 Welcome back everyone, and hope you enjoyed the opportunity to explore the exhibit hall and have a chance to network. I'm pleased to kick off the second part of our engineering 2030 session, which is focused on the role of academic and innovation institution in advancing the FTG. We've been working with the academic community for over a decade to support these efforts. Our EGD research community has been growing annually, and this year alone, we hosted 12 academic seminars reaching over 2000 registrants and laying the groundwork for a unified research agenda. We know how challenging it is to introduce new pedagogical approaches and research directions within these institutions, and we applaud the institutions that are disrupting the status quo. This session will introduce some of those innovators, starting with our hosting sponsor, the NYU Tandon School of Engineering. We will open with Yelena Kovasevic, the dean of NYU's Tandon School of Engineering. A groundbreaker in her own right, Yelena is the first woman to head the school since its founding in 1554. She received a diploma of electrical engineering degree from the University of Belgrade and a master's in PhD degrees from Columbia University, respectively. Before joining NYU, she was on the faculty of Carnegie Mellon University. Immediately following Yelena, we will welcome to our virtual stage Dr. Wendy Purcell, who is a research scholar at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, where she researches global leadership and governance for sustainable transformation in higher education and business, and leads a sustainable development solutions group. She will guide today's conversation with our phenomenal panel of academic innovators from around the world. And now I yield the stage to Yelena for some remarks. I am pleased to be welcoming you today, I'll bite virtually and I look forward to gathering together as we have in the past for future impact engineered forums. I believe that most of us are thinking about the future a lot lately, we're longing for a time where we can casually meet friends for dinner at the favorite restaurant, travel without fear and hug our loved ones. But pandemic concerns aside and I am hopeful that one day soon we will be able to truly put them aside. Engineers are pretty much always looking to the future. Ever since the UN outlined 17 sustainable development goals focused on eliminating poverty and hunger, ensuring global health and other vital objectives, engineers have been right there at the forefront. Let's think for a minute about that nomenclature, the UN didn't decide to just call them development goals. They are sustainable development goals. The inclusion of that word is important to all of us here, whether you are an engineer, academic, social entrepreneur, policymaker or simply a concerned citizen of the world. Because no matter how creative or innovative our solutions are, if they're not also sustainable, the future of our planet is at risk. We're working very hard at NYU Tandon on issues of sustainability and since the organizers have been kind enough to let me speak, I'm going to take a moment to brag a little because sustainability is not only a cornerstone of our curriculum, but also of our research. Tandon researchers are developing new ways to generate clean energy, keep our water supply safe, decrease our carbon footprint and more. Professors in our Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, for example, are designing an intelligent micro system to make industrial chemical processes faster and greener. And they're paving the path to a future that features vehicles whose only exhaust fumes are water vapor. Others are greatly increasing the power conversion efficiencies or perverskites solar cells and finding ways to harvest sunlight underwater. In our Department of Civil and Urban Engineering, to give another example, they're studying how the effects of flooding near certain results of global warming impact public health and infrastructure in urban areas. It isn't just our professors either, at our urban future lab, I'm sorry, one of our startup incubators, they've helped launch the Carbon to Value Initiative, a unique partnership aimed at commercializing technologies that capture and convert carbon dioxide into valuable products or services. Let me just wrap up my bragging with a recent piece of news I found very exciting. Our alum, Daniela Blanco, was recently named to Inc. magazine's female founders 100, in recognition of her company, Synthetics, which she launched as a graduate student along with another Tandon alum and a faculty member serving as an advisor, and which is developing chemical manufacturing equipment that can reduce energy usage and emissions by up to 40%. She's just one of the many alumni, faculty members and students, giving me hope that the sustainable future is within reach, and I'm also heartened by all of you attending Impact Engineer. Please enjoy the rest of the forum, and I do hope the next time I'll be greeting you in person. Thank you so much. Thank you Alena. Great remarks and hello. I'm Wendy Parcell. I'm a former university president and now a research scholar over at Harvard University. I'm absolutely delighted to be moderating this panel. We've actually assembled four experts to speak with us and explore how engineering associations and academic institutions are advancing the SDGs and delivering against Agenda 2030. So let me first invite our expert speakers to introduce themselves. I start with you, Evan. Hi, my name is Evan Thomas. I'm associate professor of engineering at the University of Colorado Boulder, and I'm the director of the Mortensen Center in Global Engineering. Thank you so much, Deborah. Hello, Deborah Estrin. I'm a professor of computer science and associate dean for Impact at Cornell Tech. Lovely. Good to have you with us. Kamau. Hi, my name is Kamau. As you heard, I'm from Kenya. I taught material science within the faculty of engineering at the University of Nairobi for many years. But since then I've been running an incubator to try to support that transfer from universities into industry. Brilliant. Thank you so much for joining us. Melissa. Hi, Melissa Goodall, deputy director of sustainability at Yale University, also proud NYU alum and hopeful mother of a future NYU Tandon School student. Good to have you with us. Thanks so much. So I'd like to get this panel started and come back to you, Evan, just to kick us off. And as we think about the SDGs and their interconnected hyperdependent nature, how does that feed into what engineering and its disciplinary associations are doing to kind of navigate this inherent interdisciplinarity that's required to fulfill the goals. So just really think with us about those agendas. Yeah, thanks, Wendy. I think one thing that's interesting to do is reflect on what we were doing as engineers during the millennium development goal period between 2000 and 2015. And during that period, we were just starting organizations like the Morton Center at CU or engineers without orders or engineering for change or development engineering at Berkeley. And the model at the time was we're going to address the millennium development goals on a project level and with products and fundamentally really only addressing the symptoms of poverty. We thought that we could solve and meet the MDGs by working on a community or village or project or product scale. And now we meet the MDGs and now we have even more ambitious SDGs that are broader with bigger targets. And in fact, we're really not on track as a global community to meet the SDGs at least in and among the least developed communities. The 70 least developed countries are in sub-Saharan Africa where the number of people in poverty, the actual number of people in poverty is expected to grow over the next 10 years. So we need to think bigger and broader and engineers and engineering needs to elevate our role from thinking about the symptoms of poverty to thinking about the causes of poverty. So what will it actually take to address the fact that COVID has pushed 100 million people back into poverty just in the past six months that climate change is expected to push another 100 million people back into poverty over the next 10 years back into poverty, let alone addressing the number of people in poverty that are currently already living on less than $2 a day. So we have to as engineers start thinking about climate change and trade and economics and tax policies and the policies of foreign aid and not just take a step back and go do projects but actually try to influence the system of foreign aid delivery to try to address those root challenges. So what are a few examples? Here at the Mortensen Center in global engineering, we sit at the college of engineering level. We have about 200 undergrads engaged in our program, many of whom are earning a global engineering minor. We have 70 graduate students earning either a graduate certificate in global engineering or a professional master's in global engineering. We have about 20 countries around the world. And the projects include everything from looking at the impacts of climate change on water availability to impact evaluations around putting in pedestrian footbridges to improve drought resilience, which is another example of something that's increasing in frequency and severity due to climate change, to training engineers not just in the United States but internationally. We have a focused effort to recruit, support and retain masters and PhD students who are actually from these countries that we're working in. So one of our PhD students, Dennis Mataraz, works full time in Kenya on these drought resilience efforts. He's remotely a PhD student with us, but he's actually in the context in Kenya and from Kenya. So we have a lot of other extraordinary students like that too, where we're trying to create that network of engineers working in those places, but not just on the symptoms, on the root causes as well. I love that framing that you've introduced there of symptoms to systems. I think that's a really lovely kind of parallel with local to global. So thank you very much for starting us off with such an ambitious contribution. I'm going to move on now, Deborah, to have you talk to us about the SDGs and that engineering graduate education and maybe tell us a little bit about what Cornell is doing to foster the kind of interdisciplinarity that Evan touched on that is delivering on social impact. So could you tell us what's happening with you. Absolutely delighted to be here and I should say that there is a world of activity in the New York City area and clearly on the mother campus in Ithaca with Atkinson and and other centers that engage a broad community of undergrads and scientists. What I can probably best speak to is what's happening at Cornell Tech. Cornell Tech is a campus of Cornell University in New York City, and it was created to be a center for research and graduate education, particularly in computer and information sciences and engineering disciplines. And obviously, since its inception, which was back around 2011 I joined in 2013 when we first opened our doors. The societal and economic impacts of technology and digital technologies from machine learning to cybersecurity have all become much more profound, both their role as sources of problems, as well as sources of solutions so what we've all seen is that with that growing those growing issues and the surfacing of those issues has been a growing desire across our community of students and researchers and the working professionals that we interact with to shape technology to serve public needs as expressed by the sustainable development goals. So in response, Cornell Tech has just recently launched two public interest technology initiatives with seed funding from philanthropy and just to surface our nerdiness we refer to this as PiTech. The first of these initiatives addresses a common core of our master's programs, which we call Studio. In our established studio courses, students from across our technical and professional master's degree programs learn to develop real world technology products by working with leading startups and established companies. So our new PiTech Studio track is focused on product development. Excuse me and business models to accelerate positive change in the public and nonprofit sectors specifically because that requires special attention. The second initiative addresses our doctoral student community. Our new PiTech impact internship, as we're referring to it, will give PhD students a structured opportunity to apply their technical expertise to societal needs. As many of you know, most doctoral students in technical fields already do at least one summer internship, usually with the tech company. It's a very important experience and we don't want to replace it, but we do hope to augment it. So we will fund and otherwise resource with interns and advising each of our PiTech impact interns to engage with a particular community NGO foundation or public sector organization as an alternative elementary summer internship experience. And as we scale we look forward to hosting growing annual cohorts of these doctoral interns from around the country, as well as eventually postdoctoral fellows, and even faculty sabbaticals. So making faculty salaries whole as they dedicate themselves to a public interest initiative. We're hoping in this way to really foster the interdisciplinary and community engaged work that we need to shape technical innovation to address diverse societal needs. And we're looking forward to working closely with established centers as I mentioned at Cornell such as Atkinson that engages the broader undergrad and science communities and of course to our colleagues in New York City, both academic and NGOs. Deborah, thank you so much. And it's a wonderful segue to hear about PiTech. That's a new term for us in terms of that public interest technology as we turn now to Kamau. Because I think you're going to talk to us about this scale that Evan mentioned and this pace that I think Deborah's capturing of the transformation that's really been demanded by the SDGs. And maybe you can tell us a little bit more about the power of engineering to kind of deliver the fuel, the innovation fuel, and the skills that we need. So talk to us about some of your work. Sure, certainly. Thank you very much. So, as I said earlier, I'm working, I have worked most of my career at the University teaching students engineering material science specifically and seen a lot of talent. A lot of very interesting projects, but what was really very pronounced for me quite early on is the disconnect between what was happening within the faculties of various universities and countries like mine and what's happening in the marketplace. And so we were really just training people for engineering jobs in a sector that basically couldn't absorb them fast enough and certainly not to do engineering. So, or rather the kind of engineering they do like working for a large multinational would be mostly focused around maintenance and making sure that engineering systems designed elsewhere were working as they should, and even really introducing new innovations on the production lines and so on is really quite limited. And so the, the response that we had and a lot of students would end up working in order to auditing firms, and the likes of from a policy perspective the amount of taxpayer money spent on educating people in engineering doesn't give you the return, unless there are mechanisms that are set up to allow them to be able to trade or their skills for what is expected. And so we, one of the things we identified immediately as we set up our incubator outside of the university because the bureaucracy within the university was too prohibitive was basically that we needed to be able to provide people with an engineering background the facilitation to make prototypes and to make them really well so that their prototypes that could be presented to investors and that they could also sort of do pilots and then show that the investor or the potential investor that there is something here that really, if you put your money into code, give a return. And the other thing that we realized quite quickly is that whatever we do in developing human resource around engineering is really very constrained and limited around somebody just woken up here but so very, very limited if the the ecosystem and the environment doesn't allow for that contribution to be made so what I mean here is that even from an international perspective the sort of work that's been done by the World Bank and the World Trade Organization and so on. It discourages for example protectionism and the only way that really a very small firm can actually grow in competition on a global scale with products coming from China from from Europe from America, you cannot compete. You know, just like that against such large and very experienced industries, and I think every, every country that I've mentioned every region has in the past at some point had some kind of protectionist policy, so that you can actually have an incubation period that will allow your local capacity, not just to engineer but to do so in a commercially competitive manner. Can can happen and can crystallize and so right now one of the interesting things with COVID is that you know global supply chains have been disrupted and a lot of countries in Africa around the world have had to look internally to supply what they need and so this is something that in a sense can be taken advantage of and in Kenya right now there is a list of products of the government procures government in any country being the largest consumer, that they said well this group this bunch of products 365 as it happens, a bit of a gimmick maybe but these, this number of products will not be imported the government will only buy them from local suppliers and so now there's a lot of activity in spaces like mine and others where people are putting together what it will take to produce those not just in terms of a prototype level but the quality and the quantity within the time required and so on and so it's it's requiring a lot of different agencies to come to work together the body from the government that that gives standards. We have the banks coming into to to to to supply the money and financing for this, and so on and so forth so very exciting times I would say, we're also quite aware that the fourth industrial revolution is upon us that the share rate of change of technology advancement is faster than perhaps it's ever been in the human in human history so the challenge in countries like ours is quite a lot more difficult than it probably was in Asia when they were industrializing. And so we're really quite keen to adopt some of these modern methodologies as well so we're doing pretty circuit board. fabrication in our space and making sure that as iot and the utility of iot in a in an economy like ours starts to increase. We're ready to be able to make devices locally and so on and so forth so in a nutshell, I think that is really where we are really trying to find our place beyond the engineering do the things that need to be done to make sure that the engineering can make the impact that it's that it has so much promise to make. Thank you. Thank you. I was really strong points very powerful to think about that global disruption driving local innovation but I love the way that you also captured how the incubation hub is de risking investments as well to to allow the scale, I think that we're all, you know, recognizing we need to operate at so thank you so much for that. I'm going to come to you, Melissa, so you can kind of round off and and talk to us a little bit about Yale's teaching and research connections. I know that you'd be mapping to the SDGs and and then to kind of illustrate some of that with the strengths of Yale's engineering department and what they're doing to deliver against the SDGs I think you're going to share a couple of slides with us. Yeah, I will in just one moment, because it's a slide free event but then I like going rogue so my own personal background, I feel a little bit like a kid at the grown up table because my first degree is a drama from NYU but my background is is very transdisciplinary I have a science degree a business degree etc so I landed somehow in global policy which is when Jenny Frankel read our future keynote speaker was my research assistant which is phenomenal to see her in this role today. But I joined the office of sustainability in 2008 because we were seeing at the federal level sorry 2009 because we were seeing at the federal level, a lot of inaction in terms of climate action and other environmental priorities. So I really came to this from really global priorities local action perspective I really wanted to have an idea of and this connects nicely with what Evan was saying before of how we get from that global scale to the tangible actions and then translate it back up. So that was my driving my driving sort of a passion. When I joined the office of sustainability, when we were developing our most recent pan university sustainability plan we were doing it in parallel with the SDGs which was unfortunate because we couldn't directly reference them. But we also had the opportunity to really draw on them and integrate key themes such as social innovation. Then once we had our plan up and running. We were able to and I need to do this to the screen thing but we were able to think about how Yale's teaching and research could really connect to the SDGs so the exercise that we did here. And this is me going rogue to share my screen just briefly we have just shy of 5000 faculty members at Yale University this is just a guide to show you the distribution about half of them are at the medical school. Those in the medium shade of blue are in our professional schools and then our faculty of arts and sciences is about 1000 faculty members. So the exercise that we did. Was to really take a look at the teaching and research of every single faculty member at Yale University to identify where our strengths would be in terms of supporting the sustainable development goals this is not about teaching the sustainable development goals. This is about using this as a platform. And spotlighting Yale strengths using this as a platform for collaboration but also really highlighting the role of the knowledge sector and those who are hearing about the extraordinary innovations from the other folks on this call. Must surely recognize that this knowledge that we that we the higher education institutions of the world can bring to bear on the SDGs is really critical and is not entirely recognized or elevated in the UN system. The last slide that I'll show and then I'll stop being rogue is that this is what our school of engineering so it looks like so we have about 50 faculty members in our school of engineering and applied science. And we can really contribute quite a lot to the health and well being narrative when it comes to these things. We also of course have strength in industry innovation and infrastructure. But there are some other really important areas where Yale could potentially bring strengths to this. So what we're doing with this and I'll stop my share. What we're doing with this is we're not again it's not about Yale teaching to the SDGs or Yale teaching about the SDGs we're using this as a tool to foster collaboration so it's easy to say oh engineering and architecture should be working together of course they are. Or engineering and environment but what we're now looking at is how we're going to connect business with engineering and art with engineering and nursing with engineering in really sort of savvy ways using this as a platform. So again this is not about forcing the SDGs into our curriculum but really using it as a as a platform for collaboration for innovation and to develop those systemic solutions that the others on the call have to have referenced. That's great. Melissa thank you so much I think it's great to hear about Yale's experience but also that kind of visual helps us see some of the connections that you know we don't see often in our silo departments and faculties and schools and so on. So I think we're going to have some time which is great to answer any questions from the audience but as as we're gathering those in I just wanted to to think with you. You know maybe in a kind of quick fire round I was looking at the United Nations World Engineering Day in July just of this year. And they asked this question of do engineers have the right tools to meet the UN SDGs and I just wondered you know what would what advice would you be giving to say that we could answer that question with an emphatic yes. You know what what more should we be doing maybe we'll we'll go in the same order Evan what what would you be saying that we should be doing to say yes of course engineers have the right tools to address the SDGs. I mean I wouldn't say that I wouldn't be able to say yes right now I think that you know engineers we often self segregate away from the decision tables. You know look at who's running the world it's economists and it's lawyers and it's activists and it's policymakers. Why aren't engineers there you know we don't you don't have to be a lawyer to have you know something meaningful to say we engineers need to be willing to participate in those messy conversations. We also need to be activists right we often as researchers and academics don't want to that's a six month old behind me. We often don't want to dirty ourselves by actually staking a claim to what is right or what is wrong, even with all the caveats. And I think we need to do that I think the tools that we need our is a greater willingness to engage in those discussions and then those. And again you know really trying to think about our role in addressing the causes of poverty which as come out said you know trade imbalances tax tax policies tax avoidance these are bigger drivers of poverty than whether or not another water filters been invented. And engineers can be part of those conversations. I think that's great and Deborah do you have anything to add to that given your public interest you know innovation space that you were describing. Just that I wholeheartedly agree. But at the same time engineers and nobody means that here but just to state it very clearly engineers should not do this alone. Right, the worst the thing that's worse than not having engineers come to the table to be part of the economic activist and policy conversations and to recognize the drivers for these challenges is for them to think that they can do it alone. And so being willing to take on the messiness of the collaboration, making turns and making progress on on technical and then societal you don't always do get to do the latest thing by taking on the real world constraints and collaborations. And that's really what I think all of us are trying to foster is a different kind of engineer. Yeah we've got a great question here coming in from from the audience I'm going to turn to Melissa and come out for this one. So, I'm asking for your advice actually around, you know, here's somebody Deborah and our audience who's got a great background in sustainability and education and community engagement, but isn't an engineer, but wants to work in this space so we're thinking what kinds of advice would you be giving to them about you know what positions should they be looking at. How can you know professionals like this connect with this really important agenda that you're you're describing maybe Melissa with your drama to business to sell maybe you know give us some insights there about how this individual and people like them can make their full contribution here. It's a great question and one that I'm excited about you know the thing that I would say you know in reflection to the first question is taking a problem centric approach because if you take a problem centric approach we have a problem it's not going to be solved by just the engineers. You have the product then you need to get it to market then you need to sell it then you need to make it go viral there's so many elements and so there's there's a stickiness there. And there is a solution oriented it just by nature engineering is so solution oriented this is my daughter is actually just switched her idea from being a biologist to being an engineer specifically because it's about solutions. And so to James this question you know the assets that somebody with education conservation sustainability. You know there are so many assets there the people who are designing the solutions the engineers need the people who can educate about them and can communicate about them so badly. We in higher education tend to be terrible about communicating the amazingness of what we do at writ large I think there are individuals who do it quite well but we there's an opportunity for somebody like that to get into it on on the the viral side of it. Brilliant come on this is really in your wheelhouse you know thinking of all the networks and connections that you have so how do we draw more people into this into this space. Well yeah I mean you know people like the question I guess you know a lot has been said I just want to add that quite often engineers don't may not fully understand what a challenge is about and there's a lot of interest in design thinking globally right now. And humans and a design and I think a helping engineers like in the context especially in the countries where most of the problems that the SDGs were created to solve live, you know, helping them to understand how better to be able to apply their engineering work. And so you know humans and a design is a big part of it, but there's also a question of how to understand the way that the government's work for example so the I've seen solutions created for say for example maternity and newborn child health. And they're really good from a purely technical point of view and they've got the AC the humans and the design down and they understand, you know those details but then they didn't understand the way the government works and you know you what you want is for those solutions to be taken into the government. It's a self system. And if you don't understand exactly how that works, then you'll find that it doesn't go anywhere. And so, you know, understanding that the problems are generally a lot bigger, much bigger than engineering is very important and teams need to be able to be formulated to take into account all that complexity really. So to be able to make sure that these solutions are pushed out as they should be. That's really very wise. I mean, any final comments Evan, were you coming in there. Yeah, sorry, I was going to build on my point there. And as any, you know as any entrepreneur knows everything takes is a lot more complex and takes a lot longer than you hope, and sometimes that's not compatible with academia or the funding or the mechanisms for either faculty or students or or or professionals in the field, but these things can take decades to realize you know it's not that the design cycles not nine months it's nine years. And as Deborah said earlier you know it's definitely not about engineers doing anything alone but we are actually not part of the conversation right now we need to get at those tables. At the University of Colorado, we're the Morton Center in global engineering and we chose that name. Two years ago very carefully to position the role of engineers to be alongside the global health community and alongside the development economics community, but also to try to move even beyond what are still technocratic roles to try to again look at some of those policies and to be more historical as as a development professionals we often act a historically, we need to, you know these are the arc of history is long, and the causes of poverty or deep. This is right back, I think to some of the opening comments from all of you about the, the SDGs being this incredible global challenge, you know it's the nearest thing we have as the world to a strategy for the world but but this sense of this interconnectivity and thinking at that systems level so I know there's so many rich insights that you could share but I really appreciate you spending time with us amazing practical advice as well as I think a call to action for engineers and everyone around them so I know we could keep going on a longer as always with these expert panels it's wonderful to have your wisdom and insights, but I'd like to thank you for on behalf of the team here and and close out on hand back. Thank you so much.