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Tomorrow’s Engineering Crisis

Moderator: Howard Anderson
Kristina M. Johnson Jeffrey M. Nick Sophie V. Vandebroek Thomas L. Magnanti: September 28, 2005; Running Time: 1:15:36

About the Lecture

About the Lecture

Wielding a provocative list of questions, Howard Anderson elicits strong opinions and concerns among his panelists around the future of engineering education and careers.

There’s a broad consensus that Washington is apathetic toward engineering. While the NIH budget has grown from five to 30 billion dollars in the past 30 years, support for the physical sciences and engineering has been flat. Says Kristina Johnson, “Without the enabling technologies of quantitative approaches and analytical tools for the life sciences, you would not have the breakthroughs we’re having in medicine…This is a missed opportunity.”

The panelists don’t generally perceive the trend of offshoring as a threat. Jeffrey Nick suggests, “If we step up to it and embrace the fact that commoditization in all forms…is just a fact of life and the sky isn’t falling, we can go to a higher ground where there are new opportunities. Engineering is never a menial task.” Says Tom Magnanti, “Societies become more mobile. That doesn’t mean we have to lose the cutting edge or jobs here—there’s just a different flow to the people.”

But the panelists’ hackles go up over the lackluster U.S. performance in engineering education. China, says Johnson, graduates between 250 to 600 thousand engineers a year, versus 68 thousand in the U.S. Magnanti suggests, “We’ve got to work better at making science and math in K-12 accessible, more exciting.” Johnson notes, “Maybe mathematics is the broccoli of curriculum. We have to eat it at every meal. … We must require math every year. …Otherwise, we won’t have the students to sustain innovation.” And, she adds, role models are necessary to recruit more women and minorities into the discipline. At Xerox, says Sophie Vandebroek, “We have many women engineers—twice the national average….Our C.E.O. is a woman, an African-American woman is my boss. …We must find ways to change stereotypes.”

What can be done to help engineering as a profession regain its stature in this country? Magnanti suggests a broadened engineering degree program to teach both the fundamentals and “provide a sense of markets and innovation,” enabling graduates to take on more leadership positions. Nick recommends a focus on “teaching people how to be inventive and apply technologies from one field to another.”

Lecture Details

Location: Kresge Auditorium

About the Speakers

Moderator: Howard Anderson

William Porter Distinguished Senior Lecturer of Entrepreneurship, MIT Sloan

Anderson, founder and former president of The Yankee Group, has 30 years of experience in the operations of a high-technology market research firm. He is also a co-founder of Battery Ventures, a venture capital firm in the Boston area, and, most recently, YankeeTek Ventures, a high technology venture capital firm in Cambridge.

Anderson was recently selected by Network World as one of the 25 most important people in communications. He has presented keynote addresses at both Comdex and Network Interop. He is also a contributing columnist to Forbes Magazine. He earned a B.A. in Economics from the University of Pennsylvania and an M.B.A. from the Harvard Business School.

Kristina M. Johnson

Dean, Pratt School of Engineering, Duke University

Johnson joined Duke in July 1999. Prior to this, she served on the faculty at the University of Colorado at Boulder, from 1985-1999 as a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and as a co-founder and Director (1993-1997) of the National Science Foundation Engineering Research Center for Optoelectronic Computing Systems Center.

Johnson received her B.S. with distinction, M.S. and Ph.D. from Stanford University in Electrical Engineering. She is an expert in liquid crystal electro-optics and has over 40 patents or patents pending in this field. Johnson currently serves on the Boards of Directors of Dycom Industries, Inc., Minerals Technologies, Inc., and Guidant Corporation.

Jeffrey M. Nick

Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, EMC Corporation

Nick joined EMC in September 2004 from IBM, where he held the distinguished title of IBM Fellow, the highest technical honor that IBM bestows on its IT innovators. During his 24-year career with IBM, Nick filed more than 80 inventions and holds more than 50 U.S. patents in computer systems technology.

Nick graduated Magna Cum Laude from Marist College with a B.S. in finance.

Sophie V. Vandebroek

Chief Engineer and Vice President, Xerox Engineering Center, Xerox Corporation

Prior to her current Xerox appointment in 2002, Vandebroek was Chief Technology Officer at Carrier Corporation. Earlier, she held a succession of technology functions at Xerox: Laboratory manager in Research & Technology, Platform manager in the Ink-Jet Supplies Business Unit, Enterprise Coherence program manager, Technical Advisor to Xerox's Chief Operating Officer, and Director of the Xerox Research Center of Canada.

She is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical & Electronics Engineers and a Fulbright Fellow and a Fellow of the Belgian-American Educational Foundation. She earned a Master's Degree in Electro-Mechanical Engineering in Belgium, and a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Cornell University.

Thomas L. Magnanti

Dean, MIT School of Engineering
Institute Professor Professor of Management Science and Electrical Engineering

Thomas L. Magnanti has been an MIT faculty member since 1971. He was a founding co-director of MIT's industry-university collaborative research and educational program, Leaders for Manufacturing Program, and its on-campus off-campus graduate program, System Design and Management. He has previously served as head of the Management Science Area of the Sloan School of Management and as co-director of MIT's interdepartmental Operations Research Center.

Magnanti is editor of the journal, Operations Research, and currently serves on the Boards of the Ford Design Institute and Emptoris, Inc. He was a visiting scholar at the Harvard Business School and held visiting scientist appointments at Bell Laboratories and at GTE Laboratories.

Magnanti is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He received master’s degrees in both Statistics (1969) and Mathematics (1971) from Stanford University, where he also received the doctorate in Operations Research (1972).