China.

This summer, a multidisciplinary team of ESW volunteers from various university chapters traveled to Umuahia, Nigeria, to develop a project to turn biomass waste into energy. The project was set up over the spring break last March by eight Cornell students and alumni from the College of Engineering and the Johnson Graduate School of Management.

The organization recently changed its name to Engineers for a Sustainable World because of its focus "on the challenges of long-term, sustainable development — by seeking lasting solutions for reducing poverty, and by working to improve sus-tainability in the United States and abroad," said ESW director Regina Clewlow ’01 CS, MEng ’02 CE. "The new name more accurately reflects these goals and activities."

—David Brand, Cornell News Service