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Grand Challenges and Engineering Systems: Inspiring and Educating the Next Generation

Daniel Roos '61, SM '63, PhD '66 Dr. Susan Hockfield Charles M. Vest HM: June 15, 2009; Running Time: 1:16:16

About the Lecture

About the Lecture

It’s a good thing for a world increasingly beset by mammoth challenges that universities are responding with new engineering systems programs. These initiatives, as Daniel Roos attests, are swiftly proliferating in the U.S. and abroad to equip students to address such complex issues as health care, sustainable energy, and infrastructure. Roos celebrates the fifth year of the Council of Engineering Systems Universities (CESUN), one of this symposium’s sponsors, and recaps his survey of group members on the state of engineering systems education.

While some traditionalists resist the interdisciplinary dimensions and broad compass featured so prominently in engineering systems programs, Roos believes that rapid global change necessitates corresponding change in how engineers are trained to think and practice. A case in point: a collapsing 100-year-old automobile and transportation system whose revival must incorporate complex, networked systems: intelligent infrastructure that can improve safety and alleviate congestion; and new, green, digitally wired vehicles integrated in a “smart energy net.”

ESD researchers study the complex social/technological questions that “will increasingly determine the future,” says Susan Hockfield. At MIT, Hockfield's job “is to lower boundaries that still exist between departments, and schools. By bringing together faculty, ESD creates enormous energy."

Charles Vest tells his audience, “Your time has come,” but warns that the U.S. lags dangerously far behind other nations in graduating engineers. Redesigning college-level engineering programs won’t be enough to meet the “grand challenges” posed by our times, if more children can’t be inspired to study engineering. The field lacks luster, and simply doesn’t connect with young people, says Vest. “We have failed miserably in projecting what engineering is, what it can accomplish and what’s exciting.”

The nation faces a great opportunity “to start rebuilding the economy based on real engineering innovations, to produce real goods and services, providing real value to people and society.” Vest wants to draw young people to work “at the frontiers of technology.” He notes a lot of interest in “tiny systems” such as biology, information and nano-technology. But “we need to worry” about the big macro systems of energy, environment, healthcare, manufacturing –“where the rubber hits the road between engineering and society.”

Vest wants to capture the passion of the next generation through some “soul stirring.” Through a campaign involving government, industry, and media, Vest hopes to convince young people that engineers are vital to meeting the “Engineering Grand Challenges” of global warming and sustainable energy, improving medicine and healthcare delivery, reducing vulnerability to human and natural threats, and expanding and enhancing human capability and joy (a somewhat unusual category for engineers, Vest admits).

Vest concludes with some personal comments about engineering systems, including anecdotes about Toyota’s innovations in auto assembly; NASA’s hard-won lessons in integrated design and manufacture of space-bound vehicles; and improvements in hospital care following simple changes integrated system wide. He sees the implosion of our financial system as an opportunity to study an incredibly complex human-technological system and set in place “at least an early warning system.” Vest also finds cheer in the public’s budding grasp of complex systems, as witnessed by increasing discomfort with fuel-based ethanol.

Lecture Details

Location: Wong Auditorium

“What’s important in engineering education? Making universities and engineering schools exciting, creative, adventurous, rigorous, demanding and empowering environments is more important than specifying curricular details -- that’s what I learned at MIT.”

Charles Vest

About the Speakers

Daniel Roos '61, SM '63, PhD '66

Japan Steel Industry Professor of Engineering Systems and Civil and Environmental Engineering

Daniel Roos became the founding Director of the Engineering Systems Division in 1998. Previously, he was Director of the Center for Transportation Studies, and Director of the Center for Technology, Policy and Industrial Development. Roos serves as Founding Director of the International Motor Vehicle Program and as Director of the Cooperative Mobility Program. He is co-author of The Machine That Changed the World, which has been published in 11 languages and has sold more than 600,000 copies.

Dr. Susan Hockfield

MIT President
Professor of Neuroscience

Susan Hockfield has served as the sixteenth president of MIT since December 2004. A strong advocate of the vital role that science, technology, and the research university play in the world, she believes that MIT can best advance its historic mission of teaching, research, and service by providing robust and sustained support for the ideas and energies of its faculty and students.

A noted neuroscientist whose research has focused on the development of the brain, Dr. Hockfield is the first life scientist to lead MIT and holds a faculty appointment as professor of neuroscience in the Institute's Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences.

Under her leadership, MIT has launched a major Institute-wide initiative in energy research and education and continues to expand its activities at the intersection of the life sciences and engineering, with a particular focus on cancer research. The Institute has also embarked on a sustained effort to strengthen support for student life and learning, including undergraduate curriculum renewal, and is undertaking major campus construction and renovation projects with a combined value of approximately three-quarters of a billion dollars.

Before assuming the presidency of MIT, Dr. Hockfield was the William Edward Gilbert Professor of Neurobiology and provost at Yale University. She joined the Yale faculty in 1985 and was named full professor in 1994. While at Yale, she played a central role in the university's leadership, first as dean of its Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (1998-2002), with oversight of more than 70 graduate programs, and then as provost, the university's chief academic and administrative officer.

Dr. Hockfield earned her B.A. in biology from the University of Rochester and a Ph.D. from the Georgetown University School of Medicine, while carrying out her dissertation research in neuroscience at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). She was an NIH postdoctoral fellow at the University of California at San Francisco in 1979-80, and then joined the scientific staff at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York in 1980. She served as director of the Laboratory's Summer Neurobiology Program from 1985 to 1997, concurrent with her teaching post at Yale, and more recently as a trustee of the laboratory. Her memberships in professional societies include the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Society for Neuroscience.

Charles M. Vest HM

President, National Academy of Engineering President Emeritus, MIT

Charles M. Vest stepped down as MIT's 15th president in December, 2004. He began his six-year term at the National Academy of Engineering in 2007.

During his 14 years as President of MIT, he placed special emphasis on enhancing undergraduate education, exploring new organizational forms to meet emerging directions in research and education, building a stronger international dimension into education and research programs, developing stronger relations with industry, and enhancing racial and cultural diversity. He also devoted considerable energy to bringing issues concerning education and research to broader public attention and to strengthening national policy on science, engineering and education.

Vest's book, Pursuing the Endless Frontier: Essays on MIT and the Role of Research Universities (MIT Press 2004), explores the controversial and significant issues facing academic institutions through the prism of his own presidency.

Vest continues to serve as a member of the Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction, and on the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, and on the boards of IBM and DuPont.

Vest earned his B.S. degree in mechanical engineering from West Virginia University in 1963 and both his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Michigan in 1964 and 1967, respectively. A member of the Mechanical Engineering faculty at MIT, Dr. Vest's research interests are in the thermal sciences and in the engineering applications of lasers and coherent optics.

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