2021 Moonshot Award

A team of CMU researchers headed by Erica Fuchs has been selected to receive the 2021 CIT Moonshot Award. Their proposal targets the development of intellectual foundations, data, and tools required to identify and support strategic action by governments around technologies critical for ensuring the security, prosperity (including jobs) and welfare (including health, environments and equity) of all citizens.

By synthesizing multi-disciplinary perspectives from domain experts in the critical technologies, to experts in novel data and analytic tools and the social sciences, the team aspires to create the intellectual building blocks and tools to deliver clear policy paths forward. Researchers include EPP professors Valerie Karplus, Jay Whitacre, Costa Samaras, Ramayya Krishnan and Destenie Nock and others from across CIT, SCS, and Heinz. This team is "foundational," with an aim to involve other professors from across campus.

Moonshot initiatives continue to be a significant way for the college to support longer-term visionary work by engineering faculty. Each year, a variety of proposals are vetted for their potential impact on significant world problems, with an eye toward those research areas where Carnegie Mellon is uniquely positioned to make a consequential contribution. Financial support from the college provides the essential ramp for teams to develop and pursue the type of big ideas CMU is known for.