Beverly Hills, Calif. - As President Obama announced the allocation of $240 million in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) programs for youth, the USC Viterbi School of Engineering made public their initiative as one of 122 US engineering schools developing special programs aimed to educate the next generation of engineers. Yannis C. Yortsos, Dean of Viterbi, was at the White

House to announce his co-leadership of this initiative to solve the world’s 14 “Grand Challenges.” USC is one of the first universities to develop a Grand Challenge program where they will graduate a minimum of 20 students a year who will have been specifically prepared to lead the way in solving one of these large-scale problems. The overall goal of the universities is to train more than 20,000 engineering grad students over the next decade who will be deemed the “Grand Challenge Engineers” of our lifetime.

In addition to establishing these programs, Viterbi is also working directly with the National Academy of Engineering and Lee Zlotoff, the creator of MacGyver, on a global crowdsourcing competition to identify and develop the first great television show with a female engineer lead character to encourage women to envision themselves in this strong scientific role. Media will be used to destroy the traditional stereotypes about engineers and motivate them to solve some of our world’s biggest problems.

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