Congratulations to Dr. Ghanat, 2023 Engineering Unleashed Fellow

Dr. Simon Ghanat, PE, Associate Professor in The Citadel 's Emmett Davis Department of Civil, Environmental, and Construction Engineering was named and awarded a 2023 Engineering Unleashed Fellow by KEEN | Keen Educational Exchange Network in recognition of enhancements made to strengthen entrepreneurial concepts in his first-year seminar course. Dr. Ghanat was among a cohort of 30 faculty members from 24 institutions recognized for their leadership in entrepreneurial engineering education. He presented his work at the 2023 KEEN National Conference.

The first-year seminar course developed by Dr. Ghanat focuses on environmental hazards, in particular, soil and groundwater contamination.? The course integrates the three C’s of the entrepreneurial mindset – curiosity, connectivity, and value creation, which includes social, economic, and environmental value. Entrepreneurial concepts are integrated into traditional coursework so that students learn to collaborate and to gain customer buy-in for their recommended course of action.? Students evaluate a real-world engineering problem – in this case, redeveloping a brownfield site into a public park in the ‘neck’ region of Charleston and present their proposed solutions to the City of Charleston.

According to Dr. Ghanat, “The project is ideal for developing the entrepreneurial mindset, as it requires students to develop constant curiosity and to recognize knowledge gaps and ask questions. Students then explore connections as they research and synthesize information from diverse sources to fill knowledge gaps and to complete their understanding of the problem and the proposed solutions.”

The third essential leg of the KEEN model is value creation – for the customer, the community, and the planet. Today’s students are seeking meaningful work and understand that systems on which we depend daily –roads, clean water, utilities, environmentally responsible construction, even affordable housing—engineers play a role in all of these and ultimately in the greater good of society.

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(KEEN) is a partnership of more than 55 colleges and universities across the United States. The schools in the Network focus on one mission: To reach all undergraduate engineering students with an entrepreneurial mindset (EM) so they can create personal, economic, and societal value through a lifetime of meaningful work.?Engineering Unleashed Fellows advance the community's mission to integrate entrepreneurial mindset?(EM) into practices that benefit their students, their institutions, and greater society.