Our History

The Engineering Society of Systems Scholars was established in 2025, building on more than two decades of progress under the Council of Engineering Systems Universities (CESUN). The revised name reflects on an evolving mission and more inclusive membership.

Since the founding of CESUN in 2004, there exists broader recognition of systems scholarship in engineering, a proliferation of conference venues at which to present work, and advances in virtual meeting technology to facilitate the exchange of ideas. However, other challenges persist. Societal problems continue to demand integrative knowledge and new perspectives. Systems scholars are often embedded in disciplinary engineering units and there exist few standalone systems programs. Finally, the growth of systems scholarship from different groups has produced a fragmented scholarly community.

ESSyS seeks to coordinate and strengthen the systems scholarly community and meet unserved needs from other professional societies. ESSyS supports career progression for systems scholars at multiple levels, from students to faculty. Rather than holding separate symposia or conferences, ESSyS acts to coordinate events across the broader community including co-location, cross-promotion, and special tracks, workshops, and sessions to add value.

History of CESUN

The Council of Engineering Systems Universities was established in 2004 as a group of universities with a common interest: addressing some of the great challenges of the 21st century by advancing engineering systems as a new field of study. CESUN fosters the exchange of ideas and experiences, supports joint research initiatives, cultivates a strong community of practice, and works to increase the visibility and impact of the field.

For engineers, the 21st century poses new types of challenges. The landmark engineering achievements of the previous century have led to the development and growth of vast systems that are so highly complex that they create problems unlike those with which engineers have traditionally grappled. These are not just challenges of great technical complexity, such as those at the interaction points between the many smaller systems that make up the planet’s great systems of systems. They are also challenges of social and economic complexity.

Over several decades, a new engineering field of study emerged to address these challenges in systems such as energy, communications, transportation, health care, and many others. Engineering systems today encompasses programs that are called many other names, as is clear from the program names at CESUN member institutions. The roots of engineering systems lie in the broader evolution of engineering and the ways in which engineers have responded to increasing complexity. While many engineers pursued deeper scientific inquiry, others emphasized a design-oriented approach, focusing on solutions to the challenges posed by escalating technical complexity. Operations research, systems and decision analysis, industrial engineering, systems engineering—these all contributed to the expansion of engineering—but at a certain point there was a recognition that some of the greatest challenges were precisely where the technical systems had their interfaces with people, policies, regulations, culture, and behaviour. Thus, engineering systems was born to deal with these critical new problem components. Both engineering science and engineering systems are needed in the solution of large-scale, complex problems; they complement each other.

Engineering systems is a highly practical field, rooted in real-world application. Its “laboratory” is the world around us. The field focuses on developing and employing  new methods to solve challenges at the scale of the socio-technical systems in which they emerge. By nature, engineering systems is interdisciplinary, drawing from engineering in all its manifestations, as well as the social sciences and management. This is necessitated by the nature of the work itself: human actors—their values, motivations, and limitations—are as important a consideration to the engineer as are the technical artifacts and smaller systems that comprise these vast systems.