 afternoon, good evening, or good morning depending on where you're joining us from today. Welcome to Engineering for Change or E4C for short. Today we're pleased to bring you this month's installment of our seminar series which aims to intellectually develop the field of engineering for global development. We host a new research institution monthly to learn about their work advancing United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Today's seminar is presented by Dr. Esther Abiambo-Obonio who is the associate professor of engineering design and architectural engineering at the Pennsylvania State University. My name is Yana Aranda and I'm the president of Engineering for Change and I'm joined today by Dr. Jesse Austin Renerman who is also going to be a co- moderator for the seminar. The seminar you're participating in today will be archived on E4C site and our YouTube channel. You'll see both of those URLs listed on the slide in front of you. 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E4C is a knowledge organization, digital platform and global community of more than 1 million engineers, designers, development practitioners and social scientists who are leveraging technology to solve quality of life challenges faced by underserved communities. Some of those challenges may include access to clean water and sanitation, sustainable energy, improved housing and more. We invite you to become a member. E4C membership is free and provides access to news and fellow leaders, insights on hundreds of essential technologies in our solutions library, professional development resources and current opportunities such as jobs, funding calls, fellowships and more. E4C members also receive exclusive invitations to online and regional events and access to resources aligned to the interests. We invite you to visit our website to learn more and to sign up. E4C's research work cuts across geographies and sectors to deliver an ecosystem view of technology for good. Original research is conducted by E4C research fellows annually on behalf of our partners and sponsors and deliver the digestible reports with implementable insights. We invite you to visit our research page. The URL is listed on the slide to explore our field insights, research collaborations and review the state of engineering for global development, a compilation of academic programs and institutions offering training in this sector. If you have research questions or want to work with us on a research project as a research fellow or partner, please contact us at research at engineeringforchange.org. And I wanted to highlight with that just a few examples of recent research news. One is our research collaboration with ASME focusing on the engineering response to COVID-19. That's a compilation of references related to responses for low resource settings. Do encourage you to check that out. In addition to that, a recent article that we published focusing on systemic racism in the field of international development publishing, a unique niche issue that is really important and something that we need to have a bigger discussion about more broadly. Now, we're really excited to see where you all are from and to practice the Zoom webinar, although I'm sure by now all of you are Zoom spurts around the globe. But we would really like to make sure that everybody uses the chat window appropriately. So please in the chat window, do type in your location. All right, I'm joining you all today from Brooklyn, New York. We have folks from obviously State College, Pennsylvania, Ireland, Santa Fe, Kansas, Maryland, the US Virgin Islands. Must be good weather today. The UK, London, Ann Arbor, of course, Canada, Maine, France, India, New Delhi. Amazing, amazing representation. Thank you everyone for joining us today. We're so excited to have you. So please continue to tell us where you're from, Rwanda and Colorado, Utah. Very nice. Very nice. Very nice to have you. Please do continue to use the chat window to type any comments or concerns or ideas that you want to share with the rest of the participants. If you have technical questions, feel free to send a private chat to the Engineering for Change admin. If you're listening to the audio broadcast and encountering trouble, try hitting stop and then start or try opening up in a different browser. During the seminar, please use our Q&A window to type in your questions for our presenters so we can keep tabs on those. And we're actually going to be collecting those questions and we're providing them for our presenter to address afterwards. So really critical that you do put them in the Q&A so that we are able to compile them effectively because we, at this point, I don't think Jesse have ever been able to get through all the questions. So if you want your question addressed, we certainly want to collect them in the Q&A. And we will address those questions at the end. So again, welcome everyone from Saskatchewan, Canada, to Bavaria, to Kansas. We're really thrilled to have you. All right. And with that, I am so honored to introduce today's speaker. Dr. Arbonio is the director of the Global Building Network, a partnership between UNICEF, UNSC, and Penn State. She's also the associate professor of engineering design and architectural engineering at Penn State University. Dr. Arbonio was a 2015-2016 Jefferson Science fellow placed with the USAID Global Development Lab in Washington DC. Between August 2004 and July 2015, she was a faculty member at the University of Florida's Rinker School of Construction Management. Dr. Arbonio has extensive industry experience, having worked as a construction engineer, project manager, and innovations analyst in several engineering and construction companies in Kenya, United Kingdom, and the US. Her work has been submitted through over 100 journal papers, conference proceedings, and presentations. She's on the editorial board of three journals, Journal of IT and Construction, Buildings and Intelligence Systems. And she was also a guest editor for the Journal of Sustainability. We are so honored to have you. Dr. Arbonio, I'm going to go ahead and stop sharing my screen now and turn it over to you. I will not present Jesse's bio as we've done that on many previous seminars, but he is equally impressive. So, Esther, over to you to present your slides. Alright, good afternoon, everybody. Thank you, Ayana, for the wonderful introduction. Thank you, everyone, for making time during your busy schedule. Some of you are attending this in the middle of the day, others are attending it in the middle of the evening. So thank you so much for making time to be part of this conversation. I also want to thank Engineering for Change for creating mechanisms through which people in the university can interact with their network. I'm going to share some thoughts and some ideas that we are detailing out. A lot of it is based on lessons or things that we have tried to do. Some of them have worked, some of them we need to adapt so that we are relevant, taking into account the things that are going on currently in 2020. We want to remain relevant. And we also want to partner with as many people as possible because we realize that some of these issues are so broad that tackling them is going to require partnering with other universities and also partnering with non-universities, most importantly, partnering with people who have boots on the ground. I'm going to present around, my presentation is going to revolve around three questions. What is the role of engineers in the delivery of equitable, affordable housing? What is the role of the university system? And what does it really look like? How do we know when we are successful in pointing our efforts towards the equitable delivery of affordable housing? So starting with the first one, one of the things that was a wake up call moment for me was a conversation that I embraced wholeheartedly. Some of my colleagues were doing work in New Kensington, which is a Rust Belt City, low income community, poor households, low income households. And as you can see from this picture, a lot of the issues that they're dealing with revolve around poverty, and it translates to buildings that are dilapidated. And we were invited into this conversation because of the work that we've been doing with, you know, broadly speaking, humanitarian materials that are building focus in other parts of the world. And the questions that were being asked were focusing on affordability. Putting roofing, the lowest quotations that they were getting for a roofing was $100,000, which is not affordable. And they wanted to know what methods are you using in countries such as Tanzania and Kenya? What can we learn about those experiences to inform how we address these issues? Because the formal construction sector doesn't really have a solution for us. So we went into this conversation, as I said, wholeheartedly, we felt like this is a great opportunity to transfer learnings from a different part of the world. And my wake-up moment came because of my friend Richard, who I like to think of as my community, my citizen participation specialist. When he had about the effort, he challenged me, and according to him, he told me the level at which you're coming into the community is too high. And this is something that I've shared with a few of my colleagues because it puzzled me. I'm a professor in the College of Engineering. We are dealing with a re-roofing issue that the community members had said they wanted to talk about. What am I missing? And he kept pushing me, asking me in using his words to go deeper, like look at the human being. And I translated that as looking at the human dimension. So I pushed the conversation in the direction of the indoor air quality issues that result from the leakage. And Richard just kept pushing. He was like, go deeper, go deeper, look at the person. And that made me uncomfortable because I couldn't understand how as an engineer, as a person who's in the College of Engineering, I can make a contribution to a conversation that doesn't touch the building, not the roof, not the wall, not even the air quality. And I'll come back to this slide in a minute. So I started some introspection, like just trying to again reframe my thinking. How did I get into this space? And yes, it was the UN Declaration of Human Rights. And every time I keep looking at this, housing is one aspect. It's not everything. Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for health and well-being of himself and his family, and relied herself and her family. And this includes food, clothing, housing, medical care, and necessary social services, as well as the right to security in the event of unemployment, sicknesses, disability, widowhood, old age, or any other thing that is affecting the ability to function as a productive, functional human being. And this again, you know, when you look at it objectively, housing is just one part of the problem. It is not everything it is. And so the solutions also have to be conceptualized that way. So I felt, okay, the conversation that Richard, my citizen participation especially wants me to have is something that I can find a way of connecting to what we do within the College of Engineering. Then I went on the National Academy of Engineering because we needed to also have credibility from a scientific research perspective based at the standard in many respects for what is considered cutting age. So I'm going to invite the audience to participate in this interactive activity with me. I've given you four options here. I want you to guess how many times is the word housing used by the National Academy of Engineering on their website? We'll give you a minute. Zero, less than 10, between 10 and 100. The last one should be a thousand. Between 10 and 100, the last one is between 100 and over a thousand. Sorry for the typo. Okay. So I think you can all see the results. There are people, 32 percent of you think 0, 75, 55 percent have under 10. And then you have greater than 10, but less than 110 percent. And final, the D3 percent. So the answer is actually, I can close this. Sorry, my screen is not moving. Somebody needs to give me control. The answer is the second option. It's been used less than 10 times. When I searched and looked in every page that I could find, I found it being used actually four times. Are you not able to advance your slides? No. Would you mind stopping sharing for a moment and then starting again? Okay. It's still not advancing for some reason. Okay. I can share my screen and try to be, let me know. So if you can stop sharing, I'll go ahead. I've stopped. So I can just continue talking while you're doing that whole electronic transitioning. So I counted four. It was being used exactly four times. There may be a few other instances that I did not find. And that didn't bother me. And you'll see in a minute why I didn't feel bothered. One of the people who used it was none other than President Jimmy Carter. So his voice, even if he uses it once in my world, that is equivalent to like, I don't know, one billion voices. And in his statement, he made, it was a message that he had to the National Academy of Engineering about, you know, some, what his views on the priorities for engineering research. And in his comments, he made direct reference to resource constrained environments and how it is important for our research and educational efforts to be pointed towards the needs of the populations residing in low income and poor neighborhoods and paraphrasing the words. But he also broadened the subject and said, this should include food and housing, medical education, access to water. So again, challenging us to not look at a single issue, but try to make sure that the issues that we're looking at also contribute to positive outcomes in other areas of need that the community members already have identified as their priority areas. Next slide, please. The slide has advanced just so you know. Okay. So I did a screenshot of this because I went inside the grant engineering challenges, the documentary report that outlines the grant engineering challenges. The listed topics do not have housing. But if you go in the section that talks about the infrastructure, there's that line that I was like, yes, it's there. Engineers must be engaged in the architectural issues involved in providing environmentally friendly, energy efficient buildings, both for housing and business. So between the statements that Jimmy Carter made that talk about the needs of low income communities being broadly assessed and also the grant engineering challenges saying that their goals and the aspirations that we have for the urban infrastructure will not be attained. If we do not deal with the issues related to housing, I was like, yes, there is a role for engineers to play. Next slide, please. So right now there's the any grant challenges for engineers. Slide is up. The next slide. Yeah, that one. So yeah. So I also wanted to flag this up. That's at the in the opening remarks. They also identify for cross cutting themes. Go back to the previous side. They have cross cutting themes. It's not for things, but they are for things that have to be looked at as a package. They are cross cutting. And one of them is health. Yeah, sustainability. We've already embraced that within the engineering community health. We are beginning to embrace that they're talking about security and they're talking about joy of living. This is the place where when I'm talking to my friend who's a Catholic priest, I tell him do not ask people how they feel because then it will get messy. But in this challenge, they're telling us you have to embrace the issue of joy of living, how people feel. This is one of the four, just four cross cutting themes for the grand engineering challenges. Next slide, please. So as I said, help is something that we're beginning to embrace, including people who are working. This includes people who are working in the in the housing sector in buildings and housing sector, affordable housing. It is not happening very easily for very many different reasons. Next slide, please. It's not happening for very many reasons. I keep coming back to it. And maybe about six months ago, one of the things that was a wakeup call for me was historically when we go to do things in resource constrained environment, anytime you use the word social, we look for people in social sciences and we say, okay, here's our beat and there's your beat. So deal with that. Go back to the previous slide. Yeah, but from a health sector perspective, to consider as social, the way we overlap with them is as a social determinant of health. So it's no longer about thinking about what we're going to do with social scientists but thinking about what we are going to do as contributors to the social science conversation and housing again is just one aspect of this, along with several other things, including categories such as economic stability, education, food, community engagement. And then you can stay in this slide. It's okay. So I had to step back and think about what kind of framework already exists that will give us some credible basis. Please go to the next slide. Some credible basis of engaging with the social. And again another moment, the sustainable, not that it's not sustainable development goals, but the three pillars of sustainability. Next. We lost a bit of your audio Esther, if you can perhaps just start again, looking at this slide, the three pillars. So the three pillars, thank you. Sorry about that. The three pillars of sustainability. We, as a community, we have been looking at issues related to the environment. In fact, we spend a lot of time like people in my sub sector, we do things like at breaks. So we are all about the environment about using materials that are biodegradable. We look at issues like where you're taking the soil, how is that affecting the surrounding ecosystem? Are you competing with agriculture? Are we minimizing the amount of bricks that are being fired? So we are good. We feel good about this, like we want to keep doing this. Can we do better? Yes, of course. And then we're also beginning to get better at handling the economic. And sometimes we even give ourselves a part on the back, because we know how to integrate it with entrepreneurship. So we know how to do that to a certain extent. But as far as the social is concerned, in my humble opinion, we are scratching on the surface. And I say this against the backdrop of the things that I shared previously. If we are going to deal with the cross cutting themes that were listed in the grand engineering challenges, please go back to the previous slide. Then we have to think about the multiple benefits of being sustainable. Then at the bottom of this slide, we see now we are able to problematize and characterize things that the community members identified that are broader than just housing issues. So we can do building buildings plus health, buildings plus resilience to natural and manmade disasters, buildings plus wealth creation, buildings plus affordability, buildings plus issues related to diversity, equity and inclusion, buildings plus social justice, buildings plus race, buildings plus everything. So as long as we are we find a way of partnering and developing synergies with institutions, individuals and communities that allow us to embrace the social, then we have a high probability of addressing those cross cutting issues. Next slide, please. So how do we do this? Thankfully, because I'm in a university and from the very first day I started work as a university, I was at the University of Florida, which is a land grant university. I'm now at Penn State land grant university. During the orientation, the first thing we do is remind you that we're a land grant institution, but the mission is similar even for non-land grant institutions. We do research. Next slide, please. We do research, education and extension or some people call it service. So that legitimizes our ability to participate in these conversations. Next slide, please. As a university, all universities using some formal language are committed to extending the science of any display in our case buildings, science of extending how buildings work to citizen, you get thumbs up. We can talk about it from an environmental sustainability perspective, reducing pollution, outdoor pollution, indoor pollution, lead paint issues, societal enablement, creating jobs. We can talk about access and inclusion. We can talk about economic value. The construction sector contributes to the local economy. We can talk about well-being from very many different dimensions, issues such as edging in place. How can we create environments that allow you to transition into the various stages of life comfortably? We can talk about ethics. So this is legitimately a space where universities can make a meaningful contribution. Next slide, please. There's a little bit of a lag, but it's on the next slide. Yes, I realize that. We have a problem. And this takes me back to my friend. Don't ask people how they feel. Not because it's not important, but because, you know, truth be told, this is not something that our training, our professional experience and expertise has prepared us to deal with. We want to be relevant. The relevant issues right now include racism, not just dealing with a problem, but also talking about pointing the discussion towards a solution, e.g. ratio healing. Yeah, and it gets more complicated because for you to really get to the depth that is required, then there are pieces such as civil dialogue that overlap with this. So I'm using that as one example. I'm not saying that's the only thing that needs to be discussed. And I don't know about you, but nothing in my training, nothing in my professional experiences has allowed me to deal with this, not at the depth that is required. Those were the people who've been trained and people who even through their own life experiences have developed the ability to handle these issues. Some of them are manifested through housing. Unfortunately, in many of those circles, they are on the other end of the spectrum, nothing in their training, nothing in their profession has in the experience, not professional, but experience has prepared them to deal with building related issues at the depth that is required. So we have a disconnect. We have people who can handle the social issues that do not fit in our engineering mindset or design mindset. And then we have people who can handle them, but they say our discipline is talking to them using jargons that they do not understand. And that is where part of the problem begins. Next slide, please. So again, because I'm in a land grant university, the things that I've been doing in collaboration with several other people are anchored in our foundations. I thought it was actually very interesting when I went back to read the history of land grant universities. I use language that we were given at the University of Florida when I started my journey as an assistant professor. And I thought it was very fascinating that it says things like in the original colleges that were established in the United States, they were serving the needs of the male leisure classes, government leaders and professional. And that sounds like conversations that we have in certain professional circles where we say we're stuck in an echo chamber and I'm in a male dominated profession. So this is like 1860 something or 1870 something. My profession hasn't changed. Yeah, I put in blue very few schools offered instruction in the broader needs of the community. At that particular time, it was an agricultural economy. So that's that was the focus, but they also embrace the technical areas. And then next, the land grant universities were set up, jump to the blue. So that members of the working class could obtain liberal practical education or like this is really good. Next slide, please. I may have to skip some of them because we're losing a little bit of time during the transition. And I'm told I have 10 minutes. So again, drawing parallels between the 19th century and now within the building performance community, people are frustrated. They're saying we have solutions that are not being adopted back then in 19 century. The farmers were not adopting some of the solutions that were coming out of the colleges. Yeah, and the real message here, the big message here is the land grant universities were established to focus on educational needs of everyday person. That was the primary goal at that time. And that is still included in our mission. Yeah, most of the universities beyond just land grant universities, we do have some combination of on-campus instruction, research programs and off-campus extension work. We believe in being open. The last line is not showing. But I think it was about the fact that university systems everywhere in the world have the capacity and the ability to educate people in the range of millions, especially if we come together. So that is unique to us. Professional bodies can educate, but they cannot. They don't have the critical mass that universities have. Therefore, partnerships are beneficial for very many things. I was also looking at examples of what people in the agricultural sector are currently doing. Because of the way they embraced the extension and outreach platform, any new topic, opioids, climate change, they are able to infuse it into this infrastructure. And they have a system that allows the solutions that are emerging to be translated to the people who need them, the farmers, the ranchers, etc., at the right sides without the technical jargon. And then in the grid line, I'm showing, most importantly, they also have mechanisms for making sure that the information is two-way. I was also pleasantly surprised to learn, please transition to the next slide, that the extension and outreach platform is very interested in partnering with people in the design and construction of buildings. In fact, many of them are already, next slide, please, Yana. Many of them are already offering programs that we can benefit from. They have a transfer of technology mechanism. That was in the previous slide. You don't need to go back to it. They have a mechanism for technology transfer that we don't have. Esther wants to come from Penn State University Park and physically go and take the solution to a location. Yeah. We have a gap there. We are not technology transfer specialists. That is not something that we do well. Yeah. What is an equitable housing deliverable delivery system? Transition to the next slide, please. I said that it is a system that instead of setting up a new outreach and extension platform, embrace what we have. Embrace what already exists. What's already working for people in the agricultural sector? What is already working for the people who've introduced entrepreneurship into the university landscape? Not just in the US, but the whole world. Yeah. Principle number one, you work with the people. You do not work for them. I'll go through this quickly because to say some of the time, you work with the people, making sure that the decisions that are being implemented are being made by the people. Yeah. You don't make decisions for them. And then number two, making sure that our solutions are pointed to concurrently serving three stakeholders. The households, the community, the technical community, and also unlocking economic development, economic growth and development opportunities for the region. Next slide, please. Collaboration with local institutions that's a no-brainer. Synchronizing efforts with others to avoid duplication. So these are things which they already exist and they're being used a lot by people in other disciplines, especially at the agricultural sector. But for people in design and construction of buildings, we're just scratching on the surface, targeting specific groups. One solution, one size does not fit anybody. And then one other thing that we often overlook. When we transition to delivering education and training, we forget that within the community, we are outside the campus. The campus is our niche. It's our stronghold. You put us outside the university, then the learning mode has to change. It's no longer the students that we're used to dealing with. And then we've talked already about the two-way information flow as a person who's helping to co-create the solution. I must also be learning. I must be learning from the community. I'm not there to teach them things. I'm there to learn from them. They learn from me. And then last but not least, you cannot force anybody to learn. People have to be motivated. So there's a basic question that we often forget to ask. What is in it for them? Next slide. And my friend Richard will tell you something that again he told me. It was there. And I just did not think about it. One of the greatest needs in the low income and the poor communities is learning how to make money in a capitalistic culture. When I started my conversations with Richard, you know, I was like, yes, I know how buildings work. I can use that to try to motivate the young people, you know, to get into the programs and all that kind of thing. And he said, yes, that is very good. However, he pointed out to me that a lot of the people in the communities where he works wake up every morning and they've been doing this from the day when they were born. They've never seen someone who looks like them dressing up to go and do a white collar job. In the construction industry, we know that from economics, the biggest inputs include labor. We have a problem next slide. We have a problem of skilled labor. This is a win-win. Yeah, the lack of skilled labor, the lack of affordable skilled labor, the aging population in the US or in developing countries where you have young people who are not being given opportunities to develop the skills that they need to get into the sector is contributing to the lack of affordability. Labor is the Achilles' Inn for the construction industry. We have people on one side who are ready to work. Yeah, they need to be trained. But before they are trained, they are mindset matters. Next slide, please, that need to be dealt with. And then again, that will take us into the social space that designers and engineers are not best placed to contribute to, at least not if they're working alone. If we did this right, then we can have some strategies that will cut across all these four issues, sustainability, health, security, and the joy of life. Next slide, please. So going back, yeah, this table, I could repackage it and say housing as a determinant of sustainability, health, security, and joy of living. I've highlighted just a few examples. If we had the meaningful connection with the community-based organization, we had the relationships with people like Richard who can motivate the people and cultivate their training. Some of them can end up in vocational training, others in higher education, starting with housing-related issues. We use it as the platform, as the nexus, where the magic happens. And some of them will get into the employment workforce and an income, be able to include the affordability of housing, yeah, debts, medical bills, everything, yeah. And we have the four themes addressed just like that. Next slide, please. So I wanted to close with where we started. The project about the affordable roofing. We were very fortunate that there was a framework through the Penn State Distributed Compass Model that gave us something similar to the extension platform, yeah. We worked with students at the university park, which is where I'm based, to come up with design concepts for things which are possible. Based on people who had boots on the ground, we had things such as food. Food security is important. Energy burden, addressing energy burden is important. Of course, fixing the leaking roof is also important. Over a course of a couple of years or a year and a half, we experimented with different concepts. We had a post-doc also working in parallel, coming up with a few ideas and we presented this as design concepts from an engineering perspective. Next slide, please. And then I will not show you the entire process, but just highlighting where things currently slide as of last month. They've already translated this into a concept that is being implemented, not prototypes. They secured funding from one of the utility companies and I'm told that by the end of this month, if I pay a visit, there will be at least one house that has an affordable roof that includes green roof for planting some food. They have solar panels for the energy. The leakage is gonna be fixed. And then for the people who are academically oriented, they've also put some sensors so that we can learn from this system. I'm sharing this because after we defined several examples of concepts that we believed we could work in an integrated and holistic manner, we handed this over to the equivalent of the technology transfer partner. And we've been involved indirectly or in a more secondary role, they're running the show and this thing is happening. Like the grant for doing this on a building is being driven by them. And in any case, the university would not have allowed us to do anything that's gonna be implemented because of legal ability. So there was that advantage of having a technology transfer partner on the ground who's not part of the university. Next slide, please. So the next slide is a summary one and really what I wanted to say is that, so this is just one example of the things that we are hoping to do, the things that we are setting out to do within the Global Building Network. We want to create these networks, plural. We want to create linkages between the different professions in a way that allows the engineers to do what they do best while also making them uncomfortable enough to realize that social science is not a domain for just the social scientists. We are going to have to learn something about how they work. They're gonna have to learn something about how we work. And we can map this on several other things including engagement with the community members. It's at the interface, lack of an interface. And it's about time we stopped expecting somebody else to be the interface. It is you and it is me. I have to be uncomfortable enough that I have a reason to want to step at the interface of a university in the developing world and a university in the Global South. That is the only way that we're gonna get closer to delivering equitable, affordable housing. We don't have the answers but we are not going to stop searching until we find them. Thank you for listening. Wow, thank you, Professor Aronio Esther. This is amazing, both inspiring and really a challenge, I think for the rest of the engineering field to really put ourselves into a new space and really redefine what engineering means, I think is really what you're bringing up. I'm gonna ask some of the questions, I guess, now at this point that have come up in the chat or in the Q and A. If you have written questions in the chat in your entity or you're thinking about them now, please put them in the Q and A so we can just have a single place where we can collect them at the end to make sure that they get answered, whether offline or not. So the first question is, you talked about how Penn State already had the sort of extension worker-like program that could connect with local partners in the urban area and you discussed how a lot of this need for affordable housing is happening in urban areas. So I guess we have these rural extension workers who are focused on agriculture and we have ways of connecting. There's a whole ecosystem sort of built up from those land grant universities mission over time but is there a comparable thing in the urban setting? And if not, how do we build or finance that at other? So if I was at University of Michigan and I'm saying, okay, I wanna get into this space and be doing work here and you're suggesting, hey, you really have to work with extension workers. What are your suggestions for other people? How do we go about building that network to be able to really have that extension in an urban area? Yeah, thank you. So that's actually a very good question. So I will answer it in two ways. Remember, I've been emphasizing on partnerships and collaboration. Land grant universities is just one category of universities. We have several other universities. So my first answer is look for universities in the urban center. The role that the extension worker is playing is based on the fact that if you're at Penn State working as an extension worker, you learn about a certain zip code or a set of zip codes. So you have universities in all urban centers throughout in most of the countries that I know of at least. So work with them. And then secondly, I've also used the word outreach. Yeah, so I said outreach and extension and several universities have a presence in big cities through the outreach mechanisms. Number three, you'll be pleased to know that the extension workers have gotten into the urban space and they have proof. Penn State has an extension presence in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia. So, and then I guess I live another fourth one. One of my colleagues who I think is on the call from the BRE Trust, he stretched me out of my comfort zone during a proposal that we were developing recently telling me, you know, what about urban agriculture? And I'm like, it has to touch the building somewhere. And then I remembered the green roof and I'm like, there you go, put it on the roof. We can put it on the wall. Yeah, so there's urban agriculture that doesn't touch the building, but there's also urban agriculture that is touching the building bottom line. There's outreach platforms, there are universities in urban centers and the extension platforms have already emerged in the big cities and small cities. Thank you. That's really important to know. And I think, you know, it's important that we really find different ways to create those partnerships and get the right team. I think that, you know, one of the things that I was reflecting on as I was listening to your talk was this idea of putting yourself in not only in uncomfortable situations, but making sure that, you know, you're really addressing the person at the end of the day and, you know, really getting down to that base level and finding the right partners to be able to do that effectively in whatever project you're looking at. Right? Yeah. I'm gonna ask this next question. So does the zero carbon question come into the equitable housing? So, you know, we talked about sustainability. There's this huge push. We're thinking about green building, these different types of things. Is it possible to focus on, or how do you balance? I guess, let me phrase it this way. How do you balance these multiple objectives when you're thinking about, okay, I need affordability. We also want it to be sustainable. We want it to be equitable. You have all these things going on at the same time. How are you balancing that, adding those additional objectives into, you know, what is already a difficult problem, I would say. Yeah, thank you. So I will start off by answering another question that was asked. We all agree that reducing the carbon footprint of the building is very important. And many of us know that that is moving very, very slowly. In fact, in the US, the rate of renovating buildings so that they have a low carbon footprint is one, one percent. That is how terrible it is. So I think first of all, embracing the fact that we have a problem with how we are going about trying to get people to embrace strategies that can help mitigate or reduce their carbon footprint. It's not working. That's the reality. And what we are offering is a win-win. We are saying, let's do this value proposition in a way that, you know, you can have a conversation with Richard and say, hey, these young people, I could get them into the energy efficiency sector. And then they will have access to these buildings which need to be renovated. So you are talking to the person using the language of value proposition. They care about the environment for sure. They care about using resources such as energy efficiently. But they care more about my energy bill. They care more about things like food. So my answer is, you know, find ways of first of all understanding where the pain points are. My colleague puts it very nicely and says, lack of food will kill me tomorrow. Yeah, talking about what's gonna happen in 2050, I care about it, but I care about putting food on the table for my children. So those are the approaches that we are hoping is going to be beneficial for all stakeholders, saying, you know, what are your pain points right now? What are the things that are hurting you right now? We had a terrible heat wave this summer. I mean, we still have it. I had one day when my house, one week when my AC in my house wasn't working, it was terrible. I'm like, I can't imagine a community member who has to live this kind of life every single day. I ended up with heat stress. So we are talking about having those types of conversations, not just about conserving energy because it's good for the environment, but you're doing it also because there is a heat stress problem that is impacting low income communities everywhere. If you're in a developing country, the issue again will change because for the low income communities, many cases the problem takes the form of using wood fuel systems. And I'm sure nobody's waking up in the morning and saying, you know, yes, I want to deplete the forest resources out of countries. It's a survival. The basic needs that President Jimmy Carter was talking about are not being met. So the conversation is more receptive. There'll be more receptive to the conversation if we point to some health issues. Using the food wood fuel system is polluting the indoor environment. They know that their children and the women who are pregnant at TTC are having respiratory tract issues that can be linked to the use of wood fuel systems. So it's not, we are gonna make tough rules so that you can stop damaging the environment. It's like, we are going to make rules but also provide strategies for you to have healthy indoor environment. We want to minimize the number of infant mortality because of indoor air pollution. Yeah, that's really great. I think, I mean, you touched on a lot of, you know, and you talked about this earlier, it's a lot of this is connected, right? So, you know, it's not that someone who has survival needs doesn't also care about the environment. And you know, they also care about a lot of these other objectives. And we need to find as engineers and designers solutions that really address the systemic connectedness, right? So it's like the environmental concern is connected to the health concern is connected to the economic concern. You know, if you're walking a long way to cut down that wood, you're working less maybe or you're, you know, you're using more resources to be able to collect that or spending more money. So there's all of these things are connected, right? One of the things that I do wanna ask is, you know, thinking about the cost and let's just, you know, we're focused on this urban in the US area because of what you were discussing before. I have two questions, but I'm gonna sensitize both these into one and then I have a personal question. Thinking about making these economically viable. So, you know, in academia, we often are thinking about technical performance, right? What is the state of the art of this research? We're building something, we get this new thing, we want more energy efficient or whatever it is, but you're really focusing on that affordability piece of it, right? Which is not always what you're seeing in the journal paper of like new materials or whatever it is, right? When we're thinking about that, how do we make, how do we understand the system around it? Cause you spent a lot of time talking about the labor force and the win-win thinking about all of these other systems that are not directly, you know, the material of the roof, right? And all of that influences the economic viability. So how did you, how did you get your team to think about it from an engineering mindset of really understanding that sort of economic viability of these new roof solutions? Yeah, thank you. So I won't take credit for that. I would say like it's through being challenged by people like Richard, who I think is on the call right now. It's being willing, stepping out of your comfort zone when you're pushed. And because my students, for example, and my other colleagues, they see me do this, it interests them that, you know, in my introduction, for example, they made reference to the time I spent as a Jefferson Science Fellow being pushed out of my comfort zone involved working in the Bureau for Food Security. I went in there because of the sensors and the digitization efforts, but because I was there, I had an opportunity to interact with people who turned around and told me that, hey, one of the issues that is affecting farmers is post harvest loss and the buildings contribute directly to this. So the farmer is more receptive, sorry, I went to the rural level, but the farmer, I'm using that as an example, they will be more receptive to having a conversation about energy efficiency in their buildings because you're also helping them address issues with this loss. But then the more direct answer to your question, remember I moved from University of Florida to Penn State and the hook really was my department chair in the engineering design. I was very comfortable at the University of Florida. I was not looking for a new job opportunity, but I was speculatively just having this discussion with him. And he showed me that there is a department in a few universities where they have that title engineering design that allows you to look at the broader systemic issues. So I would say, you know, interacting with people from outside your field is critical. Getting into the community, even if you started off initially as a person who was pushing a technology focus discussion, if you're receptive to talking to people and if you're listening to them, people like Richard will step up and they will tell you like, you know, what you're doing is good, but it would even be better if you thought about this other side of the equation. People like Richard will tell you that those conversations do not happen because of very, very simple reasons that we can address as professional. Number one, we show up using technical jargon. One of my partners who's not a university, one of my collaborators who's not a university person pointed out to me. He's like, I don't understand the jargon, but when I go to see my doctor, I spend 15 minutes with them. I have no doubt in my mind that I'm really, really sick. And what is it that the doctors do that we are failing to do? When we learn how to communicate with everyday people using language that they can understand, these conversations are going to happen. And then the second mistake, and I'll stop after that, the second mistake that we make when we go out, again, I'm gonna quote Richard, Richard told me like, he's gone into meetings where we are telling them, you have problems and we have all the answers and that destroys trust. You are annoying people. They don't wanna talk to you. So show up, we show up arrogant and they're saying show up, be humble. And then we will tell you what we know. If you show up, as I know it all, we will keep quiet. Yeah, that's an amazing device. And I think it's really important that we also as educators at universities when we're educating the next generation of engineers be really focusing on these types of skills. These should be concrete learning objectives that we're developing content, curriculum, evaluation around having our students practice, much in the similar way that doctors do, right? So you're talking about medical professionals, they take classes on how to do that interaction because it's critical to their work. And I think you're bringing up this very important point that I absolutely love and it's flooring me as like, this is critical to our work. If we're gonna make things happen and actually have impact, you need to be able to do this. And so we really should be focusing on it. So I love that. I think we're at 12.56. Yana, do we have time for one more question or should we? Yeah, I definitely think we have one question and then we have to wrap it up. Okay, so then I'm gonna take my own personal question here. So I think one of the challenges that you've been really addressing and talking about here is this idea of thinking about our engineering work and trying to make decisions about things that are in this other space that we're not very comfortable with, right? And so I'm really interested in your take and you've already discussed it, but I'm really interested in your take. How do we extend, what is our role as sort of researchers in developing engineering theory? How do we extend our engineering models? Like if I'm a designer, I'm developing a new model or empirical test, how do I get to that space where you're talking about in a practice-based way, I work with this team, but I'm thinking in a theoretical way, how do I get to something where just as we've done for sustainability, if I wanna do that for social and I'm saying I make this design decision, what's the theory about how this impacts housing, right? So I'm really interested in moving from like my pure, very like I'm gonna go in this physics, math-based thing, but I need to at the end understand what's the impact on housing, which is not anywhere in any of my models. So how do you make that leap from I'm in my software or in my theory, I'm in class, I'm writing calculations, how do I translate that into that other space in a rigorous way? So I'd like to think about that. So the short answer is you don't. And in one of the slides, I think I remember like pointing out that there are some technology transfer partners who have facilitated the transition of information from the very theoretical to the practical within the agricultural sector. So I'll go back and say you don't, but you don't do it alone. You do it in collaboration with people who, for lack of better words, I'll call them the technology transfer partners. Some of them are community-based organizations. Some of them are university-based organizations. Some of them are in professional bodies such as engineering for change. You don't do it alone. You think about it in terms of if Esther is ever gonna jump out of a helicopter in a parachute, she's never gonna do it alone. I'll be one of those people who you see in the pictures, who's on the back or someone else. That is, in my humble opinion, that is the only way this is gonna happen. You're gonna have to be the person who's being carried on the back of someone else so that they can jump out of the helicopter. And then going back to the agricultural analogy again, and I could do this with several other professions, but if you think about it, I have a friend who's cracking the cord for the DNA of a potato. If she showed up and asked and started having a conversation with my grandmother, who's very smart, she look at her like, what is the importance of this? Not because she doesn't think science is not important, but there is that stereotype that people have that professors are very theoretical. They're here cracking the DNA of the potato when we are dealing with food insecurity issues. So the conversation that needs to happen there is more on the broader impacts and it can actually happen. So there are cases where we fall short because we forget that the intellectual merit is important, but if I am a farmer in Kericho, in Kericho growing tea in Kenya, what is important to me, what will make me value what you have is telling me that, hey, I have the ability to predict that frost is going to affect your tea plantation within two days. So whatever science you're doing, think of it as a black box and put it inside the black box and have a conversation with the community members at the level of the broader impacts. What does this mean? That if I have a warning on frostbite, you give me two days warning, I will save one million US dollars. They're like, you can tell me all the equations you want. I don't understand. I don't care. Just give me the final outcome. I think that's an incredible note to wrap on. Great note to end up. Thank you Esther. I'm gonna pass it over to Yana now. Yana, let's wrap it up. Thank you so much Esther. Thank you so much, Jesse. That particular note of translating between community members and engineers and vice versa, it's an incredible skill that we need to cultivate. And Jesse, you nailed it too in terms of how we teach our engineers, how we create those opportunities for practicum for the engineering bedside manner, if you will. That is so critical and perhaps underlooked at this point. So with that, I want to thank everybody for joining us today. I want to thank Esther for taking the time to share your insights. Also provide an invitation to you all to join us next month where we are going to have Natasha Wright from the University of Arizona, Minnesota, join us to talk about some of her work, particularly with work in designing solutions for emerging markets and water solutions. She is a desalination expert and just an incredible, incredible person who can really provide some guidance and insight on the water energy nexus. With that, I'd like to thank you all for joining. If you have more questions that we didn't address, do feel free to email us. Esther was kind enough also to provide her email. A recording of this seminar will be available on our website. And with that, I'd like to wish you all a good afternoon, good evening, or a good morning depending where you are and encourage you to sign up on our site so you can hear more about our upcoming seminars and incredible people in our network. Thank you, everyone. See you on the next seminar. Thank you, everyone. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.