what is the future of engineering education essay

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The future of engineering education

I recently met with bioengineering alumna Ann Lee-Karlon, senior vice president at Genentech and past president of the Association for Women in Science. We had a conversation about things that had changed on campus since she graduated in 1989. Some things, she told me, were the same at Berkeley — exceptional students, cutting-edge research, and, she was delighted to say, the same commitment to changing the world.

However, she said, the way we educate engineering leaders today has an entirely new look.

She is absolutely correct. To meet the needs of the 21st century, Berkeley Engineering has made critical and meaningful additions to our academic culture. We still provide the best, most rigorous technical education in the world — that will never change. Today, however, that’s not enough. We are working to make sure that Berkeley engineers graduate with a new suite of essential skills and characteristics: leadership skills, an appetite for risk, flexible mindsets, the ability to integrate knowledge and experience working in diverse teams.

The new essentials

To develop these qualities, we immerse our students in design thinking and the entrepreneurial mindset — fresh ways of looking at engineering challenges — and we do this starting on day one.

Teaching Tech with Tech

When John DeNero first started teaching an introductory computer science course — CS 61A: The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs — in 2011 as a part-time instructor, the class had an enrollment of about 500. Since then, DeNero has joined the electrical engineering and computer sciences faculty and this year was named the inaugural Giancarlo Teaching Fellow. And the course has grown dramatically. After a complete revamp to make the intro to computer programming more accessible without sacrificing rigor, and by fine-tuning how the course is managed, 1,686 students are enrolled this semester. The course is not only popular, but the learning experience also receives rave reviews from the students. To keep pace with the growing demand for computer science education, DeNero uses automated technologies and a small army of student instructors to make the course run. Grading software gives students feedback in real-time, so they don’t have to wait for evaluations and instead can fix coding errors immediately while working through assignments. There are over 400 students involved in teaching the course: 55 teaching assistants are employed to lead course discussion and lab sections, and 48 course tutors are hired to lead small-group mentoring sections, grade assignments and host drop-in office hours. Another 301 academic interns help answer questions during lab and office hours. “One of the secondary goals of the course is to involve undergraduates in the teaching process,” DeNero says. “The world is going to need a lot of computer science educators, and I think students really master the material when they teach it.”

Imagine how a design problem engages creative students. In Jacobs Hall, the college’s new design hub, some 3,000 students enrolled in courses last year to grapple with real-world problems and dream up solutions. Examples of these design-centered courses are intriguing. In the course Bringing Biomedical Devices to Market, students bridged the gap between proof-of-concept for a new device and landing an FDA-approved product in the marketplace. In the class Designing Technology to Counter Violent Extremism, students worked with the Department of State and other federal agencies to design and prototype ways to dispel extremism — including technology to enhance civic engagement, identify early signs of radicalization, remedy issues of discrimination and improve relationships with law enforcement. The students in Reimagining Mobility took on issues of how we interact with new modes of transportation, from car sharing to automation.

Today’s Berkeley engineering curriculum also helps students develop an entrepreneurial mindset. Entrepreneurship is already a hallmark of the University of California; since 2010, 536 Berkeley students have launched 468 companies — by far the most of any public university and second among all universities. Although founding a company may not be the goal of every student, all of them will benefit from the ability to think like an entrepreneur: to strive for innovation, take risks, see value, rely on teams, learn from failure and question the status quo.

Our Sutardja Center for Entrepreneurship and Technology is a nexus for this training. There, students learn the traditional cornerstones of entrepreneurship — case studies, frameworks and tactics to give students a broad toolset to recognize opportunities, design products for market introduction, raise funds, devise business models and understand sales and marketing.

But we go beyond that, through a uniquely Berkeley method of teaching entrepreneurship. Over years of study, we have found that the best entrepreneurs share a set of behaviors — they give and accept help, collaborate, communicate through stories, trust others, seek fairness, are resilient, have diverse personal networks, understand that “good enough” is fine when time and resources are limited and believe that they can change the world. Students develop this mindset at Berkeley through games and exercises that teach trust, risk assessment, effective communication, overcoming social barriers and dealing with rejection and failure.

How does this work? In one exercise, students take to the streets of downtown Berkeley with an assignment: convince random strangers to give you their shoes. This is a sure-fire way to learn how to deal with failure. With a video recorder running, the students make their pitch and, if rejected, they move on, refining their appeal for the next person. One of our teams encountered Berkeley professor and former U.S. Secretary of Labor Robert Reich — he was so impressed with the students that he actually agreed to hand over his shoes.

Teaching, today and tomorrow

Design, entrepreneurship and other teaching innovations are now foundations of a Berkeley engineering education — and we continue to build on that foundation.

Designing a new narrative

Two years ago, the Jacobs Institute for Design Innovation began offering courses in the new Jacobs Hall, attracting students from across campus interested in the intersection of art, technology, design and engineering. One of the major draws to Jacobs Hall is that students get to work with tools and machines to prototype and build their ideas and projects. “Students like hands-on education,” says mechanical engineering professor Grace O’Connell. “It’s fun to watch students throughout the process. In the traditional lecture style, the instructor gives an assignment, and then students turn it in and they are done. With design education, the process is more iterative. You have to figure out how to improve the assignment and then do it again, which I think is closer to life after college.” This semester O’Connell, who studies the biomechanics of musculoskeletal tissues, taught an undergraduate course at Jacobs that focused on building medical devices. Forty-five students from various engineering disciplines partnered with Bay Area companies and nonprofits such as e-NABLE, a nonprofit that brings together individuals from around the world to create free 3-D printed prosthetic hands for those in need.

Entrepreneurship

Creative teaching

Today, many dominant and innovative big brands — such as Amazon, Tesla and Google — are led by engineers. So it makes sense to teach engineering students how to build and run companies. But for Ken Singer, managing director of Berkeley Engineering’s Sutardja Center for Entrepreneurship and Technology (SCET), the need to educate engineers about entrepreneurship has a more urgent reason. “Recent advancements in technology — AI, autonomous vehicles, blockchain — will change the entire topography of employment,” says Singer. “If we don’t teach students to adapt to the future, then we are training a generation of unemployable engineers.” Traditional education is often about knowledge transfer, with systems designed to reinforce, test and evaluate based on existing knowledge. But for Singer and his SCET colleagues, just transferring information isn’t enough. Instead, they designed the curriculum to foster self-directed learning and creativity. “Students are comfortable being creative if they feel like they won’t be judged for failing,” he says. “We measure the attempt, not the outcome, and we grade them on what they say they learned, not if they can recite back our lecture notes.”

New interdisciplinary courses are emerging, many that make use of the studio and maker spaces in Jacobs Hall. At the Sutardja Center’s new “collider space” at California Memorial Stadium, ideas are born through the “collision” of students, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and managers — different people from different worlds. In challenge labs, student teams compete to find solutions to big challenges, from alleviating the refugee crisis in Greece to developing the best mobile health app. Undergraduate research opportunities are on the rise; one program in civil and environmental engineering, funded by donors, offers top freshman admits a chance to work alongside faculty and graduate students in a lab — a great experience for a budding engineer and a terrific tool for recruiting the best to Berkeley.

Our journey toward inventing the future of engineering education is far from over. At Berkeley we’re working to answer big questions for tomorrow’s students:

• How can we integrate engineering with other fields? Technology today is critical in every field. Understanding it and embracing the new essentials needs to be part of the core curriculum for all 21st century students. We’ve begun to explore the idea of “Engineering + X” majors that combine engineering with unexpected disciplines across campus. Our new Management, Entrepreneurship, & Technology (M.E.T.) program is giving us experience with the power of such combinations, allowing exceptional students to earn Berkeley degrees in both business and engineering in four years of (hard) work.
• California and the world need engineers — how do we meet the demand from students and employers? Today’s students don’t see their instructor as the “sage on the stage” but rather as the “guide on the side.” Some prefer to view lectures online, later exploring the material in depth with instructors in small classroom sections. We’re getting very good at this way of teaching, and it helps us meet the burgeoning student demand in many of our popular courses.  For example, CS 61A, The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, enrolls up to 1,700 students a semester, yet it is always top-rated. How is this possible? We deploy one of the campus’s top teachers, innovative technology to give students instant feedback on their work and creative approaches to discussion sections and advising.
• How do we prepare our students for the changing future of work? Technology being invented today will dramatically and rapidly change the way we work. To prepare for this uncertain future, we must produce lifelong learners with strong, adaptable skills. The people who succeed in this environment will be connected, flexible, creative, smart, entrepreneurial — and will have deep technical competence. Our teaching must help today’s graduates react to technological shifts during their careers. And it’s not just engineers who will face this changing future — we are gearing up to educate not only the finest engineers but to expand our reach across the Berkeley campus and beyond, offering training for non-engineers that will make for more technology-literate and savvy citizens.
• In a world in flux, how do we continue to educate engineers throughout their careers to use the latest technologies to benefit the public good? At Berkeley, we are committed to deepening our focus on continuous education for working professionals and on offering professional master’s degrees like those we have pioneered in our Fung Institute for Engineering Leadership. Through both professionally-oriented graduate studies and continuing education, we must teach engineers not only to conceptualize new technologies but also about their impacts and consequences; equitable use and availability; legal and ethical implications; and their successful integration into existing or new industries. To be sure, our new directions in teaching design, entrepreneurship and innovation can serve us well in these arenas. Our students must also learn how design systems that incentivize behaviors to benefit society, and to embrace the important legal, ethical and moral responsibilities that come with implementing new technology.

We believe in the transformative power of a Berkeley education, and we’re excited about the new directions we’ve forged for Berkeley engineers. Innovating the future is what Berkeley Engineering does best: with innovations in how we educate engineers, our graduates will have the tools to shape that future.

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IEEE Potentials Magazine

The magazine for high-tech innovators

The future of engineering education

March 1, 2021 by Dario Schor, Teng Joon Lim, and Witold Kinsner

When we think of engineering education, most of us immediately recall the courses, labs, assignments, and examinations we took at a university. As students, we are often so focused on the imminent deadlines that we fail to see the big picture of how all of these pieces are connected and shaping the way we think and tackle problems. Those of us who have completed our degrees look back fondly on inspiring professors, challenging courses, and late nights studying with our colleagues.

For more about this article see link below.

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9375049

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A new report from MIT puts a spotlight on worldwide trends in the changing landscape of engineering education, pinpoints the current and emerging leaders in the field, and describes some of its future directions.

“Engineers will address the complex societal challenges of the 21st century by building a new generation of machines, materials, and systems. We should fundamentally rethink how we educate engineers for this future,” says Ed Crawley, the Ford Professor of Engineering in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics and faculty co-director of the New Engineering Education Transformation (NEET) initiative at MIT.

This realization, Crawley says, is what prompted MIT’s engineering faculty to rethink how they were approaching their own offerings on campus, and to launch NEET. “We’re targeting MIT education at the industries of the future rather than industries of the past,” says Anette “Peko” Hosoi, associate dean of engineering and Crawley’s co-lead at NEET; Hosoi is also the Neil and Jane Pappalardo Professor of Mechanical Engineering.

While their on-campus pilot was at the design stage, Crawley decided to take a broader, benchmarking view. “I knew from my five years as founding president of Skoltech in Moscow that there were examples of educational innovation scattered across the world,” he says, “but these distributed developments are difficult to identify and learn from.”

Until now. Crawley and his colleagues in the NEET program have just released “Global state of the art in engineering education.” The report, authored by Ruth Graham, is a global review of cutting-edge practice in engineering education. It is informed by interviews with 178 thought leaders with knowledge of and experience with world-leading engineering programs, combined with case studies from four different universities. The report paints a rich picture of successful innovation in engineering education as well as some of its opportunities and challenges.

The study identifies institutions considered to be the current leaders in engineering education; Olin College and MIT were cited by the majority of experts who were consulted, along with Stanford University, Aalborg University in Denmark, and Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) in the Netherlands. Outside of the U.S. and northern Europe, the only university among the top 10 cited for their educational leadership was the National University of Singapore (NUS).

“The profile of the emerging leaders is very different,” Graham notes. “While they include universities in the U.S. and Europe — Olin College, Iron Range Engineering, and University College London are among the most frequently cited universities –  thought leaders identified emerging leaders from across the world, such as Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD), Pontifical Catholic University of Chile (PUC), NUS (Singapore), and Charles Sturt University (Australia).” (The report includes case studies of four of the emerging leaders: SUTD, UCL, Charles Sturt, and TU Delft.)

The study attributes this contrast to a range of sources. For one, Graham notes, “Many political leaders outside of the U.S. are making major investments in engineering education as an incubator for the technology-based entrepreneurial talent that will drive national economic growth.”

The report also identifies some key challenges facing engineering education, and in some cases higher education as a whole. These include aligning the goals of national governments and higher education, delivering student-centered learning to large student cohorts, and setting up faculty appointment and promotion systems that better reward high-quality teaching.

According to Graham’s report, three trends are likely to define the future of engineering education. The first is a tilting of the global axis of engineering education leadership so it is less focused on U.S. and northern European institutions. The second is a shift toward programs that integrate student-centered learning with a curriculum oriented to the pressing challenges of the 21st century — societal, environmental, and technological. And the third is the emergence of a new generation of leaders with the capacity to deliver student-centered curricula at scale.

The case studies highlighted in the report include universities that may be paving the way by, for example, achieving curricular coherence and integration through a connective spine of design projects. In the longer-term, the world’s leading engineering programs may be those that blend off-campus personalized learning, accessed online as students need it, with experiential learning both in work-based placements and on campus.

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Essays About Engineering: Top 5 Essay Examples Plus Prompts

Engineering is one of the most sought after professions for the 21st century. If you are writing essays about engineering, use these examples below.

A common stereotype of engineers is that they build houses, but that is simply not the case. Nearly all of the things we enjoy today are because of engineers. The food you buy at the grocers is deemed as safe thanks to the chemical engineers who analyzed its contents. The smartphone or laptop you’re using to read this right now was made possible by computer engineers.

The house you’re living in, the offices you go to work at, these marvels made our life easier because of engineers who dedicated their time to innovate and solve our problems through science and mathematics. After all, accuracy is what sets engineers apart.

If you are writing an essay about engineering, here are 5 essay examples to help you write an insightful piece.

1. Why Engineers Are Becoming Increasingly Important by Christopher McFadden

2. women in engineering: why i chose an engineering degree by purity muhia, 3. taking lessons from what went wrong by william j. broad, 4. the way i work: brendan walker by gary ryan, 5. engineering ethics and its impact on society by dr. william m. marcy and jane b. rathbun, 1. different types of engineering, 2. future of engineering, 3. how to become an engineer, 4. pros and cons of engineering innovation, 5. is engineering hard.

“ Now consider a society that is completely free of engineers. What would it look like? It’s a hard thing to picture because for as long as humans have existed, engineers (in some fashion) have also existed. 

The closest we can probably think about would be a hunter-gatherer one. This society would literally be one of pure survival. There would be no innovation, no technology of any kind. As soon as one or other members of that society created a trap, a spear or improved on a technique for smashing things an engineer will have been “born” .”

McFadden eloquently discussed how engineers transformed our way of living and the big role they’ll be playing as society becomes increasingly reliant on technology. He also discussed the impact engineers have in different sectors such agriculture, health, and education.

“ There are some girls who still grow up thinking that engineering and science isn’t meant for women. It is important to remember women can thrive in the world of engineering. I chose engineering because I loved math and science, and engineering promised real opportunities to change the world. ”

Muhia is now one step closer to achieving her dreams of making a change in the world as she now holds a master’s degree in Environmental Engineering. 

In this essay, which she wrote back in 2016 as a student intern, she discussed the origins of her interest in engineering and aimed to inspire other young women to pursue this profession as a way to bring a different perspective to a vocation dominated by men.

“ It is not that failure is desirable, or that anyone hopes for or aims for a disaster. But failures, sometimes appalling, are inevitable, and given this fact, engineers say it pays to make good use of them to prevent future mistakes.

The result is that the technological feats that define the modern world are sometimes the result of events that some might wish to forget. ”

Two-time Pulitzer Prize winner William Broad took a dive into the subject of how some of the innovations we enjoy today were conceptualized based on the tragedies of the past. Written in the midst of the Deepwater Horizon Drilling Rig Disaster, the article gathered the takes of distinguished engineers and used infamous engineering mishaps to discuss the adjustments made to improve work conditions and quality of life.

“ Novelty is a big part of creating a thrilling experience, so fairgrounds have historically been early adopters of new technology… Now the challenge for people like me is to produce content that controls and choreographs people’s emotional experience using this technology. ”

Coined as the world’s only thrill engineer, Brendan Walker reminisced his transition from an aeronautical engineer to conceptualizing and designing roller coasters and other theme park rides, and how understanding the physiological responses is key to providing patrons an unforgettable, thrilling experience.

“One aspect of many of the recent and prominently technological changes is a vast array of unintended consequences that the designers never anticipated. Unintended consequences frequently overshadow the anticipated benefits designers of a new technology had in mind. While many unintended consequences may have tremendous positive impacts on society, others may not. Ethical considerations must be included in every step of the design, documentation and deployment process to help anticipate and mitigate negative consequences.”

Dr. Marcy and Rathbun’s insightful essay examines how to assist engineers facing ethical dilemmas. It proposes addressing the three fundamental issues regarding engineering ethics – namely engineering ethics education, ethical decision making in professional practice, and protecting the rights of engineers to make such decisions.

Essay Prompts About Engineering

It can be a challenge to think of ideas and questions when writing an essay, especially if the subject revolves on something as technical as engineering. Here are five essay topics about engineering that might be able to help you out.

At present, there are up to 21 types of engineers that’s making a difference in the world we live in. From biochemical engineers to software engineers, this essay topic can discuss each branch and tackle their area of expertise as well as the groundbreaking innovations they’ve provided over the last few years. If you can’t investigate all, you can prompt to choose one type and focus your research on there.

Looking for more suggestions? Check out our essays about technology for your next project.

As mentioned, all types of engineers are working day in and day out to improve our way of living. With 21 types of engineers to choose from, you can choose which branch will impact your or your family’s future. For instance, if you’re an environmentally-conscious individual, you can home in on the research done by environmental engineers. Alternatively, you can focus on picturing what the next high-rise buildings will look like or what are the medical advancements 10 or 20 years from now.

This can be a range of different things. It can be an essay topic on how easy or difficult acquiring an engineering degree can be based on personal experience. It can be about how to inspire your kids to become future engineers by piquing their interest in infrastructures, space exploration, and even video games in a way that they will understand.

Technological advancements have their ups and downs. We won’t be able to see it at first, but a crack in its foundation will show after years of usage. An investigative essay showing an innovation’s advantages and disadvantages might reveal the next scientific discovery of the century that will change the world’s future.

Consider writing a short essay about the merits of the engineering profession. These types of essays are good because they help aspiring engineers and students figure out if they want to work in this career path. It also encourages to writer to either reflect on their experiences or consult more knowledgeable experts. 

Tip: If writing an essay sounds like a lot of work, simplify it. Write a simple 5 paragraph essay instead.

Bryan Collins is the owner of Become a Writer Today. He's an author from Ireland who helps writers build authority and earn a living from their creative work. He's also a former Forbes columnist and his work has appeared in publications like Lifehacker and Fast Company.

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Undergrad Combines Engineering, Entrepreneurship to Advance Education

• by Katherine Panaligan
• May 01, 2024

For Gautham Pandian, a computer science and engineering junior in the College of Engineering at the University of California, Davis, engineering is about education and using technology to solve problems.

"The stories of innovators who used technology to create solutions and shape the future sparked my interest in engineering," said Pandian. "Engineering, to me, represents a discipline where creativity meets practicality, offering a path to directly impact society through innovation."  

A long-term engineering project that Pandian is most proud of is Tallyrus, a web application that uses artificial intelligence to analyze and grade student papers. He co-founded the app and startup about a year ago with fellow UC Davis student Ashwin Chembu .  

Pandian experienced the tediousness of grading first-hand while working as a tutor for over six years, where he often encountered challenges in grading which delayed the feedback students received. Recognizing the issue, Pandian decided to use his knowledge of software development to design a solution.  

The web-based app utilizes natural language processing to analyze student essays, offering swift, detailed and consistent feedback for educators to use in their review process. Pandian hopes this modernization of grading proves to be an efficient and effective answer to this tedious necessity of teaching.   

"Providing in-depth analysis and feedback quickly is challenging for teachers due to the sheer volume of papers they must handle," Pandian said. "We designed Tallyrus for students to receive comprehensive feedback [from their teachers] as quickly as possible, allowing students to learn and improve without this typical delay."  

The team is steadily advancing the platform. Pandian's team took first place in the 2024 Student Creativity Empowerment and Entrepreneurship Slug Tank, a pitch competition at UC Santa Cruz. Tallyrus also recently took first place in the student division of the 2024 Startup Challenge Monterey Bay, a program by the CSU Monterey Bay College of Business.  

Right now, the team is refining the Tallyrus platform's understanding of nuance and context and its adaptability to different writing subjects and grading rubrics.  

Pandian believes that the atmosphere of innovation at UC Davis will help him strengthen his skills and develop Tallyrus further.  

For Pandian, a major draw to UC Davis and the College of Engineering was the Student Startup Center , which provides resources for students developing products and businesses. Uniting entrepreneurship and engineering, the center allows Pandian to become involved in a community dedicated to innovation and supporting students.  

"The opportunity to immerse myself in an environment that encourages taking academic learning beyond the classroom and applying it to real-world entrepreneurial ventures was exactly what I was looking for," Pandian said.  

He currently participates in PLASMA , a 12-week accelerator program at the Student Startup Center that offers students educational and networking opportunities with mentors, industry leaders and other entrepreneurs.  

Pandian is also part of the UC Davis branch of the AI Student Collective, a student organization focused on education about artificial intelligence. In the collective's education center, he teaches high school students about AI and its practical applications.   

Off campus, he interns at IBM as a backend software developer where he is able to apply his technical skills to solve practical engineering issues.   

Through his endeavors in engineering and entrepreneurship, helping people learn and solve problems motivates Pandian to continue innovating.  

"Seeing our projects work in the real world is the kind of impact that makes all the hard work worth it."  

Learn more about Tallyrus

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Home » All articles » The Importance of Engineering in Modern Society: Solving Today’s Challenges

The Importance of Engineering in Modern Society: Solving Today’s Challenges

Welcome to our blog post on the importance of engineering in modern society and how it plays a crucial role in solving the challenges we face today. Engineering is not just about building structures or designing machines; it is a field that encompasses problem-solving, innovation, and creating solutions that improve our lives. In this post, we will explore the significance of engineering in addressing issues such as climate change, renewable energy, transportation, and healthcare. Join us as we delve into how engineers are shaping the future and making a positive impact on society.

Table of Contents

1. Sustainable Development and Environmental Engineering

1.1 an overview.

The field of sustainable development and environmental engineering plays a crucial role in addressing the challenges faced by modern society. Engineers in this field are tasked with developing innovative solutions to tackle environmental issues, while simultaneously ensuring the long-term viability and sustainability of our resources.

1.2 The Importance of Sustainable Development

Sustainable development refers to the practice of using resources efficiently to meet present needs without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. Engineers in this field are at the forefront of implementing strategies to achieve sustainability in various sectors, such as energy, water, transportation, and waste management.

1.3 Energy Engineering

One of the key areas where sustainable development and environmental engineering are vital is in the field of energy. Engineers are constantly working on developing renewable energy sources, such as solar and wind power, which can help reduce our dependence on fossil fuels and mitigate the adverse effects of climate change.

1.4 Water Management

Water scarcity and pollution are major concerns that require innovative engineering solutions to ensure sustainable access to clean water for present and future generations. Engineers in this field design and implement efficient water treatment and conservation methods, as well as develop sustainable irrigation systems to optimize water usage in agriculture.

1.5 Transportation and Infrastructure

Transportation plays a significant role in society, but it also contributes to environmental degradation. Sustainable development engineers are focused on developing and implementing eco-friendly transportation solutions, such as electric vehicles and efficient public transportation systems, to reduce carbon emissions and improve air quality in urban areas.

1.6 Waste Management

Proper management of waste is essential for maintaining a healthy and sustainable environment. Environmental engineers work to develop effective waste management strategies that include recycling, composting, and waste-to-energy technologies. These strategies aim to minimize the amount of waste generated and reduce the impact of landfills on ecosystems.

1.7 Environmental Impact Assessment

Environmental engineering involves conducting thorough assessments of potential projects or developments to identify and mitigate any adverse environmental impacts. This process ensures that new infrastructure or industrial projects adhere to strict environmental regulations and minimize their ecological footprint.

1.8 Conclusion

In conclusion, sustainable development and environmental engineering are crucial disciplines that address the challenges posed by modern society. Through the implementation of innovative engineering solutions, professionals in this field can help create a greener and more sustainable future. By focusing on areas such as energy, water, transportation, waste management, and environmental impact assessment, engineers are playing a vital role in ensuring the long-term well-being of both the environment and future generations.

2. Energy and Resource Management: The Significance of Engineering in Modern Society

Efficient management of energy and resources.

The importance of engineering cannot be overstated when addressing the challenges of energy and resource management in our modern society. Engineering encompasses a wide range of disciplines that tackle the complex issues related to energy production, consumption, and resource utilization. Through innovative approaches and cutting-edge technologies, engineers play a crucial role in solving these pressing challenges and paving the way for a more sustainable future.

Optimizing Energy Production and Consumption

Engineers are actively engaged in developing efficient methods for energy production while minimizing environmental impact. From designing renewable energy systems to optimizing the efficiency of fossil fuel-based power plants, engineers strive to maximize energy output while minimizing waste and emissions. By harnessing the power of renewable sources such as solar, wind, and hydroelectric, engineers contribute to a more sustainable and cleaner energy mix.

Revolutionizing Resource Utilization

Effective resource management is another crucial aspect addressed by engineering. Engineers work diligently to find innovative solutions for minimizing resource depletion and waste generation. Whether it’s through advanced recycling technologies, efficient water management systems, or sustainable agricultural practices, engineers constantly seek ways to optimize resource utilization and reduce our ecological footprint.

Challenges in Modern Society

Modern society faces numerous challenges when it comes to energy and resource management. The exponential increase in global population and industrialization has put immense pressure on our existing resources. Moreover, the adverse effects of climate change have necessitated the urgent need for sustainable energy alternatives. These challenges demand creative and inventive engineering solutions to ensure a resilient and environmentally conscious future.

Emerging Engineering Solutions

To address these challenges, engineers are developing innovative technologies such as smart grids, energy storage solutions, and efficient transportation systems. These advancements not only promote efficient energy use but also enhance overall resource management. For instance, smart grids enable real-time monitoring and optimization of energy distribution, ensuring minimal energy waste. Similarly, advances in battery technology have revolutionized energy storage, enabling the integration of renewable energy sources into the grid.

The Role of Engineering Education

To continue solving the energy and resource management challenges of the future, it is essential to invest in engineering education. By training future engineers in sustainable design principles, renewable energy systems, and resource optimization techniques, we can ensure a continuous stream of individuals equipped to tackle these problems head-on. Fostering innovation and collaboration among engineering students will promote the development of groundbreaking solutions, setting the stage for a more sustainable society.

Considering the pivotal role of engineering in energy and resource management, it is crucial to recognize the significance of this discipline in addressing the challenges of the modern world. Through research, innovation, and education, engineers are instrumental in developing sustainable solutions that optimize energy production, consumption, and resource utilization. By embracing the potential of engineering, we can create a more sustainable and resilient society for future generations.

3. Infrastructure and Urban Planning: The Importance of Engineering in Modern Society

Sustainable urban environments: a top priority.

In an increasingly urbanized world, creating sustainable and livable cities has become a paramount concern. Engineers play a vital role in this process by designing and implementing innovative infrastructure and urban solutions to address today’s pressing challenges.

The Inception of Urban Planning

Urban planning emerged as a discipline in response to the rapid industrialization and urbanization of the 19th century. With urban populations surging, cities faced various issues such as overcrowding, pollution, and inadequate infrastructure. Engineers were called upon to devise creative solutions, leading to the birth of urban planning.

The Power of Infrastructure

Infrastructure is the backbone of any modern society and encompasses a wide range of systems like transportation, energy, water supply, and communication networks. Engineers bring their expertise to develop and maintain these critical components, ensuring the smooth functioning of cities.

Efficient Transportation Systems

Efficient transportation systems are crucial to the mobility of both people and goods. Engineers leverage their skills to design optimized road networks, railways, and airports, enabling seamless connectivity. Through the integration of smart technologies, they enhance public transportation, reduce congestion, and promote sustainable modes of travel.

Sustainable Energy Systems

Addressing energy demands sustainably is a key challenge of our time. Engineers are instrumental in developing renewable energy sources, such as wind and solar power, to reduce dependence on fossil fuels. By optimizing energy grids and implementing energy-efficient technologies, they contribute to building a greener and more sustainable future.

Smart Water Management

Water scarcity and quality are significant concerns in many regions. Engineers tackle these challenges through effective water management strategies. They design innovative water treatment plants, distribution systems, and rainwater harvesting structures to ensure the availability of clean water for urban populations.

Resilient Communication Networks

In the digital age, reliable communication networks are indispensable. Engineers are at the forefront of developing robust and resilient systems that enable seamless connectivity. They design and implement fiber-optic networks, cellular infrastructure, and satellite systems to ensure uninterrupted communication even during times of crisis.

Green Spaces and Urban Design

Creating green spaces and well-designed urban environments is crucial for enhancing the quality of life. Engineers collaborate with architects and urban planners to integrate sustainable practices into the design process. They focus on optimizing urban spaces, improving air quality, and creating parks and gardens to promote physical and mental well-being.

The importance of engineering in infrastructure and urban planning cannot be overstated. Through their expertise and innovative solutions, engineers contribute to the creation of sustainable, resilient, and livable cities. As the demands of modern society continue to evolve, the role of engineering in shaping our urban environments becomes ever more crucial.

Technological Advancements and Engineering Innovation

Technological advancements and engineering innovation play a pivotal role in modern society, addressing the many challenges we face today. Engineers work tirelessly to create, design, and implement solutions that improve our lives and transform industries.

The Rise of Technological Advancements

In recent years, we have witnessed an unprecedented rise in technological advancements that have revolutionized various aspects of our lives. These advancements have been made possible due to the cross-disciplinary collaboration between engineering and other fields such as computer science and material science.

Transforming Industries

Engineering innovations have transformed industries, making them more efficient, sustainable, and adaptable to today’s needs. In the automotive industry, for example, engineers have developed electric vehicles that contribute to reducing carbon emissions and combatting climate change.

Solving Energy Challenges

Engineers have also made significant contributions to solving energy challenges, developing renewable energy sources such as solar and wind power. Through the integration of engineering and science, solar panels have become more affordable and efficient, providing an environmentally-friendly alternative to traditional energy sources.

Improving Healthcare

In the field of healthcare, engineering innovations have led to improved diagnostics, treatment options, and patient care. Medical devices such as MRI machines and robotic surgical systems are prime examples of how engineering has revolutionized the healthcare industry, enhancing both the accuracy and efficiency of medical procedures.

Ensuring Sustainability

Sustainability is a critical aspect of modern engineering. Engineers are actively involved in developing sustainable solutions and practices to minimize the impact of human activities on the environment. Through innovations in waste management, water treatment, and green infrastructure, engineers are playing a vital role in creating a sustainable future for generations to come.

Enhancing Communication and Connectivity

Technological advancements in engineering have also greatly improved communication and connectivity. The development of mobile technologies, high-speed internet, and wireless networks has transformed the way we communicate, collaborate, and access information.

The Role of Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has emerged as a prominent field that intersects with engineering. Through AI, engineers can develop intelligent systems that automate tasks, analyze complex data, and make informed decisions, leading to increased efficiency and productivity across industries.

In conclusion, technological advancements and engineering innovation are instrumental in addressing the challenges of our time. Engineers continue to push boundaries, developing solutions that transform industries, improve healthcare, ensure sustainability, and enhance communication and connectivity. As we look to the future, the role of engineering in shaping our society will continue to grow, driving progress and innovation in all aspects of our lives.

In conclusion, engineering plays a crucial role in addressing the challenges of our modern society. From solving complex environmental issues to developing innovative technologies, engineers are at the forefront of finding solutions that improve our quality of life. The importance of engineering cannot be overstated, as it enables us to create a sustainable future and tackle the pressing problems we face today. Through their expertise, creativity, and dedication, engineers continue to drive progress and shape the world we live in. So, let us recognize and appreciate the invaluable contributions of engineers and support their endeavors in building a better tomorrow.

The future of education: an essay collection

Before the industrial revolution, neither education nor technology mattered much for most people. But when technology raced ahead of education in those times, many were left behind, causing unimaginable social pain. It took a century for public policy to respond with the ambition of providing every child with access to schooling. While that goal still remains beyond reach for some, the stakes have now risen well beyond providing ‘more of the same’ education.

Through the digital revolution, technology is once again racing ahead of education and those without the right knowledge and skills are struggling. That thousands of university graduates are unemployed – while British employers cannot find people with the skills they need – shows that better degrees do not automatically translate into better skills, better jobs and better lives. The rolling processes of automation, hollowing out middle-skilled jobs, particularly for routine tasks, have radically altered the nature of work. For those with the right knowledge and skills, this is liberating and exciting. In India for instance, online providers have picked up the outsourced functions of traditional corporate and public enterprises. But for those who are insufficiently prepared, it can mean joblessness or the scourge of vulnerable and insecure work: zero-hours contracts without benefits, insurance, pension or prospects.

There is an urgent need for policymakers and educators to once again break free from short-term fixes and instead focus on the big trends that will shape the future of education. The contributions in this collection explore these major trends, and each is framed by the experience of practitioners on the ground in our separate collection Views from the classroom . Only when policy is aligned with the best research and the experiences of teachers can it begin to reshape an education system fit for the challenges of our times.

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Agile government: the role of public affairs education

New Zealand's education delusion: how bad ideas ruined a once world-leading school system

For IEEE Members

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Participants at a breakout session discuss ideas for how to make concrete, chemicals, and single-use packaging more sustainable during ERVA’s Engineering Materials for a Sustainable Future visioning event, held in July.

A quick glance at the news headlines each morning might convey that the world is in crisis. Challenges include climate-change threats to human infrastructure and habitats; cyberwarfare by state and nonstate actors attacking energy sources and health care systems; and the global water crisis, which is compounded by the climate crisis. Perhaps the biggest challenge is the rapid advance of artificial intelligence and what it means for humanity.

As people grapple with those and other issues, they typically look to policymakers and business leaders for answers. However, no true solutions can be developed and implemented without the technical expertise of engineers.

Encouraging visionary, futuristic thinking is the function of the Engineering Research Visioning Alliance . ERVA is an initiative of the U.S. National Science Foundation ’s Directorate for Engineering , for which I serve as principal investigator. IEEE is one of several professional engineering societies that are affiliate partners.

Engineers are indispensable architects

Engineers are not simply crucial problem-solvers; they have long proven to be proactive architects of the future. For example, Nobel-winning physicists discovered the science behind the sensors that make modern photography possible. Engineers ran with the discovery, developing technology that NASA could use to send back clear pictures from space, giving us glimpses of universes far beyond our line of sight. The same tech enables you to snap photos with your cellphone.

As an engineer myself, I am proud of our history of not just making change but also envisioning it.

In the late 19th century, electrical engineer Nikola Tesla had envisioned wireless communication, lighting, and power distribution.

As early as 1900, civil engineer John Elfreth Watkins predicted that by 2000 we would have such now-commonplace innovations as color photography, wireless telephones, and home televisions (and even TV dinners), among other things.

“If we are going to successfully tackle today’s most vexing global challenges, engineers cannot be relegated to playing a reactive role.”

Watkins embodied an engineer’s curiosity and prescience, but too often today, we spend the lion’s share of our time with technical tinkering and not enough on the bigger picture.

If we are going to successfully tackle today’s most vexing global challenges, engineers cannot be relegated to playing a reactive role. We need to completely reimagine how nearly everything works. And because complex problems are multifaceted, we must do so in a multidisciplinary fashion.

We need big ideas, future-focused thinking with the foresight to transform how we live, work, and play—a visionary mindset embraced and advanced by engineers who leverage R&D to solve problems and activate discoveries . We need a different attitude from that of the consummate practitioners we typically imagine ourselves to be. We need the mindset of the futurist.

Futuristic thinking transforms society

A futurist studies current events and trends to determine not just predictions but also possibilities for the future. The term futurist has a long connection with science fiction, going back to the early 20th century, personified in such figures as writer H.G. Wells .

While many literary figures’ predictions have proven fanciful (though some, like Elfreth’s, have come true), engineers and scientists have engaged in foresight for generations, introducing new ways to look at our world, and transforming society along the way.

Futuristic thinking pushes the boundaries of what we can currently imagine and conceive. In an era of systemic crises, there is a seemingly paradoxical but accurate truth: It has become impractical to think too pragmatically.

It is especially counterintuitive to engineers, as we are biased toward observable, systematic thinking. But it is a limitation we have overcome through visionary exploits of the past—and one we must overcome now, when the world needs us.

Overcoming systematic thinking

Four times each year, ERVA convenes engineers, scientists, technologists, ethicists, social scientists, and federal science program leads to engage in innovative visioning workshops. We push hard and ask the experts to expand their thinking beyond short-term problems and think big about future possibilities. Some examples of challenges we have addressed—and the subsequent comprehensive reports on recommended research direction for visionary, futuristic thinking—are:

• The Role of Engineering to Address Climate Change. Our first visioning event considered how engineers can help mitigate the effects of rising global temperatures and better reduce carbon emissions. We envisioned how we could use artificial intelligence and other new technologies, including some revolutionary sensors, to proactively assess weather and water security events, decarbonize without disruptions to our energy supply, and slow the pace of warming.
• Engineering R&D Solutions for Unhackable Infrastructure. We considered a future in which humans and computing systems were connected using trustworthy systems, with engineering solutions to self-identity threats and secure systems before they become compromised. Solutions for unhackable infrastructure should be inherent rather than bolted-on, integrated across connected channels, and activated from the system level to wearables. Actions must be taken now to ensure trustworthiness at every level so that the human element is at the forefront of future information infrastructure.
• Engineering Materials for a Sustainable Future. In our most recent report, we discussed a future in which the most ubiquitous, noncircular materials in our world—concrete, chemicals, and single-use packaging—are created using sustainable materials. We embraced the use of organic and reusable materials, examining what it is likely to take to shift production, storage, and transportation in the process. Again, engineers are required to move beyond current solutions and to push the boundaries of what is possible.

ERVA is tackling new topics in upcoming visioning sessions on areas as diverse as the future of wireless competitiveness, quantum engineering, and improving women’s health.

We have an open call for new visioning event ideas. We challenge the engineering community to propose themes for ERVA to explore so we can create a road map of future research priorities to solve societal challenges. Engineers are needed to share their expertise, so visit our website to follow this critical work. It is time we recaptured that futurist spirit.

• Q&A: U.S. Science Foundation Director on His Vision for the Agency ›
• NSF Engineering Alliance Supports IEEE’s Plan on Climate Change ›
• Climate Change Is NSF Engineering Alliance’s Top Research Priority ›

Dorota A. Grejner-Brzezinska , an ERVA principal investigator, is vice president for knowledge enterprise and a professor in the department of civil, environmental, and geodetic engineering at Ohio State University , in Columbus.

The New Shadow Hand Can Take a Beating

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The future of brain science

Guest Sergiu Pasca is a physician-scientist who turns skin cells into stem cells and then into brain tissues he calls “organoids” and “assembloids” in order to study psychiatric and neurological illness in a dish instead of in living human beings.

With this knowledge, Pasca hopes to develop new treatments for conditions ranging from schizophrenia and autism spectrum disorders to chronic pain, he tells host Russ Altman in this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast.

Listen on your favorite podcast platform:  

Related : Sergiu Pasca , professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences

[00:00:00] Sergiu Pasca: For Timothy Syndrome in particular, because this is, you know, the paper that is coming out next week. We got such a good understanding of the biology of this condition through these human cellular models, organoids, assembloids, 2D cultures, that at one point the therapeutic opportunity just became self-evident.

[00:00:18] It just became clear this is exactly what we need to do. And this came like three, four years ago. And then through a series of experiments that we've done, we've now developed a strategy that can essentially reverse almost all the phenotypes, all the defects that we've discovered in patient cells over the years, literally within some of them within hours, some of them within days, but they're essentially just like completely reversing them.

[00:00:47] Russ Altman: This is Stanford Engineering's The Future of Everything. And I'm your host Russ Altman. If you're enjoying the show or if it's helped you in any way, please consider rating and reviewing it to share your thoughts. Your input is extremely valuable and it'll help others learn about the show. 

[00:01:01] Today, Professor Sergiu Pasca from Stanford University will tell us how his group has figured out how to take skin cells, turn them into brain cells, and then study some of the most vexing psychiatric and neurological diseases in a dish with the idea of generating new therapies. It's The Future of Brain Science. 

[00:01:22] Before we get started, please remember to rate and review if the show has helped you in any way. That will help us immensely.

[00:01:35] Psychiatric and neurological diseases are some of the toughest diseases to study and to treat. And those are related. Because we don't have good ways to study the brain. Nobody wants to give up a piece of their brain for scientific research. It's really hard to understand what goes wrong at the molecular and cellular level, and how we can invent new ways to treat terrible diseases such as chronic pain, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and depression.

[00:02:03] Well, Sergiu Pasca is a professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. And his group has figured out how to take skin cells, make them go backwards in time to become stem cells, which have many potential future fates, and then get those stem cells to differentiate into little pieces of brain. His group has shown that they can do this reliably, and they can generate little circuits where the cells talk to one another and recapitulate some of the deficits that are seen in patients who have certain diseases. It's an amazing story, and you're about to hear about it. 

[00:02:43] Sergiu. You've developed this amazing ability to grow living tissue that mimics parts of the human brain. First of all, how does that work? Then we can talk about why you did it and what we can use it for. But tell me, how do we grow little pieces of brain? 

[00:02:57] Sergiu Pasca: Well, the process starts by generally taking a tiny skin biopsy, so just taking a few cells from the skin of any individual, say a patient with autism or with schizophrenia, bringing those cells into the lab and then essentially doing some mumbo jumbo to the cells, you know, playing cellular alchemy and pushing those cells back in time to essentially turn into stem cell like cells. Um, and the reason why we do this is because stem cells have this remarkable ability of turning into any other cell types. So once you have the stem cells from any individual, not only can you store them and share them with others, but now you can gently guide them in a dish to become brain cells.

[00:03:43] And we spent essentially the past fifteen years designing strategies to turn these stem cells from any individual, into various types of brain stems and ever, brain cells into various ever more complicated preparations. 

[00:03:59] Russ Altman: Fantastic. So a couple of questions to follow up. I think everybody knows that the part of what makes the brain is there's a very complicated architecture of the cells where they are and how they interact with one another.

[00:04:11] Are you able to get that to happen or are these just individual cells sitting in a dish, but not talking to each other and not creating the kinds of structures that we see when we do, you know, uh, studies of brain tissue?

[00:04:24] Sergiu Pasca: That's a very good question. So about fifteen years or so ago, we were doing exactly that, kind of like at the bottom of a dish, a flat layer of brain cells. Um, let's say cortical neurons, so neurons of the cerebral cortex. Of course, they're great. I mean, they look like neurons. They're human neurons, you know, their shape and their properties were those of human neurons. But they're not able to communicate with each other the way they do in the three-dimensional brain.

[00:04:49] And more importantly, as you pointed out, they're not able to communicate with neurons at a distance because what makes the human brain unique, or the brain really unique, is that unlike other organs that are more homogeneous, let's say the liver, it does matter which part you're actually probing or you're looking at.

[00:05:06] And so what we've actually slowly done is first of all, generate three dimensional preparations that are now known as organoids that resemble parts of the nervous system. Let's say parts of the spinal cord or parts of the cerebral cortex. And that we spend, you know, five, six, seven years, kept refining those methods.

[00:05:26] And at one point we really became interested in studying cell interactions. We thought that was important, that forming circuits from the cells will be, um, enabling for so many applications. So then we introduced what are now known as assembloids. 

[00:05:42] Russ Altman: Assembloids. 

[00:05:43] Sergiu Pasca: Assembloids, which are essentially assembled three dimensional cultures where, let's say, you, uh, make a three-dimensional culture that resembles a simple cortex. And one that resembles the spinal cord. And then you culture them separately. You provide different cues and small molecules so that they become those cells. And then at the right time, which, you know, depends a little bit on the brain region, you start putting them together. And by putting them together, literally you put them in physical proximity to each other.

[00:06:13] And initially we thought we're going to have to guide, and we're going to have to like tell the cells what to do, kind of like in engineering, right? Provide the blueprint. Of course, what we got wrong at that time was like in biology, the cells already know what to do. So once you actually put them together, there are this emergent properties.

[00:06:32] The cells will recognize where they actually have to go and they'll start project and find, for instance, motor neurons, connect with them. And then if you put a third part, let's say a piece of muscle that you get from a biopsy, then those neurons will connect to the muscle. And suddenly the muscle was just starts twitching in a dish under the control of cortical neurons.

[00:06:51] So I was like really exciting because suddenly you can witness the remarkable power of self-organization for a process that, to be honest, we don't even understand that well. It's not like we know how the rules of assembly of those, but once you provide, so like the minimal conditions necessary, you unleash these forces of self-organization.

[00:07:12] Russ Altman: So the cells really want to be a brain, they want to be a spinal cord, and you just have to let them do it almost. 

[00:07:19] Sergiu Pasca: Precisely. 

[00:07:20] Russ Altman: So one, one final preparatory question is when you're creating these individual organoids or that will become part, I guess, become part of an assembloid, does it always have to be just one type of cell?

[00:07:30] You talked about livers and even livers, as we know, are made out of multiple cell types. So how advanced is your ability to make a mix of cells, for example, the cells that are feeding the neurons or that are supporting the infrastructure of the brain? Or is that a future topic? 

[00:07:47] Sergiu Pasca: Well, I mean, one way to look at you know, brain developments is that, um, there are multiple niches. There are multiple places where cells are born. Um, and those niches will have cues for those stem cells to generate the diversity of cells. They're all kind of like coming from there. Let's take the example of the cerebral cortex, like the outer layer of the brain. The region of the brain where, you know, we think that all of our cognition and what makes us human comes from.

[00:08:13] Most of the cells in the cerebral cortex are born, uh, in a region close to the ventricle, a ventricular zone, where there are these progenitors called radial glia. This radial glia will essentially generate almost all the cells in the cerebral cortex in a sequential manner. For instance, they'll first make deep layers of the cortex and then upper layer of the cortex, and the cells will organize themselves in a sequential manner.

[00:08:38] So, as you can imagine, if you specify, um, the generation of this particular type of stem cells, you can expect to generate all of the cells. 

[00:08:48] Russ Altman: Fantastic. 

[00:08:49] Sergiu Pasca: Now that doesn't mean that you get all of them, because some of the cells do come from outside of the nervous system. So for instance, microglia, the resident immune cells of the brain are not even born in the brain. They're born far away. They're mesodermal in origin. So if you really want to put them in, you have to make them separately. And then insert them into this preparation. 

[00:09:07] Russ Altman: Okay. 

[00:09:08] Sergiu Pasca: And, uh, but it, so that becomes again, an assembloid to a large extent. 

[00:09:12] Russ Altman: Okay, great. Well, this is, I could go on forever, but that has set us up beautifully for the conversation, which is why did you do this? And what are you using these brain tissues to do? 

[00:09:24] Sergiu Pasca: Well, you know, deep in core, I think what I am is a frustrated physician. And that's what I think I've been, and I continue to be. And for me, as I was doing my medical training, I was, you know, in awe of what molecular biology can do for most branches of medicine, as you very well known.

[00:09:44] And, you know, I was training at a time where we started to see some of the first rationally designed drugs in oncology, where literally, you know, you weren't just like hitting all the cells, you know, so that they will all die, but you will have a pathway. Uh, and you'll have a targeted, uh, therapeutic that will just cure like the cancer.

[00:10:06] And then, you know, you go on the, you know, oncology and then you move and you go in psychiatry, uh, to see patients. And it's almost like a completely different world. Their disorders are not defined molecularly or cellularly in any way, they're defined behaviorally. And they're, um, you know, also most of the drugs that we already have, have not been designed rationally, have not been discovered because we understand the pathophysiology, but rather in reverse, you know, they're found by chance.

[00:10:36] And then we've kind of like tried to figure out how they work and what the disease is like based on that. And that was really frustrating for me, I must say. Um, and it became clear that the reason why psychiatry and neurology have been left behind versus all other branches of medicine is to a large extent because we cannot access the human brain.

[00:10:54] Russ Altman: Right. People don't usually want to give you a sample of their brain to study. 

[00:10:58] Sergiu Pasca: They don't. 

[00:11:00] Russ Altman: For understandable reasons. 

[00:11:01] Sergiu Pasca: For very understandable reasons and nor do they give you one to test a drug, you know, before you do it. And that was really, uh, frustrating for me at that time. And I was doing a lot of experiments in animals, uh, cat and rats and animals.

[00:11:16] And it was incredibly powerful to be able to like stick an electrode into the brain of an animal and listen to electrical activity. Right? As the animal was performing various tasks. And it becomes clear that if we really want to understand these neuropsychiatric diseases, ultimately we will need to listen very carefully, very closely to those neurons and understand the molecular basis for that.

[00:11:41] And at that time, as I was finishing my clinical training, there was this remarkable breakthrough that was published around that time. That certainly still sounded at science fiction. A lot of people didn't believe that it was true, which was this idea that you could take any cell, a skin cell, and turn it into a stem cell.

[00:12:03] And it was, as you can imagine, outrageous because everybody thought, and it was dogma at that time, that development is a one-way street, you can never go back. Once a cell has been formed, you just don't go back to become a stem cell. It would be a liability to like forming cancers. And yet, you know, Yamanaka showed convincingly that you could do that.

[00:12:24] And in my mind, that kind of like clicked. Uh, and realize that it would be a remarkable opportunity for us in psychiatry to form, uh, to build brain cells from individuals in a non-invasive way without really accessing their brains. 

[00:12:38] Russ Altman: Yep. 

[00:12:39] Sergiu Pasca: And that essentially derailed my career to a large extent. And I sort of like gave myself fifteen years of like trying to do basic science. Hoping that, uh, you know, we'll make some advances and I'm coming very close to those fifteen years, so we'll see how it goes. But for me, it really came out of this frustration that I felt we were making much biological progress in understanding this. 

[00:13:01] Russ Altman: Okay. So let's go right to it. So if you take the skin of somebody who has, let's say, bipolar disorder or schizophrenia, and if you make a little piece of brain, it's not the whole brain, it's a little piece. Can you tell that there are problems with that, with those cells that might relate to the fact that the patient has schizophrenia? Because that's, that would be remarkable, because then you could sprinkle drugs on top of it. I use that as a metaphor, of course. And see, does that fix whatever is wrong? So, does a schizophrenic patient, when they go through this process of giving them, giving you their skin cells, do you wind up with little pieces of brain that you that have relevance to schizophrenia?

[00:13:40] Sergiu Pasca: Well, the challenge with that approach generally is that we wouldn't even really know what to look for. 

[00:13:47] Russ Altman: Right, right. 

[00:13:48] Sergiu Pasca: You know, like for a patient with bipolar, how would we know that we found something? And then that was really the challenge in the beginning because a lot of people said like, well, sure you can make the cells, but how are we going to know?

[00:13:59] So actually choosing the disease that you study, uh, judiciously is actually crucial. So what we actually did is we anchored it in genetics, actually. We went back and we thought, well, there are genetic forms of psychiatric disease, highly penetrant disorders, where if you have this mutation, you will certainly be very sick.

[00:14:20] And some of those mutations are in genes that we kind of know what they do overall. So we could test the function of those cells and the classic example, the one that we focused on fifteen years ago. 

[00:14:31] Russ Altman: Yes. 

[00:14:32] Sergiu Pasca: Is this rare form of autism and epilepsy called Timothy Syndrome, which is caused by a mutation in a calcium channel. And calcium channel, as the name implies, they carry calcium inside the cells.

[00:14:43] Russ Altman: Yep. 

[00:14:44] Sergiu Pasca: So we thought if we're going to be able to make neurons from this patient, we could actually measure how calcium goes inside the cells. And if there's something abnormal, we'll know what to look for. 

[00:14:53] Russ Altman: Right. So you have the hook there that you know what you're expecting, where the abnormality might be.

[00:14:59] Sergiu Pasca: Precisely. At least we have some sort of, you know, benchmarking that we can do. Not that we would know what would come afterwards, but it would tell us at least that there is something valid about these models. And that's exactly what we did early on. And then of course, continued characterizing the cells.

[00:15:15] And you can find all kinds of like defects now we know, not just in how the cells handle calcium, but how the cells are moving, for instance, throughout the nervous system, how they're making connections with each other. And once you find some of these defects, whether they're like in organoids or in assembloids, then you can really start contemplating the idea, let's try to reverse them.

[00:15:33] Let's try to sprinkle specific drugs or, you know, find other therapeutics to reverse them. 

[00:15:39] Russ Altman: Yes. 

[00:15:39] Sergiu Pasca: With the idea that if you were to reverse those in a dish or in some of these models, they will have an effect in patients. Uh, and of course that step has not yet been done. Nobody has really, went all the way. We're getting close, but nobody has really gone all the way to saying, okay, we'll reverse this now in a dish. Let's move into a patient and show that this will work. 

[00:15:58] Russ Altman: Fantastic. Okay. So you have some big news coming out around now. Can you give us a little flavor as we close this first segment? What's the latest things that coming out of the lab that you're most excited about?

[00:16:12] Sergiu Pasca: Yeah, I mean, for the past ten, fifteen years, essentially what we did, I feel, has been building tools to a large extent. And then paradoxically, my lab is probably much more well known as a tool building lab than I wish. I don't consider myself a tool builder. I never really wanted to build tools, to be honest. I wanted to understand the pathophysiology of disease.

[00:16:35] All these years of actually using these novel tools or trying to understand the biology of these disorders are starting to pan out. In the sense that, for Timothy Syndrome in particular, because this is, uh, you know, the paper that is coming out next week, we got such a good understanding of the biology of this condition through this human cellular models, organoids, assembloids, 2D cultures, that at one point, the therapeutic, opportunity just became self-evident.

[00:17:04] Russ Altman: Wow. 

[00:17:04] Sergiu Pasca: It just became clear. This is exactly what we need to do. And this came like three, four years ago. And then through a series of experiments that we've done, we've now developed a strategy that can essentially reverse almost all the phenotypes, all the defects that we've discovered in patient cells, uh, over the years, literally within, some of them within hours, some of them within days. But they're essentially just like, uh, completely reversing them.

[00:17:28] And I think that's very powerful. Of course, it poses all kinds of questions of like, what do you do next? There's not a very good animal model for this disease. So how do you test before you go into patients? And that's where another tool that we were developing in parallel came uh, to help. Which is, uh, you know, most of the therapeutics really do need to be tested in a living organism, in vivo, rather than just in a dish.

[00:17:50] It's very important. We know that already. A lot of failures come from the fact that something works really well in the dish. You go in a living organism, it doesn't work, or it has like unanticipated side effects. So how do you do that? How do you test something, you know, while keeping the patient safe? How do you test it on human patient cells without harming the patient? 

[00:18:09] So, a few years ago, we devised a strategy where we actually can take some of these organoids, but then transplant them into animals. We put them into a rat early in development, so that you essentially build a unit of human cortex into that rat. So almost a third of a rat hemisphere will essentially have human tissue. 

[00:18:28] Russ Altman: Hemisphere of its brain. 

[00:18:31] Sergiu Pasca: Of a rat. Yes. So you can do an MRI and you can see that a third of a hemisphere now has human tissue that we transplanted there early on. And it's vascularized, it receives sensory input, you can move the whiskers of the rat.

[00:18:43] Russ Altman: I'm going to bookmark putting a human tissue, brain tissue, into a rat for later on in our discussion, but I just wanted to bookmark that. Keep going, keep going. 

[00:18:53] Sergiu Pasca: But essentially now the human cells, the human neurons, uh, are integrated into the rat circuitry. And the reason why that is important is because now you, if you have a therapeutic, uh, for that disease, you can come and inject it into the rat, so in an in vivo system, but then look at the effect on human cells. And you can envision that it could be exactly the patient that you plan on treating. 

[00:19:19] Russ Altman: Yep. Right. 

[00:19:20] Sergiu Pasca: And then a week later you can get out the tissue and say, has there been an effect? Is the drug working? Is it having unanticipated side effects, like an immune reaction or other? So I think that is a very powerful way, uh, to actually test these drugs before we move into the clinic. 

[00:19:38] Russ Altman: Yes. 

[00:19:39] Sergiu Pasca: And so that's one of the things that we've done for Timothy Syndrome in particular. As we've had all these in vitro studies at one point, we were like, what is next? Where are we going to do? How are we going to get into? 

[00:19:49] Russ Altman: And for just to finish up for this part of the conversation, do the rats that you generated have brain tissue from patient's skin who had Timothy Syndrome? 

[00:20:00] Sergiu Pasca: Exactly.

[00:20:02] Russ Altman: This is The Future of Everything with Russ Altman. More with Sergiu Pasca next.

[00:20:20] Welcome back to The Future of Everything. I'm Russ Altman, and I'm speaking with Professor Sergiu Pasca from Stanford University. In the last segment, Sergiu told us about his amazing ability to take skin cells and turn them into small pieces of human brain tissue that can be studied for disease and for new therapies.

[00:20:37] In this segment, he'll tell us how complex these brain circuits can get, and some new results showing that they're even able to model the complex circuits like the perception of pain. He's also going to address the ethical issues about manipulating what are peculiar to humans, brain cells. And also he'll talk about how his group is sharing their technologies so that brain scientists all over the world can benefit.

[00:21:03] Sergiu. There's a lot of things that go wrong in the brain, and it's not always as simple. It's sometimes a complex set of connections between cells. They call them, like, neural circuits. So, where is our ability to, uh, engineer these more complex communication pathways that are important to understand certain diseases?

[00:21:22] Sergiu Pasca: You're right on point, because most psychiatric disorders are likely gonna arise not from, you know, drastic changes to cell composition of the brain. It's not like parts of the nervous system are missing, but rather arise from faulty communication between neurons in specific circuits. So it's becoming really important that with our human cell models, we're building ever more complex circuitry in a dish that allows us to probe some of this mechanism.

[00:21:51] So, you know, initially the assemblers that we were building had just like two parts. You would just put them in close proximity. Cells will migrate from one part to the other or they'll project. Then of course we wanted to put like more parts because most of the circuits have more, um, uh, more components.

[00:22:05] So we put three parts, cortex, spinal cord, the muscle. But then of course, some of these pathways have more than three. And actually adding a fourth component was not trivial. It took several years. to create both the components and, you know, kind of like the technology that is necessary to grow some of these cultures for longer periods of time.

[00:22:24] And just to give you an example of something that we've, uh, put together quite recently has been to actually build a sensory pathway, a somatosensory pathway from four parts. And somatosensory, uh, or somatosensation, essentially sends information from the periphery to the nervous system. So for instance, tactile information or pain information or temperature is sent by terminals in our skin, uh, that send those signals to the spinal cord, the spinal cords project it all the way in the middle of the brain in a structure called the thalamus, and then the thalamus will send it to the cortex where that sensation ultimately arises. And so there are multiple components. So we spent several years making each of this component, components of the circuit, and then we put them together. And recently we've succeeded in assembling the entire pathway, uh, that actually, uh, can respond to pain stimuli, pain like stimuli.

[00:23:25] Um, so you can actually make a sensory organoid, a spinal cord organoid, a thalamus organoid, and a cortical organoid. You put them together and form a somatosensory assembly. 

[00:23:36] Russ Altman: So earlier in our conversation, you were telling us about this amazing capability for the cells. You just have to give them the chance to be successful and they figure out what to do.

[00:23:46] In this case of these four different cells, was that still the case that they knew what to do? Or do things get sufficiently complicated that you kind of have to nudge them a little bit more than you do in the previous cases? 

[00:23:57] Sergiu Pasca: Oh, actually, again, they know what to do. 

[00:23:59] Russ Altman: Wow. 

[00:24:00] Sergiu Pasca: I mean, they know what to do and we wouldn't know how to instruct them, to be honest. We're still like pretty ignorant about this. But the cell, some of the circuits are so ancestral and so well conserved, that probably their evolutionary mechanism in place to establish some of that basic connectivity, uh, almost intrinsically. 

[00:24:17] Russ Altman: And I find this so exciting because based on your story with the Timothy Syndrome, you now can create pain or create touch, and then you can try to manipulate with drugs to see if you can modify the experience in a dish, and then presumably, modify the experience in the rat and then the humans. Is that the kind of plan you imagine? 

[00:24:39] Sergiu Pasca: Absolutely. And you know, it's quite interesting because once you put all these four components together, you know, they connect with each other and the reason why we know they're connecting with each other is because if you look at the activity of the neurons across the four components, they become synchronized. Rather than each kind of like sparkling their own kind of like song, suddenly, they're all talking to each other, and you see this emergent property, uh, this emergent activity of the four-part component. And then, what you can do, is you can sprinkle in some of the stimuli that we know are mimicking uh, let's say pain. So, you know, one thing that people, 

[00:25:15] Russ Altman: We'll call it pepper. 

[00:25:17] Sergiu Pasca: Exactly. So you can take capsaicin from like hot pepper. And if you sprinkle that, which by the way, if you add it even to your skin, it's painful. But if you add it here, if you add it here, then you'll suddenly just see that the first component lights up the sensory one and it transmits activity throughout the entire pathway.

[00:25:35] So that gives us, you know, some indication that indeed it actually works. And then what you can do even more is you can now model diseases. And so there are mutations that cause either loss of pain, or exacerbation of pain. Both of which are bad, obviously. And you can induce those mutations that are generally in sodium channels.

[00:25:55] You can actually induce those mutations in this preparation and suddenly see that there's either, you know, this synchronization of activities, so the sensory systems are not, you know, processing the stimuli right, or there's over processing. So it gives us really, for the first time, the ability to watch this communication between the sensory neurons and the circuitry right in front of our eyes, but with human cells. 

[00:26:18] Russ Altman: And I can see how the adding of four, it's just the beginning because anybody who's a clinician knows that after patients are exposed to pain chronically, they start to get psychiatric responses to the pain.

[00:26:29] You know, part of the pain is their high-level processing of the experience of pain. I've even had guests on the show talking about these, and you can imagine that you're going to need to build level five, six, and seven so that we can start to understand how those raw stimulation of pain leads to changes in how you process information at a much higher level. I mean, I'm not, I don't mean to give you any homework, but I could imagine that this could be on the list. 

[00:26:54] Sergiu Pasca: Absolutely. And right now our system, and I think this is important to clarify also so to not create any confusion, is the valence of pain, the sensation of pain. It's usually processed in other brain regions.

[00:27:07] This is, this information is taken from the cortex and it's processed and it gives us the sensation of pain. We don't have that yet in the system.

[00:27:14] Russ Altman: Right. 

[00:27:15] Sergiu Pasca: That will have to be built exactly as you said, separately. And in fact, many of the circuits are loop circuits. They're going up in, in loop, which is really important.

[00:27:23] And so we've been working quite diligently in trying to build ever more complex circuits. Of course, they're all in vitro, so they're never going to have the full, you know, complexity of an in vivo circuit, but we also don't want the full complexity. We want the system to be sufficiently complex, yet simple for us to use to dissect the molecular components and move forward therapeutically. 

[00:27:46] Russ Altman: So as I promised a few minutes ago, I definitely want to go to the ethics of this because, you know, the headline here, well, the headline is really that you're addressing diseases that we didn't have an ability to address before. But another headline is that we're taking human, pieces of human brain cells and we're putting them in animals and basically you're manipulating a lot of things that some people may consider very sacrosanct, very human and very peculiar to humans. So tell me a little bit about how as a scientist and a physician, you have navigated some of the ethical issues about making sure that your work is accepted and that people understand what you are doing and where you, if you're drawing any lines, where you're drawing those, what's the situation there?

[00:28:27] Sergiu Pasca: Yeah, no, this is a very important component. To be honest, I never really kind of like thought or planned for it as we were like moving forward. But you know, the paradox is as follows. Psychiatric disorders are to a large extent uniquely human, or you know, most of them, if not all of them are uniquely human.

[00:28:45] And so, as you can imagine, if you want to understand this, the models that we have for those disorders need to be as human as possible. And yet, the more human they become, the more uncomfortable we feel about creating something that is really human like experience. And so, certainly we're not there with any of the preparations that we have.

[00:29:05] But as our preparations are getting ever more complex, there are all kinds of concerns that are being raised about this. Some of them, you know, very careful, uh, one, some of them anchored in misunderstanding of what it's actually done. But I think that is exactly the moment when you have to have conversations with, first of all, the broader scientific community, and then with the public itself.

[00:29:30] I think the public has a responsibility to be part of these conversations. You know, most of this work is paid by federal grants. And I think the general public has, uh, the right to be involved in this conversation. 

[00:29:41] Russ Altman: What kind of feedback have you gotten? Oh, I'm sure you've given popular talks like to, you know, to, to the lay public, how do they respond?

[00:29:49] Sergiu Pasca: So generally, I think like the public understands really well what the motivator, I think if the motivation comes through very clearly. Uh, I think it's, uh, you know, everybody will connect. Everybody knows somebody who's suffering from a psychiatric disease, right? I mean, this are affecting one in five individuals. And everybody knows just how devastating these conditions are and that we will need some solutions.

[00:30:11] So I think people will understand, but at the same time, this type of research needs to be done responsibly. Because we are crossing various boundaries, you know, you could say by building ever more complex circuitry. And I think in vitro, there are fewer concerns that I think are realistic, uh, in the sense that sure, the circuit can get very complex, but there's no sensory, uh, input that is like, there's no output that is meaningful, it's very difficult to do both.

[00:30:38] But you can envision that if you transplant into an animal, uh, there is another series of like controversies that are arising. So what I've done is, first of all, we've had a lot of conversations with others. I gave a series of public talks, including a TED talk, which was a really important component of engaging already the public. And, uh, just recently, uh, I co-organized a meeting at Asilomar in kind of like the historical, uh, side where some of this conversation actually started with like Berg doing, 

[00:31:09] Russ Altman: The 1970’s when genetic engineering became possible. Yes? 

[00:31:13] Sergiu Pasca: Yeah. So together with my colleague here at Stanford, Hank Greely, we co organized this meeting at, uh, at Asilomar where we brought together not just scientists from the field, but actually scientists from outside the field, people who are studying consciousness, philosophers, evolutionary biologists, uh, social scientists to really think, uh, you know, very openly about this.

[00:31:36] And we're putting together a series of, uh, guidelines, uh, that we're in the process of like writing up, that hopefully, uh, will catalyze farther discussions. And our hope is that in the future we'll have an even bigger meeting that will engage even more broadly, uh, you know, families of patients, but other scientists across the field and neuroscientists in particular as we think about these issues. 

[00:32:01] Russ Altman: Fantastic. Well, we're a little bit, we're almost out of time, but I wanted to give you thirty seconds to talk about the very exciting prospect that you are now sharing this technology so that others can use it. And just give me a fifteen, twenty seconds on what's the idea about sharing these technologies?

[00:32:16] Sergiu Pasca: Yeah, well, you know, as you know, I realized very quickly that, uh, as we were developing technologies, and again, as I mentioned, I never envisioned being a tool developer. I don't consider myself a tool developer, but at one point, once we've had, you know, half a dozen or a dozen of these techniques put out, there are a lot of people who wanted to implement them.

[00:32:34] There are a lot of like troubleshooting, and these experiments are not trivial, you know, unlike like CRISPR where, you know, you can do your experiments like very quickly in two or three days and maybe even try them in the kitchen at home. These experiments require hundreds of days. 

[00:32:46] Russ Altman: Not for the kitchen. 

[00:32:47] Sergiu Pasca: And there's a lot of troubleshooting, and not in the kitchen. And so they require a lot of effort. And initially we've helped individual labs one by one. I mean, literally more than a hundred labs. Helping them to implement step by step the technique. At one point it became overwhelming. 

[00:33:01] And so what we did is through the center that I lead here at Stanford, the Stanford Brain Organogenesis Center, we started putting together a course, an international course where we would bring, you know, twenty-five students at a time and teach them essentially all the tricks of the trade.

[00:33:17] And within one week, and we prepare of course for months before because it's kind of like a cooking show, you know, I mean, we have all the components ready. They do the critical steps. They would never be able to do a hundred days long experiments in a week. But they land their critical steps. And when they come here, they also make a pledge that they will go back home and they will teach others at their own institutions.

[00:33:36] And that has, you know, beautiful amplifying effects because now there are hundreds and hundreds of alumni. I mean, I travel around the world and people come and say, oh, we've learned at the course, or we've learned from somebody who learned at the course. So it's been really remarkable and there's so much to do in neurology and psychiatry for a lifetime.

[00:33:54] So, and I think here at Stanford, we've always had a culture of like broadly and openly sharing whatever we developed early. So it, it really just aligned beautifully, I think, with the philosophy that we have here. 

[00:34:05] Russ Altman: Thanks to Sergiu Pasca. That was The Future of Brain Science. Thanks for tuning into this episode with over 250 episodes back in our archive. You can have instant access to lots of good conversations with brilliant people passionate about their work. If you're enjoying the show, or if it helps you in any way, please write and review and give it a five. You can connect with me on X or Twitter @RBAltman, and you can follow Stanford engineering @StanfordENG.

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What is the Future of Indian Engineering Education

By GNIOT Group

Indian engineering education system is set to undergo a major overhaul as the government is focused to Manufacturing and engineering sector in India which includes upgrade engineering colleges , improve faculty quality and provide better infrastructure for students. As this Sector is alligned with Governments MAKE IN INDIA mission , engineering education is set to grow in short term and long term.

Current Challenges to Engineering Education in India

Engineering education in India is currently facing three major challenges: a shortage of qualified instructors, lack of industry engagement and the low employability of graduates. The first challenge is a result of many qualified engineers retiring and not enough young people choosing engineering as a career . The second problem is that there aren’t enough companies willing to invest in hiring Indian engineers. And lastly, Indians who do take up engineering often don’t find good jobs because they didn’t study the right subjects. Several top level executives have conveyed that the solution lies in graduates being trained in fields like artificial intelligence, robotics and data analytics. These are the skills that are in high demand.

Discussion of the Present Situation and Future Needs

The India engineering education is not at par with the international standards. The teaching quality of India’s engineering colleges suffers due to the lack of good teachers, infrastructure, and facilities. The curricula are outdated and do not prepare students for the future. There is also a need for greater emphasis on vocational skills to meet the changing needs in the industry. India’s engineering colleges need to be linked up with the leading professional institutions and industries for a better interface between industry, academia and government. There are also a number of new engineering colleges in India which are running with out the approval of AICTE and UGC. These institutes need to be closed down as soon as possible.

The engineering colleges are good and better in India, but the quality of education is very poor. Many of the engineering colleges do not have good infrastructure, teachers are not well qualified. The educational system in India is not producing technically competent students.The government should have a uniform education system, which should be able to produce good quality engineers and doctors. There is no particular government institution that should be responsible for the development of technical education. The government should form an independent committee, which would be responsible for the development of technical education, along with the relevant engineering colleges.The government should take a step to develop infrastructure, laboratories and

faculty of engineering colleges and assign extra funding, so that the colleges can continue to provide good quality education.A government should fund the research and development, which can be done in higher institutions of technical education. A government should form a committee, which would be responsible for the development of technical education in the country.

The future of Indian engineering education is going to be a lot different from what it was in the past. This is because people are going to have an increased awareness of the role that engineers play in society. In addition, there will be more opportunities for engineers to get jobs and make a decent living. This is an exciting time for students who want to pursue careers in this field.

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