NEW YORK, N.Y. -- No longer the "me generation," American engineering students are actively taking on some of the world's toughest problems. A Cornell University-based national engineering service organization will bring 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 next week.

The group, Engineers for a Sustainable World (ESW), will host students and supporters from across the United States at the Mezzanine Conference Room, 30 Rockefeller Plaza, at 5:30 p.m. May 12. The event, which will be both fund-raiser and a call for volunteers, will feature 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, Ithaca, N.Y., in 2002 as Engineers Without Frontiers, ESW now has a presence on more than 80 campuses in the United States and includes more than 1,000 students and professional engineers, many of whom volunteer to work on integrating community development and engineering in the developing world. ESW's programs and services are made possible by the support of donors and members. The organization received initial seed funding from an anonymous donor, and is seeking to diversify its funding base.

Current projects being coordinated by ESW include a rural water-supply project in Honduras, a composting-education project in Bosnia-Herzegovina, and, starting in June, computer training in China. This summer, a multi-disciplinary team of ESW volunteers from various university chapters will travel to Umuahia, Nigeria, to develop a project to turn biomass waste into energy. The project was set up over the spring break by eight Cornell students and alumni from the College of Engineering and the Johnson Graduate School of Management.

ESW also has begun to encourage the integration of this community service into academic courses. Five new project-based courses have been created at Cornell, Pennsylvania State University, Stanford University and the University of Michigan, with student teams working with partners in El Salvador, India, Jamaica, Africa and U.S. communities. At Stanford this spring, students have been working on a class project to design a green building in Nicaragua. The 11-member team includes both undergraduates and graduates with backgrounds in civil engineering, earth systems, economics, physics and alternative energies.

Jennifer Burney, the project team coordinator, helped to create the new civil and environmental engineering course. She also is co-chair of the ESW national conference, "Solutions for a Shrinking Planet," to be hosted by Stanford from Sept. 29 to Oct. 2, 2004.

"We are proud to have sparked this initiative within engineering education," said Regina Clewlow, ESW's executive director (a 2002 Cornell M.Eng. graduate), who founded the student group with Krishna Athreya, director of Minority and Women's Programs in Engineering at Cornell (who will be a speaker at the New York City event). "In the past two years, we have discovered that there are a lot of engineering students and faculty who are looking for ways to address issues of poverty and sustainability. We're happy to be creating ways for them to make a positive difference," said Clewlow.

The group 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 sustainability in the United States and abroad," said Clewlow. "The new name more accurately reflects these goals and activities."

Related World Wide Web sites: The following sites provide additional information on this news release. Some might not be part of the Cornell University community, and Cornell has no control over their content or availability.

Engineers for a Sustainable Worl.d: <http://www.esustainableworld.org >

ESW Stanford chapter: <http://esw.stanford.edu/conf04 >