Defining the next generation of engineers

The ways engineers influence our lives today are so numerous, that it’s almost impossible to answer the seemingly simple question: what is an engineer?

A conventional definition reads something like the one found in The Cambridge Dictionary: “a person whose job is to design or build machines, engines, or electrical equipment, or things such as roads, railroads, or bridges.”

While building bridges is an example of what an engineer does, it doesn’t do justice to the vast and consequential nature of the impact engineers have, or how engineering has evolved through an industrial-driven era to a tech-driven one. Just think about the spectrum of things those engines they’re building are now powering—from unimaginably fast supercomputers to autonomous vehicles to clean chemical reactors. And sure, engineers still build bridges, but today bridges might refer to the broadband that connects underserved communities to needed educational resources or the telehealth device that connects a patient to their doctor.

With engineers increasingly essential to almost every aspect of humanity, it’s time to revise the conventional definition. Here’s how one engineering school, NYU Tandon, is rethinking research and education to cultivate the kind of unconventional engineers the world needs today.

1. Unconventional engineers need to break down department walls

Engineering disciplines have their own individual languages and conventions that can make collaboration difficult. A barrier can exist, for example, between chemical engineers, who speak the language of chemical reactions, and electrical engineers, who converse in mathematical equations. But some of the greatest innovation is occurring where disciplines collide. And while not “staying in your lane'' can be messy, engineers make some of the greatest strides in areas where different knowledge bases and skill sets come together in unexpected — and unconventional — ways.

At the NYU Tandon School of Engineering, faculty members and students are excited to collaborate at the intersection of different areas, like robotics, data science, and biomedical engineering to improve healthcare, or computer science and artificial intelligence to improve cybersecurity. So, while it’s certainly true that some civil engineers plan highways, and some computer engineers tackle the problems of operating systems, that’s just one small fraction of the story.

From bedside monitors to prosthetic knees, engineers have long been making valuable contributions to healthcare, and recently that has become even clearer, with telehealth pushed to the forefront during the COVID-19 pandemic, imaging techniques growing increasingly sophisticated, and complex surgical procedures being conducted with robotic technology. Those advances would not be possible without collaboration among multidisciplinary teams of engineers, technologists, and clinicians.

At NYU Tandon, for example, biomedical engineers and mechanical engineers are building microfluidic “organ on a chip” systems to model disease environments and study cell interactions. They’re making use of cells from individual cancer patients to create personalized, in-vitro disease models that can quickly provide key information about the potential efficacy of various treatment methods against a patient’s own specific cancer. Their roboticists are working to help doctors deploy advanced rehabilitation and assistive technologies for patients with mobility issues, neurological conditions such as Parkinson’s, and stroke damage. Data scientists are identifying inequities in the way patients from underserved communities access healthcare services, so policy makers can work to mitigate them.

NYU Tandon biomedical and mechanical engineers are making use of individual cancer patients’ cells to build “cancer on a chip” disease models that can quickly provide information about the potential efficacy of various treatment methods against a patient’s own cancer.

NYU Tandon biomedical and mechanical engineers are making use of individual cancer patients’ cells to build “cancer on a chip” disease models that can quickly provide information about the potential efficacy of various treatment methods against a patient’s own cancer.

But healthcare is just one of the areas in which reaching beyond discipline-specific departments and schools can be vital. NYU’s Center for Cybersecurity, for example, does not consider protecting online systems to be solely the domain of computer scientists and engineers: a collaboration between NYU School of Law, NYU Tandon School of Engineering, and other institutions, it’s training a new generation of cybersecurity professionals who grasp both the technical aspects of the field and its legal and social implications.

NYU Tandon is orienting their research and education around vital areas, and the intersections between them, that will help create safer, more sustainable, healthier urban communities.

NYU Tandon researcher Maurizio Porfiri studies zebrafish interactions to understand and create mathematical models of animal behavior—just one example of multiple complex systems he studies.

"But healthcare is just one of the areas in which reaching beyond discipline-specific departments and schools can be vital."

Tandon’s unconventional engineers are also working on problems that may not, on the surface, seem related to engineering at all — including using data science to help stop the spread of disinformation on the internet; ensuring more equitable hiring, housing, and criminal justice systems through responsible AI; and discovering new ways to make art.

2. Unconventional engineers see the patterns others miss

Maurizio Porfiri is an NYU Tandon Institute Professor with appointments in the Departments of Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering, Biomedical Engineering, and Civil & Urban Engineering, and as a core faculty member at the school’s Center for Urban Science and Progress. Even with the premise that it takes multidisciplinary expertise to solve important problems, it’s an impressive array for just one engineer. Perhaps even more impressive is the wide variety of research that Porfiri undertakes. Named to Popular Science’s “Brilliant 10” list for his work with biologically inspired aquatic robots, he has also delved into issues involving gun violence, smart materials, and COVID-19, among other topics that might not seem to have much in common on the surface. “Dig a little deeper,” Porfiri asserts, “and the commonality becomes clearer.”

“How do animals behave? How do people reach consensus? How does a pandemic spread? What happens when particles collide? These all involve dynamic, complex systems, and that’s the underlying layer,” he explains. “Once you decide upon the questions you want to answer — whatever those questions may be — you need to study the interactions taking place.”

Among some of the projects he has undertaken at the intersections of data and health, materials, and social behavior:

Engaging stroke patients in interesting citizen-science initiatives that can be integrated into their otherwise tedious physical therapy regimes with the use of haptic joysticks, thereby increasing compliance and improving the experience of telerehabilitation
Building a mathematical model specifically for the city’s unique social and transportation structures using data from New Rochelle — the New York suburb first seriously afflicted by COVID-19. His goal: to help health and government leaders make smart, up-to-date testing and contact-tracing decisions
Advancing the understanding of the sometimes surprising causal relationships among potentially contributing factors to firearm-related harm, such as prevalence of gun purchases, state legislation, media exposure, and perceptions of firearm
Predicting how the cascading effects of migration from flooded areas of Bangladesh will ultimately affect 1.3 million people across the country by 2050
Studying the remarkable structural properties of the Venus' flower basket sponge (E. aspergillum) to gain insight into how the organism's latticework of holes and ridges influences the hydrodynamics of seawater in its vicinity—work that could lead to advanced designs for buildings, bridges, marine vehicles, and anything that must respond safely to forces imposed by the flow of air or water

3. Unconventional engineers start with solution-oriented learning experiences

Learning to think unconventionally starts on Day One for NYU Tandon students. Participants in their Global Leaders and Scholars in STEM (GLASS) honors program, for example, are taught that their education comes with the potential and responsibility to defend and advance the world’s infrastructure, communities, economies, and planet. They choose the issue they want to tackle — based on one of the National Academy of Engineering’s Grand Challenges, like making solar energy economical or securing cyberspace, or one of the UN’s Global Challenges, such as providing clean water for all — and Tandon ensures they have the resources to take it on and find practical solutions. Similarly, the Vertically Integrated Projects (VIP) program allows students to choose from dozens of real-world hands-on projects and collaborate with peers from other majors.

The NYU Tandon Robotics Design Team, one of more than 30 Vertically Integrated Projects teams, tests their Mars rover design in Coney Island.

At Tandon, VIP students are actively:

Deploying Computer-Aided Design, 3D printing, circuit fabrication, and biomedical research to create a better way to preserve and transport donor lungs for transplant recipients
Prototyping customizable, low-cost orthotics for patients with limited mobility
Designing and building off-road vehicles from the ground up—and then racing them
Creating robots capable of navigating the surface of Mars . . . and a lot more.

*NYU Tandon Dean Jelena Kovačević with two students in the NYU Tandon MakerSpace.*

*NYU Tandon Dean Jelena Kovačević with two students in the NYU Tandon MakerSpace.*

“If I were to reimagine research at an engineering school from scratch, I would not start with departments; I would have self-forming teams working that would rise and sunset based on the critical issues of the time,” NYU Tandon Dean Jelena Kovačević explains. “At NYU Tandon, we have oriented our research and education around vital areas and the intersections between them, and that approach has resulted in a thriving research, teaching, and innovation ecosystem that gives me great hope for the future.”

This content was paid for and created by New York University, Tandon School of Engineering. The editorial staff of The Chronicle had no role in its preparation. Find out more about paid content.