Category Archives: Soapbox

Addressing societal challenges by engaging 100% of society’s intellectual capital

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Decorative photograph of author's research groupToday is International Women in Engineering Day (INWED).  I have written previously about the lack of progress in achieving gender equality in the engineering profession in most Western countries (see ‘Reflecting on the lack of women in engineering’ on March 16th 2022) and the seismic shift in attitudes required to increase the number of women in engineering at all levels (see ‘A big question for engineers’ on June 8th, 2016).  I can see signs of change locally.  My research group has hovered around an equal number of men and women for some years.  In the School of Engineering in Liverpool four women have been promoted to be professors in the last four years – though at a reception following an inaugural lecture given by one of the pair of women who were the first female professors in the School, I was gently admonished by a senior female colleague in another school about why it had taken so long.  Of course, she is right.  Progress is very slow and we need to do better.

Simone de Beauvoir wrote in her book, The Second Sex first published in 1949: ‘Representation of the world, like the world itself, is the work of men; they describe it from their own point of view, which they confuse with absolute truth.’  More than seventy years later, this still appears to be true, at least in the engineering profession who are responsible for the technology everyone uses everyday.  About twenty years ago, the then President of the US National Academy of Engineering, Bill Wulf said, ‘As a consequence of a lack of diversity [in engineering] we pay an opportunity cost, a cost in designs not thought of, in solutions not produced’.  However, diversity on its own is not enough, we have to be inclusive and treat everyone equally – as we would like to be treated ourselves.  If we do not engage women in the engineering enterprise then we ignore 50% of society’s intellectual capital and we cannot hope to solve the challenges facing society, in part because we will be confused about the truth.

Thank you to my two guest editors who reviewed this post for me.

Photo: Author’s research group in 2022.

 

Reasons I became an engineer: #4

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Images from the optical microscope showing the tracks of bacteria interacting with a surfaceThis is the last in a series of posts reflecting on my steps towards becoming an engineer.  At the end of the previous post, I described how I moved to Canada becoming a biomedical engineer in the Medical School at the University of Calgary.  It was a brief period of my career, because shortly after I started, I was encouraged to apply for a lectureship in mechanical engineering at my alma mater which I did successfully.  So, I returned to the University of Sheffield and started my career as an academic engineer.  I continued to work in biomedical engineering, focussing initially on cardiac mechanics [see ‘Tears in the heart’ on July 20th, 2022], then on osseointegrated prostheses [see ‘Turning the screw in dentistry’ on September 9th, 2020] and, more recently, on computational biology [see ‘Hierarchical modelling in engineering and biology’ on March 14th, 2018] and cellular dynamics [see ‘Label-free real-time tracking of individual bacterium’ on January 25th, 2023].  However, the dominant application area of my research has been aerospace engineering informed by, if not also influenced by, my experiences in the Royal Navy, including flying a jet trainer aircraft shortly before leaving.  In the last decade, I have been introduced to nuclear reactor engineering, both fission and fusion, and have used them as vehicles for developing research in digital engineering [see ‘Thought leadership in fusion engineering’ on October 9th, 2019].  This biographical series of posts has described my evolution as an engineer – it was not an ambition I ever had nor did anyone push me towards engineering but I have found that my way of thinking about problems is well-suited to engineering, or perhaps engineering has taught me a way of thinking.

Image: Figure 4 – Tracks (yellow lines) of the sections (purple circles) of four E. coli bacteria experiencing: (a) random diffusion above the surface; (b) rotary attachment; (c) lateral attachment; (d) static attachment. The dynamics of the four bacteria was monitored for approximately 20 s. The length of the scale bars is 5 μm. From Scientific Reports, 12:18146, 2022.

Slicing the cake equally or engineering justice

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Decorative photograph of sliced chocolate cakeIn support of the research being performed by one of the PhD students that I am supervising, I have been reading about ‘energy justice’.  Energy justice involves the equitable sharing of the benefits and burdens of the production and consumption of energy, including the fair treatment of individuals and communities when making decisions about energy.  At the moment our research is focussed on the sharing of the burdens associated with energy production and ways in which digital technology might improve decision-making processes.  Justice incorporates the distribution of rights, liberties, power, opportunities, and money – sometimes known as ‘primary goods’.  The theory of justice proposed by the American philosopher, John Rawls in the 1970’s is a recurring theme: that these primary goods should be distributed in a manner a hypothetical person would choose, if, at the time, they were ignorant of their own status in society.  In my family, this is the principle we use to divide cakes and other goodies equally between us, i.e., the person slicing the cake is the last person to take a slice.  While many in society overlook the inequalities and injustices that sustain their privileged positions, I believe that engineers have a professional responsibility to work towards the equitable distribution of the benefits and burdens of engineering on the individuals and communities, i.e., ‘engineering justice’ [see ‘Where science meets society‘ on September 2nd, 2015].  This likely involves creating a more diverse engineering profession which is better equipped to generate engineering solutions that address the needs of the whole of our global society [see ‘Re-engineering engineering‘ on August 30th, 2017].  However, it also requires us to rethink our decision-making processes to achieve  ‘engineering justice’.  There is a clear and close link to ‘procedure justice’ and ‘fair process’ [see ‘Advice to abbots and other leaders‘ November 13th, 2019] which involves listening to people, making a decision, then explaining the decision to everyone concerned.  In our research, we are interested in how digital environments, including digital twins and industrial metaverses, might enable wider and more informed involvement in decision-making about major engineering infrastructure projects, with energy as our starting point.

Sources:

Derbyshire J, Justice, fairness and why Rawls still matters today, FT Weekend, April 20th, 2023.

MacGregor N, How to transcend the culture wars, FT Weekend, April 29/30th, 2023.

Rawls J, A Theory of Justice, Cambridge MA: Belknap Press, 1971

Sovacool BK & Dworkin MH, Global Energy Justice: Problems, Principles and Practices, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014.

Image: https://www.alsothecrumbsplease.com/air-fryer-chocolate-cake/

Reasons I became an engineer: #3

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Decorative image of photoelastic fringe pattern in section of jet engine componentThis is third in a series of posts reflecting on my path to becoming an engineer.  In the previous one, I described how I left the Royal Navy and became a research assistant at the University of Sheffield in the Department of Mechanical Engineering [see ‘Reasons I became an engineer: #2’ on May 3rd, 2023].  My choice of research topic was dictated by the need for a job because I had to buy myself out of the Royal Navy after they had sponsored my undergraduate degree and I needed a salary to allow me to make the monthly payments.  So, I accepted the first job that was offered when I went back to the University to talk about my options.  I worked on investigating the load and stress distributions in threaded connections with a view to designing bolted joints that would be lighter, stronger and with a longer life.  We used a combination of finite element modelling [see ‘Did cubism inspire engineering analysis?’ on January 25th 2017] and three-dimensional photoelasticity, which is an experimental technique that has fallen out of fashion [see ‘Art and Experimental Mechanics’ on July 17th, 2012].  I was fortunate because all of my work as a research assistant went into my PhD thesis which although not ground-breaking resulted in several journal papers [see ’35 years later and still working on a PhD thesis’ on September 16th 2020] and, with the help of personal contacts, a post-doctoral fellowship at the Medical School at the University of Calgary, Canada.  In Calgary, I worked on the design of experiments to measure the stress in the pericardium, which is a sac that surrounds the heart – still engineering but a major shift in focus from industrially-focussed mechanical engineering toward biomedical engineering.

Image: Fringe pattern in section of photoelastic model of jet engine showing distribution of stress from Patterson EA, Brailly P & Taroni M, High frequency quantitative photoelasticity applied to jet engine components, Experimental Mechanics, 46(6):661-668, 2006.