If ambitious plans outlined here last month come to fruition, several of the world's leading universities could soon be collaborating on engineering-design projects and research activities, exchanging students and professors, and pooling their expertise to work more closely with industry.

At a two-day conference at Columbia University, deans and other leading faculty members from Ivy League engineering schools and their counterparts from elite institutions in Brazil, China, and India gathered to discuss the formation of a new alliance called CIBI. ...

Joseph J. Helble, dean of Dartmouth's Thayer School of Engineering, says the alliance grew out of discussions the Ivy League engineering deans have had about what they "can do as a collective group of high-quality universities," he says. Engineering is the only professional graduate school that all Ivy League institutions have in common, and the deans have talked about ways in which they might share students and collaborate on design projects. For example, they could focus on energy challenges one year and clean-water problems the next.