Colorado School of Mines
AC-4: Graduate Program

The Humanitarian Engineering and Science (HES) program educates technical professionals to promote sustainable community development by drawing on a unique mixture of faculty expertise in engineering, applied sciences, and social sciences. HES students engage in direct research and outreach within and alongside the communities they seek to serve. Project experiences prepare graduates for careers in development, corporate responsibility, or further study.

The HES program combines advanced technical or scientific content in an affiliated stream with attention to community engagement practices in order to ground students’ expertise. Disciplinary tracks in environmental engineering, geological engineering, and geophysics prepare students to apply knowledge about the Earth to promote more sustainable and just uses of water, energy, and other Earth resources as well as to understand and mitigate potential hazards.
HES graduates are prepared to become impactful leaders who can harness engineering and science to foster sustainable community development for people around the world.

Through a new interdisciplinary graduate program, Colorado School of Mines (Mines) and National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) Advanced Energy Systems (AES) degree program prepares researchers at the doctoral level and energy professionals at the master’s level to address the full complexity of tomorrow’s infrastructure, economic, and environmental challenges.

The Natural Resources and Energy Policy (NREP) graduate degree program is part of the Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences department at Colorado School of Mines. In this program, a multidisciplinary lens based in social science is applied to natural resources and energy. NREP focuses on teaching qualitative and quantitative critical thinking skills in order to respond to global challenges surrounding energy, natural resources, and resource management. Earning a Masters of Science in Natural Resources & Energy Policy (Non-Thesis) requires students to complete 30 credit hours made up of 18 core and 12 elective credits.

A new program that examines the sustainability space exploration and mining.

Our work is a part of The Sustainable Bioeconomy for Arid Regions (SBAR) project whose goal is to optimize guayule and guar production to support the economies of the southwestern United States. As water becomes less available for agriculture, it is important to identify and test drought and heat tolerant crops that grow well in arid regions and provide positive economic returns.

The Bioproducts & Bioeconomy Sustainabiity team’s work includes developing a life cycle model to estimate environmental impacts for guar, guayule, and alternative crops such as Hevea, which requires accurately capturing the material inputs and outputs of the product systems including all aspects of the agricultural and downstream processing. Modeling results will ultimately be used to optimize the overall production of guar and guayule products and co-products with experimental work validating models throughout development. Our work will aid in providing a clear path to a sustainable regional bioeconomy in the American Southwest, while addressing several of the UN’s sustainability development goals.

The work we do in N and P sustainability is focused on integrating models at different scales that quantify flows of N and P in economic sectors, in individual products, and in the environment so that we can understand how changes in human systems (e.g., location of production, production processes, markets for N–and–P–containing products) will affect N and P emissions to the environment. We are currently working to expand the capabilities of U.S. county scale N and P input models, enabling commodity-specific tracking of N and P impacts over time

Minor in Engineering Community Development (ECD)
Our ECD minor is an evolution of the country’s first minor in Humanitarian Engineering created in 2003. Designed specifically for engineers and applied scientists who want to serve communities, the ECD minor prepares Mines students to become leaders in community development through engineering. Graduates of the ECD minor can work in the US Peace Corps (see Mines Peace Corps Prep Program), community service NGOs, international organizations or inside of corporations in projects related to community development. The knowledge and skills learned in the ECD minor will prepare graduates for any engineering job involving community engagement, cross-cultural work environments, and human-centered design.

We graduate about 10-12 students per year in the two HE minors, approximately half of whom are in the Engineering for Community Development (ECD) minor and can opt to take the undergraduate version of the same class, although it is not required. Some portion of those students also may take “CEEN 477 - Sustainable Engineering Design.” The other half of students in the Leadership in Social Responsibility (LSR) minor can opt to take CEEN 477, “PEGN 350 - Sustainable Energy Systems,” or “PEGN 430/530 - Environmental Law and Sustainability.” b
https://humanitarian.mines.edu/ecd-minor/