Hosted by the UW’s College of Engineering, the National Academy of Engineering’s (NAE) Grand Challenges Summit came to campus yesterday, featuring two keynote speakers and a student competition inside of Meany Hall.

Seattle is the fifth and final stop in a series of regional summits across the country focusing on 14 “grand challenges” of the decade identified by the NAE, with a national meeting planned for October in Los Angeles, Calif. The conference continues today at the Washington State Convention Center.

The challenges focus on five areas: energy, the environment, health, security, and learning and discovery. While they range from making solar energy economical to preventing nuclear terror, Seattle’s summit is focused on two issues in particular: engineering better medicines and tools of scientific discovery.

“We really want deep discussion. We picked those [challenges] because of Seattle,” said Matt O’Donnell, the UW dean of engineering, during his address to the more than 200 people in attendance. O’Donnell also spoke of the leadership of both the UW and the city in information technologies, medicine and aerospace science.

After the opening of the conference, engineering students presented their entries for the Regional Poster Competition, a contest which judges the students’ innovations for addressing many of the different challenges. There were 18 entries for this competition, all of which were presented in poster form. The first-prize winner of the contest will be presented today and awarded $500 and a stipend to attend the National Grand Challenge Summit in California.

Priya Guruprakash Rao, a master’s student in the Department of Human Centered Design and Engineering, and Deepti Vivek Shah, a master’s student in the Information School, introduced a prototype of Baby Steps, an Internet application that lets parents keep track of their child’s development and milestones.

“It’s difficult for parents to continuously track developmental growth,” Shah said, citing that developmental problems and disabilities affect up to 10 percent of children under the age of five. Both Shah and Rao hope a free program like Baby Steps could make it easier for parents in poor parts of the world to recognize problems early. They are working to get funding for the prototype to be available on Facebook, Twitter and mobile platforms next quarter.

Min-Tih Lai, a senior majoring in mechanical engineering, presented a solar/thermal-power prototype that can be used at home and costs less than $1,000 to produce.

The other speaker of the day, UW alumnus Hugh Chang, director of Special Initiatives in the Office of the President of the Program for Appropriate Technology in Health, encouraged students to look at careers in global health.

“In the global health space, we need new solutions,” he said.

The NAE Grand Challenges Summit today features speakers and panelists from the UW and the University of Texas in Austin, and corporations such as Facebook, General Electric and Google.

Reach reporter Bryden McGrath at news@dailyuw.com.