Humanitarian Engineering aims to resolve problems in areas with serious structural or coincidental resource limitations and to cocreate appropriate solutions to better people's lives.
The University of Twente in its Shaping 2030 vision decides to be a university of technology that puts people first. We direct special attention to three societal themes and the challenges they pose, framed in a single question: How can we contribute to the development of a fair, sustainable and digital society between now and 2030?
From an Humanitarian Engineering Perspective, our goal is ambitious and twofold: we have set up a Humanitarian Engineering Master Programme that can support our existing research lines in Humanitarian Engineering.
Engineering for sustainable community development provides an approach for engineers to cooperatively work with people on location to identify needs and resources, develop technology solutions, and assess impact.
Humanitarian Engineering is an joint initiative of the three faculties Engineering Technology (ET), Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation (ITC) and Behavioural, Management and Social Sciences (BMS).
Education and Research play an equally important role in Higher Education Institutions such as Universities. Their intertwining is one of the main driving factors for each of our scientific topics embraced at the UT. We want to train students for leading our tomorrow society and at the same time we want to push forward research boundaries for improving our society. The Humanitarian Engineering field is not an exception.
Trying to get close to the established and challenging target "zero poverty" does require both engineers with specific interdisciplinary skills and researchers that are able to analyse the basic problems of areas affected by crisis and offer valuable but simple and efficient solutions. Therefore, we want to become the reference point in Europe for both research and educational aspects of Humanitarian Engineering.
Key domains
The Master programme will focus on three main domains that represent its backbone:
Stay up to date about Humanitarian Engineering
In our podcast, our Humanitarian Engineering group introduces humanitarian engineering actions and their importance to society. We talk with our guests about initiatives that develop engineering solutions that promote the well-being and lives of people lacking access to fundamental resources. We release one episode per month.