 Dear colleagues, good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, depending where you're joining us from today. Welcome. Welcome. My name is Yana Aranda and I'm the Director of the Engineering Global Development Group at the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. And I also serve as the President of Engineering for Change. It is my privilege today to welcome you all to this very special webinar in celebration of World Engineering Day 2021. I will be serving as your moderator for today. This morning, I had the privilege of joining the opening ceremony of World Engineering Day hosted by UNESCO, which included the launch of the UNESCO Engineering Report, which has been a decade in the making. This assessment emphasized the importance of achieving the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals by 2030, and the vital role of the engineer in the realization of the SDGs. The speakers highlighted the need for cross-regional and cross-cultural solutions and strengthening of global cooperation for the common good. The Director General of the UNESCO also highlighted the challenge of for the engineering community, in particular the geographic and gender disparity within our profession. Her example of the distribution of engineering talent was a stark reminder of the inequities within our profession. We're literally across the African continent, where some countries have just one professional engineer for 170 people. E4C and ASME have been helping to meet these challenges head on by preparing and activating engineers around the globe to tackle these urgent issues. I'm excited to share just a few examples of how we do this today. We will feature four of our 2020 cohort of engineering for change fellows, our staff, and champions advocating for change towards engineering a cleaner, healthier, and more sustainable global community. The webinar will be archived on our site and on our YouTube channel, you can see both those URLs on the slide you're seeing now. The information on upcoming webinars is available on our site and E4C members receive invitations to those directly. If you're following us on Twitter today, I invite you to join the conversation with our dedicated hashtag, hashtag E4C webinars. Now, some very important housekeeping items. We really want to make sure that everybody is familiar with how to use the Zoom platform, although I'm fairly certain that during this pandemic you have all become Zoom spurts, as I like to call us. But in case you're not sure, please use the chat window right now to tell us what part of the world you are joining us from today. So I'm going to go ahead and enter mine as well. So welcome from the Netherlands and Sweden, Ghana, and Ohio, Tucson to New Jersey, Newcastle. These are coming in way faster than I can read them Vancouver and Mexico, Indiana, Rochester, Scotland, Paris, California, Oshawa, Ontario, I'm from Toronto. Hey, neighbor. Oregon, and California, the UK. I mean just incredible welcome everyone we're so so thrilled to have you with us today. Just as a reminder, please use the chat window to type any remarks you might have for your fellow listeners, as well as for the engineering for change admin if you have any trouble. We would like to reserve the Q&A window for any questions that you have for our presenters today so we can keep track of them. Welcome again everyone from Uganda to Kansas to California to Kingston we're so thrilled. Before we move to our presenters I'd like to tell you a bit about engineering for change and ASME. ASME is a nonprofit membership organization which was established in 1880 for enabling collaboration, knowledge sharing and skills development across all engineering disciplines. ASME has over 100,000 members in over 140 countries and has a mission to advance engineering for the benefit of humanity. That core mission propelled ASME to be the core founder of engineering for change over a decade ago. For those of you who don't know us, E4C is a knowledge organization, digital platform and global community of more than 1 million engineers, designers and development practitioners 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 agriculture and more. We invite you to become a member. E4C membership is free and provides access to news and thought leaders, insights on hundreds of essential technologies in our solution, including 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 their interests. Now the global megatrends of shifting demographics, digital connectivity, particularly critical during the COVID-19 pandemic and technological advancement are reflected in our membership to date. E4C members are from India, followed closely by the United States, Pakistan, Nigeria and the Philippines. They are young, approximately 70% of them are under the age of 35. They are technically trained as engineers, scientists, architects and designers, and a significant percentage of them are women. What this data tells us is that young, diverse, technically trained people, particularly in emerging and frontier markets, are seeking to apply their skills to improve the quality of life in their communities and beyond. So we invite you to join them and us on Engineering for Change as members. In 2018, E4C has been powered by SME for over a decade, and that would not be possible without the visionary leaders and champions like our executive director and CEO, Mr. Tom Costabile. So I'm going to give a quick bio version here for Tom. He is an accomplished C-level executive with a strong track record of delivering successful results for large global organizations while leading them through significant change. He serves as the executive director and CEO of SME and oversees our organizational strategy around our core technologies and organizational programs and codes and standards development, membership conferences, technical publishing, education, professional development and public policy. He's a very busy man, and we're so thrilled that he set aside some time to join us in celebrating today. Tom, over to you. John, thank you and good morning, good afternoon, good evening, and hello for tomorrow for some of you. John, thank you very much. And to all of you, thank you for joining Engineering for Change webinar. It's important because today we're going to talk, we're going to learn more about advancing sustainable engineering and building the workforce of the future. Let me tell you why I may just be the biggest fan of the E4C fellowship program. As many of you know, ASU needs mission is to advance engineering for the benefit of humanity. I can't think of a better way to do that than to take some of our brightest young engineers, test them with a major humanitarian challenge, and then turn them loose for six months to address it. The energy that comes out of these meetings is just unbelievable. If that was all these fellowships do that would be impressive enough, but there's another important way that E4C advances engineering. It's by enabling early career engineers to research, learn and to grow in the profession. Today's fellows of tomorrow's leaders, no doubt in my mind, I've seen it in my short tenure year. So in a very tangible way, E4C fellowships are building the future of engineering. I trust by now that you've heard about our campaign for the next generation of engineers. ASME is ambitious five year effort to secure financial future for our philanthropic programs, one of which is of course the E4C fellowships. So I would encourage you that after we conclude today, please take a minute, go to the ASME Foundation website, that's ASME foundation.org, and you can see firsthand the amount of work that's going there. If you're able to, I would request that take a look at the donate page. Whatever you can do, we'd be thankful for. This is a campaign that has my full attention. Yana was very polite, but anytime I get the chance to deal with this group, it's a fun group, it's an innovative group, and ladies and gentlemen, they are making a change every day a positive change to our global environment. So before we get started, I'd like to just offer a couple of important acknowledgments. First, I want to thank our partners and our friends at Autodesk Foundation, who they're generous support of the E4C fellowship program. They continue to be a great partnership in the program is growing because of you. I also want to thank Mary Ellen Machado, the E4C program manager, Marilyn Hogan Clover, our program coordinator, who consistently go above and beyond to make sure that the fellowship program is at the top of its game. And of course, I'd be remiss if I didn't thank our big boss, Yana Aranda, who serves multiple roles, both of us are director of engineering global development portfolio, and the president of engineering for change. Along with a very talented team, they work very hard to make this event possible. And Yana, Mary Ellen, Marilyn, thank you guys again you continue to do a fantastic job. I'm just pleased to be a part of your success. Ladies and gentlemen, with that, let me turn it over to Mahatesh Harimath, ASME's President-elect and my friend. And I thank you all for your interest in E4C for today. Mahatesh, welcome. Thank you, Tom, and good morning, good afternoon, good evening, wherever you are as president-elect of ASME, I'm delighted to welcome you to this important recognition of our E4C fellows. I say important because of the work that our E4C fellows do is so vital to reaching the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. UN SDGs represent urgent priorities for improving quality of life in underserved communities around the world, priorities like clean water, sanitation, adequate food, and access to healthcare, 17 in all, and our E4C fellows apply their engineering talent and tools to solving them. But today is important for another reason as well, and that is the opportunity it gives us to take pride in what ASME's programs accomplish. Two years ago, I had the honor of serving our society and our country as ASME's congressional fellow. I was privileged to work as technical advisor to the Committee on Science, Space, and Technology of the US House of Representatives. As a result of that fantastic experience, I came to know firsthand the value of ASME fellowship, another benefit of being an ASME member. So I'm proud to be a leader in this organization and even prouder of all the ways ASME members and programs serve the greater good. Thank you for logging in today, and thank you to our E4C fellows for their valuable contribution you are making to improving the quality of life for everyone. Enjoy the webinar. Thank you so much, Mahantesh. Thank you, Tom. We are honored to have you. I'm seeing the numbers keep climbing on our participants here over 100 so far and going so very excited to have everyone join us today for this awesome day. So with that, let's talk a little bit about the Sustainable Development Goals. Mahantesh, you kicked us off. The 17 Sustainable Development Goals, you present a unified framework by which the global community is addressing humanity's greatest challenges. They are simultaneously technical and social in nature and require high impact solutions, a technical talent pipeline that is prepared to engage effectively, as well as infrastructure and public leadership to drive implementation at scale. We are now less than a decade away from the deadline set to achieve the SDGs. Engineering, technology and innovation have a pivotal role to play in achieving them, but engineers in particular remain disconnected oftentimes from the global efforts, limiting the potential impact. And as a result, development projects are often suffering from insufficient engineering knowledge and systems perspective, resulting in wasted investment and reinvention of the wheel. Engineers have limited access to the high quality training, helping them for the multidisciplinary and cross-cultural skills needed for sustainable development. And still, there are a few dedicated platforms and robust networks available to sufficiently enable this technical workforce to contribute their expertise to advancing the goals. E4C has been dedicated to these issues for over a decade by leveraging our unique community, digital platform and expertise. As a knowledge organization and media platform, we regularly present timely issues to our global audience. And as a convener of academic, nonprofit, on the ground organizations, the private sector and multilateral agencies, E4C draws on diverse perspectives to identify research priorities and understand multi-sectoral and cross-functional profits. To believe the research objectives determined together with our partners, we assemble and cultivate diverse talent around the globe. We lean on the insights and strategic guidance of our global network of more than a thousand experts in academia, nonprofit, private sector and multilateral agencies. What you see here is an image is just an example, a snapshot of our network of academic institutions that we collaborate with around the globe. With that, we integrate with our research fellowship. Our fellows whom we expose to these urgent issues and train to execute a mix of scholarly work, private sector market research, policy research and qualitative interview synthesis required to deliver the contextual insights needed to propel our sector forward. This approach allows us to simultaneously train exceptional rising professionals worldwide, provide a platform for interdisciplinary cooperation and connect a community of fellow leaders and peers from every continent. The result is a combination of actionable research informing sustainability strategies in the private and public sectors alike and already connected and able workforce. This knowledge that is developed is accessible as it is published in the form of open source reports on our digital platform. The insights cut across geographies and sectors to deliver an ecosystem view of technology for good, infuse engineering insights into global development and serve to catalyze needs driven innovation. To date, we have published 31 reports in partnership with 39 diverse organizations from all sectors. In 2020, our partners included private sector organizations such as Autodesk, nonprofits working on the ground such as iGov Africa and Kenya and EWB Australia and academic partners such as Penn State. The research outcomes are compiled in our 2020 research annual report, which we are very pleased to officially launch today. Through methods such as participatory research and landscape mapping, E4C delivers actionable research that is directly aligned to the sustainable development goals. In 2020 alone, we focus particularly on the SDGs of zero hunger, number two, good health and well-being, SDG3, clean water and sanitation, SDG6, affordable and clean energy as embodied in SDG7, industry innovation and infrastructure, SDG9, sustainable cities and communities, SDG11, responsible consumption and production, SDG12, climate action, SDG13 and above all else partnerships for the goals as embodied through all of our programs in SDG17. All of this is compiled into annual research reports that we invite you to review. And of course, if you have any questions, ideas or topics that you would like to explore with us, we invite you to contact us at research at engineeringforchange.org. So with that bit of background, I'm very pleased to turn it over now to our program manager, Mariana Machado, who is the lead for our fellowship program to provide a bit more detail. Welcome Mariela. Thanks so much, Mariana. Before I pass it on to the true stars of this virtual event, our E4C Fellows, I would just like to provide a quick background about our program. As mentioned during, as mentioned before, our research collaboration are holistically integrated with the E4C Fellowship Program. We have matched exceptional talent worldwide to ensure this unique insights. We do this by recruiting fellows based on qualifications, expertise, and research priorities, such as region technical expertise and sector, for example, energy or ICT or water. What's really important to highlight is that we also provide a comprehensive workforce development program during those five months of the fellowship. The program is 100% virtual, which has enabled us to grow in the middle of a pandemic and provide structural online engagement and incentives to achieve the research objectives determined together with our partners. We provide an online community with digital tools and provide targeted training and networking opportunities meant to advance their career into this field in their future. As you see on this next slide, during their five month tenure, E4C Fellows developed their technical and soft skills through this four pillars. They have 400 hours of research, enhancing their thought leadership and communication skills. They also have more than 30 hours to practice remote diverse and international teamwork and targeted learning modules in different types of fields of engineering to train this new holistic generation of engineers. We work for the professional and soft skills that you see below and for the training. And we also offer more than 30 hours of networking opportunities where they're able to connect with each other and to connect their regional networks. The annual program attracts global applicants and has grown significantly since 2014. In 2020, at the height of the pandemic, we hosted nearly 90 fellows from every continent as you see on the map. We reflected on what Yana mentioned before, that talent pool that reaches all corners of the world. One of the most remarkable outcomes of the program, as you see there with the 56% of women, is that a gender spread, it's the opposite to the rest of the engineering sector, which we're very proud of. We also wanted to highlight how competitive this program has become. In 2020, out of a pool of more than 400 applicants from 72 countries, we have the very hard task to select just 25 fellows from 15 countries, and you will be hearing from some of them today. So far, our fellowship in 2020, which we're still recruiting for, so if you're interested, we'll be sending the link in the chat. We have received more than 600 applications from more than 80 countries, covering all continents as you see on the map. And we're still aiming, we're still a couple of weeks away to closing, so we're expecting thousands of interested candidates. Without further to say, before I pass it on to our fellow, I just want to thank the fellows that are not present here, fortunately we cannot have them all. I just want to thank the E4C Fellows 2020, representing 15 countries across the globe are 25 fellows that I just mentioned, and thank you them for their incredible work last year and the work that you can see reflected on our annual report. Now without further to say, let me pass it to our forever fellow. Grace exemplifies the engineers that were aiming to train to become global leaders and change makers. Our programs allows to come back for a second third or even fourth year like Grace did to support program management and strategic planning for their constant improvement every year of the program. Grace has supported the growth of the program from a couple of fellows in the year that she was here the first year to 50 fellows this year. Grace is also the main editor of the E4C research annual report and our current research manager for this year as well. In her spare time, she's a PhD candidate from the University of Michigan. So without further to say, and to welcome the rest of our fellows over to you Grace, and thank you so much. Thanks Mariela. Thanks so much for having me today. As Mariela just mentioned the program has been an incredible part of my early career and has even influenced me to pursue a PhD in an interdisciplinary engineering program. I started as a fellow few years back in 2017 and since then the program has grown and I've had the privilege to grow with it. This year we're focusing more on scaling the research program based on the lessons that we've learned over the last couple of years, which is really exciting. So this year we've had many outstanding fellows work on research to address some of the challenges related to the sustainable development goals. In total 16 reports were published this year. These are all available on our platform and described in the annual report. These can be accessed at engineeringforchange.org slash research. We welcome you to take a look at that after today's webinar. Today we will share findings from just four of the list that you see here. I will start us off by sharing the work completed regarding the response to COVID-19. Next we'll share challenges and opportunities facing the social entrepreneurship and innovation sector in the United States. Then opportunities for design and manufacturing industry to improve their sustainability outcomes. And last we'll hear about the state of engineering for global development programs specifically in Asia. So let's get started with our first report. Over the last year the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted communities worldwide. So many solutions have been desperately needed. However, we have been facing some intense issues. We saw global and local shortage of PPE and ventilators and supply chains have been facing some serious bottlenecks. And suddenly, in efforts to understand the spread of the disease, rapid testing and contact tracing solutions were in demand all over the world. And on top of these, governments have issued mandated lockdowns, meaning that engineers have had to figure out how to design and manufacture safely within these guidelines to protect employees and staff. This work was a large effort that included five 2020 fellows and one fellow alum volunteer across five different countries. The work was also advised by fellow alumna Caroline Sawyers who currently consults with the World Health Organization. We foresee fellows and expert advisors work closely with ASME, specifically Christine Riley and the Biomechanical Engineering Division and Bob Hawk from the Engineering for Global Development Committee to investigate engineering solutions needed during the pandemic. First fellows curated recommended standards technologies and solutions for medical device and testing implementation specifically for low resource settings. The image that the team completed was used to inform panel discussions at the UN Economic Commission of Africa. They're 29 COVID-19 innovation and investment forum, which took place last June. In the next phase of this research case studies from nine countries were selected research and reported on the report describes rapid ventilator design in Panama, Colombia, India, the Netherlands, and the United States. PPE development in Canada, Ghana and Lebanon and mobile phone contact tracing in India and South Korea. I don't have time to go into all of these but I will highlight a couple examples. First in the United States Ford Motor Company and General Electric partnered in early 2020 to produce 50,000 ventilators. The collaboration leveraged GE's Biomechanical Design Expertise and Ford's Manufacturing Expertise. In just a few weeks a ventilator picture here was designed to optimize manufacturing time. Ford set up a manufacturing floor actually just down the highway from me where they borrowed office desks and equipment from other facilities in southeast Michigan. They created a COVID-safe manufacturing line and ultimately delivered the promised 50,000 ventilators, which have been distributed to hospitals around the United States. Another case that I will highlight is PPE manufacturing in Ghana. Partnerships between the Ghana Society of Biomechanics Engineers, Makerspaces and Universities assemble teams to design and manufacture PPE, such as 3D printed face shields and masks. Through government support and resources from the Ghanaian garment industry, roughly 15 million face masks have been manufactured and distributed to healthcare facilities and schools. It's truly incredible the response that engineers have had during this pandemic and we hope that by telling these stories we can celebrate the accomplishments and also prepare more adequately for future humanitarian and global health crises that may and will come. Next, I will pass it along to Patrick Sowers, who is a senior lecturer and PhD student at the Ohio State University, where his courses and research focus on engineering projects in rural communities. Welcome Patrick over to you. Thanks Grace excited to be here today to talk about my research collaboration with E for C and Belgrove USA this past summer. Typically my research focuses on curriculum development and water access in rural communities, but fellowship this summer I had the opportunity to dive into the social innovation sector, which I'll talk about on the next slide. Social innovation in the US is a group of organizations that focus on addressing economic environmental or social problems through a market driven approach. An example of an organization such as this is one of the 2020 ASME I show finalist, renewable. This organization takes food waste and converts it to nitrogen to be used as fertilizer for aquaponics farms. On the next slide I'll talk about some of the needs of the sector. Each year hundreds of social innovations do not make it to market lab work and testing is not enough for a product to be successful. There needs to be implementations on how to scale and market a product effectively. The needs of this sector wanted to look at how do successful organizations in the space operate, and what can be done to support these organizations. One way that these organizations can be supported is going through an incubator process. Belgrove USA is an incubator such as this. An incubator comes alongside the social innovation organizations and walks them through product development from start to finish. Our research specifically looked at categorizing and organizing all of the social enterprise incubators in the USA. And I will talk about how we did this on the next slide. Our research strategy focused on collecting all the existing literature that had been compiled in the space. From there we worked to create a database which had over 300 social enterprise incubators currently operating in the US across many different sectors. We then identified some experts within the space and organizations that would be able to have semi structured interviews where they would share challenges and insights into their organizations, as well as the sector as a whole. This presented a plethora of opportunities that I'll talk about next. The opportunities that we saw from this research were the opportunity to streamline operations amongst these organizations, organizations that chose a sector focus were more successful than others that spread themselves too thin. From all the organizations interviewed, there was a willingness to collaborate and network, but they were unsure of the best way to do so, which would lead to an opportunity to improve that space. The opportunity that we saw throughout this research was coming up with a uniformed metric to measure and track impact from the social innovations. With engineers working in the sector and being a part of the social innovation space, if we can show and train engineers, how their decisions affect the world around them. We're looking to work towards achieving the SDGs and more specifically SGD nine, which is an inclusive and industrialized sustainable industry. Thank you. Excellent. Thank you so much Patrick. Next, I'm excited to introduce Elizabeth Collins, who is a mechanical engineer from Scotland. She's currently based in Spain, and her background includes experiences in manufacturing and sustainable energy. Welcome Elizabeth over to you. Thank you Grace, and I'm looking forward to sharing one of our research today. So I love this project actually as my background is in manufacturing. So it was really relevant to my interests, and I got to connect with some really interesting people in the field. And overall it's given me a lot to consider going forward in the industry. I actually worked on this project with Dana shoe, one of the other fellows, and we did it in collaboration with auto desk, who were really looking for ways to support and develop sustainability initiatives using technology like theirs. So, our research really targeted the design manufacturing industry and opportunities in this field to improve sustainability efforts. We were primarily looking at the early stages of design, where software can be used for things like lightweighting material choice, improving manufacturing efficiency to reduce a product's environmental impact, and also to potentially prompt compliance to certain design objectives or standards. So we wanted to investigate what role industry standards can play in driving sustainability efforts. So we started off with this research mapped out existing standards and practices identified by top companies and industry, and conducted a literature review. We also used connections from the ASME and auto desk networks to identify experts to interview on the subject, and connected with eight leaders across universities and leading companies in design and manufacturing. So they really helped us get an insight into both academic and industry perspectives. So onto some of our major observations. In our review of the standards identified by companies, we found that there were a variety used, but there wasn't a huge amount of consistency or one gold standard across all companies. With the overlap that we did find only a small number of these had directives relevant to early product design stages, and we also found companies quite often creating their own custom sustainability standards and programs. So there is plenty of opportunity at the early stages of product development to make a positive environmental impact. But there aren't always great measures put in place to ensure consideration at this early stage. And a common critique that we found to our research was that voluntary standards are often not specific enough. And the criteria and expectations for products, and often are scoped a product end of life metrics instead of early design considerations. So we also wanted to investigate what else other than standards might be driving sustainability efforts in companies. And when talking with experts, some of the most notable motivations were regulations customers and social values. It seems like increasing regulations is one of the most effective ways to push companies further. We heard how even tougher local or national regulations can ultimately have a global influence. And although there needs to be a push for enforcement of these laws, it's a strong driver for change. And also concerns around social impact seem to be growing. And with some companies relying on their reputation for doing the right thing, that can act as a strong internal motivator for change. As consumers, we find that business business interactions are particularly important with big companies having a lot of leverage over suppliers and also the ability to pressure their competition into change. The ideal situation is where companies work together to push the whole industry forward. Moving forward, STD 12 aims to ensure sustainable consumption and production patterns with one of the targets being to encourage companies to adopt sustainable practices and to integrate sustainable information into the reporting cycle. And that was really at the heart of our research and I was trying to identify the trends and opportunities to drive development. So our two major observations from our research where that there's a great need for communication collaboration and sharing of information, not only within businesses but between different companies and the industry. Within companies recommendations include effectively communicating the sustainability goals to engineers to encourage more impact on the design stages. Through research we heard the engineers often have other priorities at this stage and don't necessarily have full awareness of the sustainability initiatives being agreed at higher levels in the business. Also, increasing reporting and communication between companies could hopefully inspire collaborations, which can push the industry as a whole forward. In order to make true progress toward designing a more sustainable future companies must be transparent and consistent in how they present sustainability information. A life cycle assessment or LCA is a way to assess environmental impacts associated with all stages of the life cycle of a product. Both academic and industry experts saw the potential for a short-cut LCA with relevant elements being prioritized for use in the product design phase. We need to be a real balance there to ensure that this wouldn't overburden engineers and the design process. Great. Thank you so much, Elizabeth. And I'm now excited to introduce another outstanding fellow, Polavi Konwar. She is from Nepal where she earned her degree in environmental engineering. She is now a manager at a water filtration manufacturing company and is currently based in Seoul, South Korea. Welcome Polavi over to you. Thank you, Grace. Hello and Namaste everyone. This is Polavi Konwar. And like Grace mentioned, I'm from Kathmandu, Nepal, but I'm currently living in South Korea. And I'm really very thrilled to be sharing my research collaboration along with my fellowship experience with you guys today. Starting with my fellowship experience, I would say as standard is one of the best thing that has happened to me in the during the pandemic, because it not only fulfilled my wish to work in a global platform, but also it provided me an opportunity to to work in a diverse group of with the diverse group of people, and it also haunted my skills soft and technical skills, boosted my confidence which I was really lacking as an early career engineer. So I urge everyone who is listening to me right now and is an early career engineer who is interested in engineering and development do do apply for the fellowship opportunity because it will be worth it and I am sure that you will be happy when you do it. So now, starting my another slide with the topic of my research, my topic of the research was state of engineering for global development in Asia. And for those who don't know what engineering for development is, just to give a sneak peek engineering for development is the practice or the discipline that intersects between engineering and development. And to bring about the social impact that we all are seeking in the world. And in many part of the world it is also known as appropriate technology, ruler engineering, humanity engineering and so on and so forth. So basically, my research was already I mean the similar research has already been carried out by our previous fellows for the last three years with the help of ASME and engineering for change. And as you can see on the screen that such kind of research has already been carried out in many part of the world like North America, South America, Australia, New Zealand, but Asia was yet to be discovered so I played the role in it, and now moving forward to the next slide. So, actually the topic of my, the scope of my research was to cover the entire reason of Asia, but due to the limited time I was only able to map out the academic programs institutions, career opportunities and like journals researchers, which is related with this discipline, only in the Southeast Asian region. So I think, I believe that this research is still an ongoing project. And for this research, I did my, I basically did the desk research, where I was fortunate enough to interview more than 20 plus personals from countries like Japan, South Korea, Nepal, India, which really built my networking strongly, and I really enjoyed that. So, from the research what I found was, it was very surprising to me because I only researched for seven countries, but within those seven countries like there were vast opportunities, which I was unaware of myself too, even though I was very interested in this field. So I found that there were 19 institutes, institutions who were practicing engineering for global development as a part, like, as a part of a graduate level programs or either social innovation, research centers, or, or, or just giving out the opportunities for students to internship and like do a fellowship program so, so the biggest opportunity that I saw in this field was that this field is growing enormously and young people like me are not really concerned about the mainstream engineering but also are looking forward to the holistic engineering and the engineering for global development. Now moving on to the next slide for our opportunities and challenges I think I already discussed the opportunity is that this is a growing field for anyone who is willing to work in the engineering and development. And for the challenges I think my, my personal experience was that in the Asia, especially in the Asia there were no any graduate, I mean there were no an undergraduate level program. So which limited kind of which also made an impact that this kind of engineering discipline, like engineering for global development discipline is not a credible engineering that give a sense of the undergraduate level program so, and another challenges for this discipline was that there was a lack of universal name, like I already mentioned that this engineering for development is also known as appropriate technology and it has many names like more than 10 or 20 names all around the world so I really felt that in order to connect and collaborate with the people in the same field we do need a universal name, so that we can work together and come together and yeah, do the do the universal work. And so lastly this research will be very research will be found in the website of E4C and the report will be very helpful and sourceful to those who are willing to connect collaborate and expand their communities in the vast network of engineering for global development. And finally this work was to align along with the partnership I mean the SDG goal number 70 which was partnership for goals, as we believe that world will become a better place when we collaborate and collaborate together, rather than competing. So thank you. Thanks so much Palavi and thank you also to Patrick and Elizabeth for joining us and sharing your work. As a reminder, all this work is and the work of other fellows is available on our platform and is organized in our annual reports. We hope you take a look after the conclusion of the webinar. I will pass it back to Iyana to moderate the Q&A session. Thank you so much Grace and thank you to our fellows I'm just going to put up a slide so at this point we are eager to hear your questions and please do enter them into the Q&A window for the Q&A bar when you can. Start with one question that's actually directed to Elizabeth. And this question is related to your research so from your point of view what are some strategies for incorporating sustainability impact at the beginning of the design process, or perhaps a better question. How do you see future research being conducted to determine these strategies. So I think a lot of what we found through research was there was kind of a consensus that a short cut at LCA, so if you take out certain elements of the LCA and apply them at the beginning of the design process you could potentially incorporate that into technology. And I think kind of in the same theme if you can't do it with technology then trying to communicate better with the engineers what the sustainability initiatives are, because that was something that we saw again and again is that it's maybe not particularly well communicated through businesses. Yeah, I think I would say that. Future research, I think probably rolling that kind of thing out maybe looking into a software is already all for that and what kind of benefits that has, I would say, I hope that answers the question. I think it sounds like whoever asked this and we want to encourage you to reach out to us perhaps propose some future research, because I think that it is right for additional insights. So, more questions coming in I do again encourage you to put them into the Q&A so we can keep track. So, this is a question I think that's coming in for Palavi. I welcome the rest of the fellows of course to weigh in. So, regarding graduate program, sorry the engineering, global development programs, particularly in Asia, it said that the slide noted that they are focused at the graduate level. What can students do as undergraduates to get involved or to begin the discussion, particularly let's say with the Asian lens. Yeah, thank you for whoever asked this question. Yeah, I think, even though there was not a specific undergraduate level program or the degree program related with the engineering for global development. There were a lot of opportunities within the institutes in Asia, which provided the opportunities for students like to join in the research collaborations or begin up a startup or you know just to be a part of the group which is really interested about the works, and there are also some of the exchange exchange student kind of facilities in IITs, Bombay or Madras so maybe you can check out the report and go through it and in case if you want to get a degree level program I think you can also go through the other research sites which are for the Europe and sorry, North America and Latin America and Australia and New Zealand. I think they have some of the undergraduate level degree programs there as well. Thank you, Flavie and actually this seems to be a follow on question from that someone is curious about how you specifically heard about the E4C fellowship and what made you decide that it was the right fit for you. Sure, I'm very happy to answer this question always. So I actually was interested in appropriate technology and I was presenting in one of the conferences in Korea itself and I met Mariela, I'm from the leader of E4C presenting about E4C and I just instantly thought oh I should be here. So why am I not here I question myself and I think yeah one thing led to another and I met Mariela in Korea itself and it was a great experience she delivered a lot of things about E4C, I got excited and instantly applied so and luckily I got selected so yeah. Thank you so much. So another question has come in and this one is quite nuanced is regarding, maybe this is for Grace to address based on your global view of the research collaborations this year. Did any of the projects have a mobile and gender gap strategy or perhaps insight that you want to highlight? Yeah, and if I'm understanding it correctly by mobile gap they mean like information like access to the internet. Okay. Yeah, there was one report specifically actually there was a webinar on it last week, which I believe is available on the E4C catalog of previous projects on the ICT or the information communications technology infrastructure in northern Kenya so that report really actually looked at the differences between urban and rural communities in Kenya and had a lot of recommendations and analysis of those gaps because I don't remember the statistics off the top of my head maybe Mariela can share more because this is her expertise but there was definitely like a gap there and a lot of recommendations for implementers in the sector related to gender. None of the reports this year focused on that SDG which I believe is number four women and but a lot of the reports talk about like so when we talk about energy we do see a gender gap when we talk about access to mobile technology we see that as well. So it was included but it wasn't necessarily a focus this last year so but that's a great question and definitely an area for future work. And actually Grace I'm not going to let you have to hook quite yet there was another question that came up directly to you, given your what you presented around COVID-19 the COVID-19 engineering response. The listener wants to know what are some of the most important lessons from the COVID-19 engineering response that we should use for future crisis response from your perspective. Yeah, that's a really great question. I would say, based on kind of just summing up a lot of the case studies and the factors that led to the success of quite a few. One was the, the active involvement of government. So quick policy that enabled funding or enabled supply chain, you know, to be efficient. That was extremely helpful that was a catalyst for the GE and Ford project that was extremely successful. That was also a, the case study in South Korea also included a lot of government supports and then also in Ghana to, I would also say that the collaboration so being willing, I think, as I talked about the Ford and GE one. I knew like one side had that biomechanical expertise and one side had the manufacturing and so when you're talking about okay we need to get something out as soon as possible. Okay, we need to manufacture it quickly. And to do that we need to do a bunch of design changes, right because the current product takes, it's a longer manufacturing process so that collaboration between two different groups with their own expertise was like the reason it was so successful. I would say those two things. Funding and collaboration. Excellent. I think it's very actionable. Another question I think this is directed towards pot Shrek is regarding the social impact initiatives database and how we can access that. So the database is still under construction, but I would encourage if you're interested in learning more about the report and the data that we collected to check out the report on the E for C website. And if you are interested in the raw data, I would suggest reaching out, and we can see what parts we can share before it is made public facing. Thank you so much Patrick. Now, one more question actually very specifically targeted towards Elizabeth. Can you speak a little bit more about the shark-cutted lifecycle assessments, any thoughts on what could be taken out at the beginning stages of the design phase while still providing sufficiently useful insight for making decisions. I think that maybe thanks very much for the question. I think that follows on maybe slightly from the last question I think that would have been great to have that as our next area of really kind of digging into what elements of the LCA can be pulled to the start. On a high level we would say probably things like material choices and things like light weighting and consideration and end of life use as well as there was a big one that came up in a lot of interviews and also energy consumption. And once a product is up and running really I think all of those could be considered an early design design stage. Thank you so much. So, I have a couple of questions that have come in that are I think directed at us and staff. So, one question here is related to our colleagues at IEEE, it's to Philatronics and electrical engineers. The humanitarian technology group or site, special interests in global humanitarian technology I believe, has a very aligned mission to engineering for change. Is there any global initiative between E4C and IEEE site? Well, as just a little bit of a background or history as I serve as the institutional memory for engineering for change, E4C was co-founded by ASME, IEEE and engineers without borders USA. We do continue to actively collaborate with IEEE and we are very connected to our colleagues who lead the site initiative and are always sharing information and opportunities. We are eager to continue to collaborate and seek out shared value. And like Grace mentioned around collaborations relative to COVID response, it's really about finding those really well-aligned opportunities. So, if you have some ideas as someone who is part of the organization, we are so welcoming if you see some potential pathway for us to really move forward on. Alright, a lot of questions coming in. So, I'm trying to address them all. So, this other question came in related to universal metrics for measuring environmental impact. This particular listener is curious about the most recent thinking on this front if anybody has encountered any of that through their research. This is a big question actually. Is there anything? If not, again, I think this is an excellent topic for us to explore for the future. And I really am grateful for you for putting that question to our presenters today. Maybe if I see anything else that here. So, there's a couple of questions that are actually related to very specific to the fellowship. So, Maria, I'm going to turn these to you. So, as an early career engineer, I feel like the fellowship is miles away. Do you have any tips to progress towards the goal of becoming a fellow? I know there are a couple of questions there and I think we will tackle it by order, but something that is very important to be considered in this big pipeline of incredible talent that we receive each year is to have a passion to expand in this social impact or having some experience, some volunteering experience in trying to apply engineering in your local community or internationally to improve quality of life in whichever sector that is. So, I think that's one of the main things aside because our pool is usually engineers, architects, scientists. It's early career and maybe I can tackle that at once. Early career engineers, we consider early career engineers, PhDs, undergrads that are in their last year of undergrad, grad students, PhDs, but also engineers that already started their careers and are five years in. It's kind of the maximum so we don't have any age limit to that. It's just aligned to your experience. We usually have early career engineers so that we can push those careers forward. So I would just say to Maria that one recommendation is just to start getting some experience close to your community and trying to see how you can help with your technical expertise to improve quality of life. And I think that will put you in the pool of candidates that are considered. Thank you, Mariela. And there's another follow on question here from someone who wants to know how they can get their university more involved in the E4C fellowship program. Yeah, that's a great question. I will be sharing and I will be put in here in the chat and email fellows at engineer4change.org and if you are interested in collaborating more closely with engineer4change that being, you know, maybe receiving the fellowship application earlier, and there are other opportunities that we have coming down the pipeline like webinars, but also our annual event to impact engineered and other activities that you can get involved in. I will put the email right there so that you email us and just express interest and we can make a quick call and maybe understand what your needs are so that we can include you in that network of universities that Diana mentioned at the beginning of the of the call. Thank you, Mariela. And I'm going to, we're one minute out, so I'm going to wrap it up because I want to be respectful of your time, but I'm going to leave it on this last question. One of our listeners says, asking, what are the challenges from our own perspective, I'm going to take this now from my perspective, when it comes to integrating engineering with development to drive a sustainable future. So, I personally think that one of the greatest challenges is providing a platform by which engineers can be exposed and trained in this field. It is something that needs to happen in addition to, you know, the technical skills that we are imparted as part of our training both in academia or as students and on the job. So, offering opportunities like the world, like the fellowship is one pathway for us to be able to equip this workforce. And I think one of the most critical elements with this is the support of organizations that represent the engineering profession like ASME who have done this to really advance this future for us all. So thank you for that question. Thank you for all your questions. I'm sorry we couldn't get to all of them. There's a lot of great questions here, but I want to again encourage you all to review the research that we've presented today. Please share any ideas or recommendations for future topics. I personally am deeply proud of everything we've been able to accomplish at E4C over the past decade. And particularly for bringing together this global community of change agents that forms our fellow's cohort today. It's been an incredible and fulfilling journey for our team and our supporters. And none of this will be possible, as I mentioned in answering my question without the support of ASME's leadership, the ASME foundation for working trust to support our work, and our amazing partners, expert networks, sponsors, and the small but mighty team that I am privileged to lead. It's been a pleasure celebrating World Engineering Day with you all. I want to thank you for your time I want to thank you for your questions, and I want to wish you a fantastic day. And with that, I wish you all a dear and thank you all and continue the celebrations. See you on the next E4C webinar. Bye bye.