Jury nominates finalists of the Mondialogo Engineering Award by Daimler and UNESCO

• International jury of experts nominates 30 finalists for the third worldwide contest for engineering students, among them fourteen teams from India
• Presentation of the award worth €300,000 at the Mondialogo Symposium in Stuttgart in November 2009 
• Premiere for the Mondialogo Online Community Award

Stuttgart/Paris – The finalists for the Mondialogo Engineering Award 2009 were selected in Stuttgart. An international jury of experts nominated 30 teams and their project ideas for the finale of the worldwide contest for engineering students organized by Daimler and UNESCO. Participants from 28 countries will be represented in the finale, among them Indian students from universities in Aurangabad, Bangalore, Chennai, Hyderabad, Jaipur, Kanpur, Mumbai and New Delhi. The finalist teams will take part in the Mondialogo Symposium from 6 to 9 November 2009 in Stuttgart, where they will receive their Awards. These will be presented in three categories: gold awards worth €15,000, silver and bronze awards worth €10,000 and €5,000 respectively. The total award prize money is €300,000 in this third round of the Mondialogo Engineering Award. Engineering students from 94 countries have submitted a total of 932 project ideas, which are focused on addressing climate change, sustainable development, and the eradication of poverty in developing countries.
Key criteria for nomination by the jury were quality and creativity, addressing the UN Millennium Development Goals, feasibility, and the intensity of cooperation, dialogue and exchange of knowledge between the student engineers. About one third of the finalists are women.

The five-person jury chaired by Prof. Herbert Kohler, Vice-President E-Drive & Future Mobility and Chief Environmental Office at Daimler AG and Prof. Walter Erdelen, Assistant Director-General for Natural Sciences at UNESCO, consists of 
• Peggy Oti-Boateng (Ghana), Director of the Technology Consultancy Centre at the University of Kumasi, Ghana 
• Shirley M. Malcom (USA), Head of Education and Human Resources of the American Association for the Advancement of Science 
• Ali Uddin Ansari (India), Director of the Centre for Environment Studies and Socioresponsive Engineering at Muffakham Jah College in Hyderabad 
• Paul Jowitt (United Kingdom), Director of the Scottish Institute of Sustainable Technology 
• Barry J. Grear (Australia), President of the World Federation of Engineering Organizations (WFEO).
At the Symposium in November the Mondialogo Online Community Award will be presented for the first time. All visitors to the Internet Portal mondialogo.org were eligible to vote for their favourite project. 
Alongside the Mondialogo Engineering Award, the initiative launched by Daimler and UNESCO in 2003 also consists of the Mondialogo School Contest and the Internet Portal in five languages. The aim is to encourage dialogue between people of different origins, who work together across continents on a joint project. This cooperation is intended to promote understanding, tolerance and friendship between people with different cultural, religious and linguistic backgrounds.