 All right. Well, welcome everybody to the disrupting engineering research session of impact engineered. My name is Jesse Austin Brennan, I'm an assistant professor, the University of Michigan and mechanical engineering, and I'll be moderating today session so we'd like to welcome all of you and thank all of you for spending your precious time during these challenging, you know, conditions here with us to discuss what the future of engineering research for impact looks like. So very excited today. So I'm just going to spend a few minutes talking about introducing a topic and then we'll get right to our panelists. But we're all here because of the, we want to work on engineering research using engineering and particularly creating new engineering knowledge through research to address the sustainable and achieve the sustainable development goals and address, you know, achieve poverty reduction. And one of the important things if we look at graphs over time, we know that poverty as we've made a lot of progress in terms of reducing poverty, but in a lot of areas, we know we still have work to do so you can see here. You know, because of efforts mainly from the governments in South Asia and in East Asia that's really China and India, reducing a lot of their poverty but we see in Sub-Saharan Africa, the number of people in extreme poverty is actually growing. And the projection suggests that it's going to be growing until 2030. So we have a lot of opportunity in order to find new solutions and innovations in order to try and reduce poverty. Now, one of the problems with that is that, you know, our traditional methods for doing that really focus on sort of a product level, a village level and what we are thinking about right now is how do we address this number how do we get to the next level of poverty reduction through engineering. And we think that that is through multidisciplinary teams and really reaching out at a systemic level and understanding at a systemic level, how we can address these types of issues. And so a lot of the people working in development and engineering for development. Now, those projects don't fit into the traditional engineering research and technology transfer process. So if we really want to understand impact. We know that the way that we have been doing it and this is just a, you know, you don't have to look at this, this graphic too closely. But what we have here is you're going from research you do disclosure IP assignment you have a commercialization plan. We all have these technology transfer offices within our university systems that are set up to get the technologies that we develop in the lab out into the market. But we know that the type of engineering research that's happening today. When we want to do for development to actually reduce some of these, these poverty numbers doesn't fit well within this there's a lot of other things that go into it. Really the thesis for today is that the world has problems and universities have departments. I'm not sure who said that but the earliest citation I could find of this quote was from Gary Brewer in 1999. And what we're going to look at with our panelists today is what should applied multidisciplinary research look like. What are the barriers and opportunities that we have in order to reduce these barriers to really try and achieve impact we want those numbers to go down. How do we do that through engineering research if the traditional methods and traditional paradigms we think could use improvement. So to do that, you don't want to listen to me talk about that that's that's not why you're here. We have five perspectives on the future of engineering research. I'm Geneau from Berkeley, Amy built in from the University of Toronto, Julia Binder from EPFL, Arvin Rahman from Purdue and Evan Thomas from CU Boulder. And what we're going to do next is we're going to have them each sort of present their organization themselves introduce themselves and their organization, and sort of their philosophy as to what the future of engineering research is. And then we will get to questions where you guys can submit questions. I will try and synthesize those and moderate them to the panelists and we really have this round table discussion to try and understand where the opportunities. In order for us to move engineering research forward. And with that said, enough of me talking I'd like to turn it over to our first panelist Alice if keep Alice Agagino. So Alice if you could go ahead and introduce yourself thank you again for joining us and tell us about what's going on at the Blum Center. Okay, thank you Jesse. So my name is Alice Agagino and I'm really pleased to be here today and be among the panelists and the audience. I am a professor of mechanical engineering at UC Berkeley and also education director at the Blum Center for developing economies, but I'm also chair of the development engineering graduate group. And one of the things I want to talk about today is a bit more about the challenges and opportunities that drove its history. I also want to put in the context of the engineer 2020 reports. So I'm not moving slide yet Jesse 15 years ago I was co author of the National Academy of engineering consensus studies on the engineer 2020 and how to educate them. And our reports emphasize the needs for as you said a multidisciplinary systems approach that considers complex context ethics, sustainable development and engineering impact. We found some quotes from those studies that I think are relevant to today. We said we aspire to a public that will recognize the union of professionalism, technical knowledge, social and historical awareness and traditions that serve to make engineers competent to address the world's complex and changing challenges. We aspire to a future where engineers are prepared to adapt to changes and global forces and trends, and to ethically assist the world in creating a balance in the standard of living for developing and developed countries alike. Since then, along with a bad transformations and curricular changes that are fairly radical across the board in US universities, they have tried to address the aspirations for engineers in the curricula. But it in my mind it has not been an institutionalized at the doctoral level yet at least it hadn't been at UC Berkeley. It was hard to follow these principles in the research agenda and apply them to the benchmarks we use for academe like qualifying exams, dissertation reviews, and faculty promotions. So if we could go to slide to with the encouragement from USA ID are faculty work together towards these goals to form an interdisciplinary graduate group across the campus. A new interdiscipline that we call development engineering. We collectively worked in the community to intellectually define the field and create the PhD minor. And today our graduate group which is a kind of a self formed department has over 30 faculty and 18 disciplines, as you see in the word map here. Design development engineering is a transdisciplinary field of research and practice that combines the principles of engineering with economics entrepreneurship design business and policy among others to create technological interventions to solve high impact problems in complex low resource settings. In slide three, our next slide, our learning and research model is grounded in a deep understanding of the importance of context, understanding of development goals with a view to scaling in the future for impact. We use a human centered design approach and iterative approach to combine qualitative and quantitative data to understand the problems make sure we're solving the right problems start out with and frame the problem so that they're we're looking at the critical problems in order to create and prototype solutions for iterating on community co design assessment and feedback for improvement using the systems approach. Next slide. It shows our development engineering program and its context as being housed in the Blum Center for developing economies that provides longitudinal support for the concepts that evolve from the center with a focus on social entrepreneurship scaling and commercialization. And the final slide. This is an engineering program the context of other curricular programs at the Blum Center. We build on our 10 year old undergraduate minor and global poverty and practice, and recently based on student and industry demand we just started launched a new three semester professional master's degree with the first cohort starting in fall of 2021. In summary, I asked the question what is the future of development engineering. I believe, and I will make the point with the questions that it is the future of the engineering profession. Thank you. Thank you very much, Alice, and we'll now move to Toronto. Amy, could you tell us what's going on over at CJ. Let's let Jesse so I think Alice really set the set the stage, you know, really, really well. So I'm, I'm professor any built in the most associate professor mechanical engineering at University of Toronto, and I'm also the director of the Center for global engineering. So you can forward on the slide Jesse. We were formed back in 2009, a lot with the same motivation which which Alice kind of mentioned previously. I recognize that this is really the future of engineering, you know, there's, there's a need there's a great need for thinking about challenges in this within the space and, and also a desire from both the faculty and student level to think about how, how we can make a contribution to think about these challenges around global development. So we were formed back in 2009 really as a cross disciplinary research Institute, and we've grown to having over 30 collaborating faculty members working on different research initiatives in this area. And our overall mission is looking at being able to catalyze, you know, cutting edge research to be able to address some of these worlds, most intractable challenges and train the next generation of engineers to make a contribution in this area. So there's a number of ways that we do that through research, our courses, capstone projects which we which we help to develop in fellowship so I don't have a whole lot of time today so I'm just going to focus on a few sample initiatives that we've done as a, as a framework that we look at applying towards addressing research and bringing together these type of multidisciplinary teams to work in this area so you can go on to the next slide Jesse so. So a few of the project a few of the multi multi faculty initiatives that we've been coordinating out of the center are really, really focused on particular challenges so the first, the first, the first of these types of initiatives I'm going to highlight is the initiative called the reconciliation through engineering initiative so this is recognizing the fact that there are a lot of sustainability challenges which are being encountered by remote indigenous communities within Canada. And there was a desire about three years ago to think about how engineering can play a role in collaborate together with different faculty members from across the university to contribute. So we came together and put together this initiative, and it was recognized that doing this work is something that's going to be a long term initiative, and we needed to make sure that we had, you know a very systematic and and approach to be able to go through it so we started to kind of ground up, you know, brought on brought on some, some research associates to really ground the project and help develop the concepts develop the relationships with the, with the communities and, and develop the approach. And we developed an approach is really based on two I'd seeing so thinking about bringing indigenous knowledge into the process itself, and making sure that it is really indigenous focused challenges which which they want to see having so we're in the course of the of the three years we've been working on this we brought together a number of different projects focused on this, and I think from things related to food security access to clean water access to slope supply to chain and logistics which is really difficult for many of these remote indigenous communities, and seeing how engineering research can play a role. And I don't have a whole lot of time to go into the exact details but I think one of the key things that we found is really essential when thinking about these types of research projects is to try to think about what are the barriers to both the faculty and the community level from engaging and being able to put in together an infrastructure to address that. And that's really the goal of what we're doing in the center and through our research associates being able to make that bridge and make that connection. So they will go on to the next one. Yes, so another another initiative which is a little bit, a little bit newer that we've been working on, again is a is a program. We're focused on sustainable peri urbanization and thinking about the rapid expansion that is happening and make mega cities around the world. Again, you know we follow this, this same approach towards putting together this map map multi faculty collaborative research research initiative. So I think we have some, some research associates which are really grounding the research providing the connections and the direct connections with the, with our partners, and making sure that the research is going to be stay stay relevant and making sure that it's really community focused and, and the right problems to be addressed so I think one of the big things that we've been doing is yeah just trying to put together that ecosystem that enable faculty to contribute in this area, where the type of research is really, really challenging to get, get up and running takes a lot more than a lot of more traditional research research activities and, and CGN we're really trying to put together an infrastructure that enable faculty to contribute and make sure that the research stays relevant. And we'll just go on to the last last slide. One of the other key things that we do and when we're developing these partnerships is we find sometimes there's a role for engineering research to play. There's a role for engineering to play that's not necessarily research. And there's a lot of need from some of our partners to think about how we can, you know, some of the, some of the more technical challenges that they're addressing they just don't have the bandwidth, think about some of the things that we've been doing also within CGN is partnering up some of the things that we've been doing with our partners with more well defined engineering projects that that that really address their challenges. One of the other key things that we've been doing to help support that is looking at how we can leverage and, and, you know, and educate the future leaders in this area in these initiatives so we have we form these range of capstone projects, where the students are able to collaborate together with the NGOs they get a chance to work together with them in the field and address their challenges. And these are things that help to help to help to solidify some of the relationships that we're building and, and help to address some of the real challenges seen by the NGOs and in a relatively short timeframe. So just a few things that we've been doing to help support these types of the formation of these types of projects and, and, and hope to see, hope these these topics will see some of the discussion as we, as we think about how we can further catalyze engineering research to make an impact in this area, as we go through the discussion so I'll pass it along to the next, the next panelist. Yes, thanks, Amy. And now we're going to go to silence EPFL and Julia Binder. Julia, can you tell us what's going on with tech for impact. Thank you so much, Jesse, and it's a pleasure to be here with you today. I actually good evening from from Switzerland was on for my, my side. If you can go to the next slide. What I want to tell you a little bit about today is, we have a new initiative at EPFL or rather new since end of 2017 where we want to address university white, the problem of how can we generate as a tech university how can we have an impact. And if you look at the slide I think I always like to start with the slide because in many ways, we know that climate change is real we know that all the scientific facts show us global warming is happening and at the same time we have more leaders and powerful positions and I don't have to tell you that in the US that that basically contribute to the distrust in this data and I think as a as university this is something that we should be fundamentally concerned about. And we wanted to address this with a with an initiative that is really holistic in the sense that we truly believe in what Amy and Alice mentioned this multi disciplinary approach also from our faculty, but we will also want to take this outside approach, better accessible and disseminate that to the general public to companies to NGOs to international organizations to basically really have an impact beyond our immediate university setting. If you can go to the next slide. Jesse thank you so much. And basically what we're doing is on the one hand we're promoting this multidisciplinary research sustainable research how can our research address the sustainable development goals and I think in many ways. Thank you university we often still have to do some some pioneering work right we still have to have to enlighten our researchers that actually their research is linked to the sustainable development goals or can have an impact beyond their lab. What we also do and I just mentioned that we really try to get the corporates on board. How can we actually create innovation projects together with big companies together with NGOs international organizations. Geneva is just like 30 minutes down the road so for us all the big organizations basically are just like 30 minutes down the road which means how can we better collaborate on addressing these very important issues of our time. And then last point is how can we sensitize our researchers and students for for this whole notion of becoming entrepreneurs and what is more becoming entrepreneurs with an impact. Next slide. Jesse said thank you. We did a mapping of our of our EPFL campus and what we found I think this is very interesting out of our 350 labs what we find is that 190 work on at least one of the SDGs, which I think is already quite remarkable. We had to do some work where we were basically explaining what are the SDGs what are we even talking about. And exactly what we really find is that EPFL is particular strong when it comes to contributing to health impact contributing to energy renewable energies and this bigger bucket of industry innovation and infrastructure. And we see this reflected in our spin offs and we see this reflected in our dedicated research centers. What what for us is really at the heart of the entire initiative is this collaborative multi stakeholder approach where we have formed several councils they they look like they're organizing silos and let me reassure you it's not the case. It's just for us to organize them in a way. On the one hand we have the academic council we have our NGO council with a corporate council and we have our entrepreneurship community. All of them have a dedicated, let's say, program manager that tries to understand their needs, and then tries to work with them on a daily basis. The core idea is always to initiate projects where they have to collaborate. And I give you just a couple of examples. One example is our data driven circular economy initiative, where we really work with. At the moment I think we have 25 of our researchers involved from all faculties or three out of our six faculties. And then basically what we can really see is that that EPFL could play a strong role and kind of bring this data, data perspective to this whole notion of circular economy, because I think in many ways we know that circular economy might be a very promising solution. And the question is why haven't it lived up to its potential just yet. And we say we can actually basically add missing possibilities to this conversation. Another project that is dear to my heart is basically our tech for deaf initiative. And here, and also mirroring what Alice was mentioning, we really adopt the human centered design approach where we work together with our NGOs, and basically our NGOs submit challenges that they have encountered on the field. And they submit these challenges to us and then our researchers can can basically answer with a concrete proposal of how their technology how their technological solution can address this challenge that the NGO has encountered. And then and this is basically putting another for us a challenge but it's quite interesting is, they have to work with partners in the global south this could be universities entrepreneurs. This could be policymakers, they have to work with partners in the global south in implementing the solution on site, and in building scalable and sustainable business model so this is really the idea that we try to how can we leverage EPFL technologies to address the societal challenges of our time and I truly believe that this is the future of, of impact engineering if we talk about it. And I think we try really to approach change as a chance for an as an opportunity. And we hope, and it's actually very nice to be with many like minded speakers and for sure audience as well. Thank you. Thank you Julia, really great. And then our end. Can you tell us what's happening at Purdue. Good day. Good day everyone my name is urban drama. I'm a professor of mechanical engineering so really glad this event is happening in ASME. I am currently the executive associate dean for the faculty and staff in the college and also director of the USID funded laser pulse consortium, which is really a five year effort to really bring research driven to bear to field source development challenges. Prior to that I was so city info global programs and had a chance to work on what used to be the innovation for international development lab or innovation lab which is today the shop family global innovation lab. Next slide. You know, I'd like to broadly think about science technology and innovation, playing probably a key role in the future of development. You know, as some of you know the future of, you know, development and SDG goals have been really set back by the covert crisis as well at least by five, some some say 10 years. So the 2030 objective is going to get harder. Still, you know, I'm a strong believer in science technology innovation, playing a key role in it. I'd like to refer to the different ways or think about the difference ways in which STI, which I think of is engineering really can play a role. And this is articulated very well by the two objectives of what is today the innovation technology and research hub at USAID. Which used to be a global development lab, but it speaks about two objectives. One is this notion of producing breakthrough innovations by sourcing testing and scaling, which is what we've been talking about so far. But there's another angle to this which is really about how do we transform the development enterprise, you know, promoting different partnerships data evidence are interesting, all kinds of scientific advances. And so I'm trying to give examples of two examples of what we've been trying to do at Purdue in each of these contexts. Next slide. So just like in other institutions here, we started within global engineering programs 2014. So the innovation for international development lab which thanks to our donor who's featured in the middle Manu Manrika Shah is now really active and diverse, you know, enthusiastic group of people working on these kind of challenges. I have here. This is the program director she's on the on the on the right here. George you who is their assistant dean for global programs all listed. Next slide please. I want to emphasize here our model which actually is not, you know, very different from what Julia just spoke about. In regard to the top NGOs in the world as being representative of the development sector, these are the people who actually have long standing expertise in working with communities and so on. We've developed long standing partnerships with many top NGOs and we have a really intense focus effort at trying to understand what our field source development challenges. We've developed pathways to feeling that in many cases. In most cases, for example, there is actually not a need for a new technological innovation the last mile challenge that technology exists at the right cause it's not not there at the community for whatever reason. So it's really it takes a lot of feeling to figure out what the innovation gap really is, and then we presented as a challenge problems, you know research partnerships and so on. So we're focused on scale up, not only through startups but also through other kinds of partnerships scaling up so this is one of our loop focusing on NGO partnerships, seeding programs and getting to really to scale up of those efforts. Next slide. The other example, which was the other part of the objectives of science technology innovation is how can we change the development enterprise as a whole. The national development enterprise which is driven by you know all the fund donors international donors that's roughly a 50 to 70 billion dollar enterprise, not including the national governments, all over the place. All that those 10s of billions of dollars of international development programming are going into implement program implementation. It's an opportunity for research, especially science technology and innovation to inform those massive implementation projects that are going on around the world and that's what laser tries to do is really engage worldwide, more than 2000 researchers practitioners and all 56 USID countries and really engaging them with these field source development challenges where research can really play a key role. So these are some of the numbers we are consortium like I said produce er s Vienna University, my career university in Uganda, my colleagues who are doing all this with me you are new she's a faculty in industrial engineering Joe sinfield who was our innovation science lead and civil engineering. And then Andrea Bernersky and Betty will go to our program directors for this. Next slide. So the idea of what this comprises of we have many parts we have this massive network like I said, we pay a lot of effort in working with development stakeholders to identify key research challenges. We fund them through core and buy in mechanisms. We have this whole model for embedded research translation to make sure research translates into changing policy or practice. And we ensure gender integration in everything that's done and be focused on capacity strengthening our researchers to be able to more effectively translate the research policy and practice next slide. We do this process. All these different things using innovation science to identify what the research gaps are for development in more traditional sectors such as water food security education, East Africa, but also in more current areas such as soil and migration response in Colombia, such as themes of water and air pollution in Vietnam private sector competitiveness measurement of resilience for example in Ethiopia we work with the local missions really, and largest set of stakeholders to identify these things, and we issue grant calls and fund researchers to ensure they work with translation partners to translate what they do to policy or practice over next slide. For example of some of the buying projects to give you an idea of how impactful they are. You know, one is in northern Iraq where post ISIS ISIS that are dedicated strategy for example of not only intentionally wiping out agriculture that was related to cultural practices of the minorities. So we work really with our agriculture program as a Notre Dame apology experts to really figure out what were to do research and identifying what, what needs to be done with cultural agriculture to restore these communities and bring them back. We're working with South Africa it's a very unique partnership with the Department of Science and Innovation in South Africa and USAID mission to help South Africa's efforts to really improve the situation with trafficking in persons. We're funding through the science Academy of African Science Academy. We're funding research trying to bring out through data and through rigorous research, the scale and scope of human trafficking that exists in South Africa today. So these are some examples of what we're trying to do through laser. And that's all I have. Thank you, Arvin. Evan, I think. Great. Yeah, thanks so my name is Evan Thomas I'm associate professor of engineering at the University of Colorado in Boulder, and I'm the director of the Mortensen Center and global engineering. The Mortensen Center was founded in 2004 as the Mortensen Center and engineering for developing communities and over the past almost 16 years. It's been built into a multidisciplinary research and academic center that embraces a lot of the updating of how engineers contribute to global poverty reduction that Alice and Arvin and the other presenters have shown today. So I think we see a lot of alignments as this field of engineering global engineering development engineering humanitarian engineering advances. So by a context setting again to build on what Jesse said earlier, here's who uses energy and here's who's contributing to global warming. And here's who still has a high burden of disease 99% of the children under the age of five who die every year were born in a low income country so there's still significant health and economic and justice disparities globally. One of the challenges is the mechanisms of how we deliver for an aid. Often money comes in from one side all this programming that are been mentioned into projects that often have a technology component water filters, off grid energy systems cook water and sanitation systems designed to benefit people's health and livelihoods, but the outcome of that development programming can be short lived about half of water and sanitation programs, or infrastructure is broken or in disrepair within the first 18 months, but we don't pay for services and we hope that communities and countries can sustain services but these are communities that have very low tax bases and are already constrained by other poverty barriers, and have difficulty supporting a service. So part of our vision of global engineering is how do we get engineers to think beyond a project beyond a product and think about services so if you have a water pump, you monitor that water pump. You can maintain its mechanism, and you incentivize the money in the business model have to come into play, so you can incentivize cost effective service delivery. We do this within the Morton Center and a number of different levels. The Morton Center has about 200 undergrads in our program, many of whom are earning our global engineering minor. We do it students in our program who are earning either our graduate certificate in global engineering or our professional masters in global engineering, and our students and faculty work in about 20 countries around the world. We're a medium sized research center we do about $5 million a year and research and contracts from USA D and NSF and a number of the other partners that have been mentioned today. We changed our name from engineering for developing communities to global engineering about two years ago to really own that we're work trying to work on a higher level than just the symptoms of poverty we also want to be concerned with the causes and potential solutions to persistent poverty. So that includes looking at standards development system science impact evaluation data instrumentation contracting, which is an important piece of how we sustain services structures and settlements of course the core has often been environmental health air quality and water quality and safe sanitation and then professional graduate and undergraduate education. Because as me and some of the work that engineering for change has done over the years is particularly mechanical engineering focus I wanted to highlight some of our thoughts around product design. I'm not going to narrate this slide but the takeaway is that there's been a lot of emphasis on human centered design and similar models in the development space. We're working to incorporate service delivery as part of design in development and trying to support service providers and that design goes beyond a product. So I'm going to give just a couple quick examples of our current research. This is a project led by one of our outstanding PhD students so tall air beguiza. Sean tall has been funded by the NIH and the Gates Foundation to develop this air quality monitoring technology that shows people in households in Rwanda their current air quality and we use this to try to encourage healthy behavior change. A couple example articles just to show sort of the breadth of where you can publish in this field so this is an article in the Journal of exposure science and environmental epidemiology not usually a journal for an environmental engineering PhD students. Another example of our work is focused on how do we improve the sustainability of row water services and we do this in part with instrumentation where we have satellite connected sensors on hand pumps and deep boreholes. And when the sensors tell us that a pump is broken, we go out and fix it. Sean tall led some of this effort in Rwanda a number of years ago this has been funded by NSF USA be different and the World Bank we're currently in the middle of a large scale deployment with the World Bank in Nigeria. Today we ordinarily would have been over there but we're doing it all remotely with our partners one or eight Nigeria. And we publish in fields you know in journals as diverse as ES and T and plus one on topics that include controlled trials as well as things like machine learning. We're not doing this at scale this is northern Kenya where drought is effectively an annual occurrence now and when there's drought people turn to groundwater boreholes these are no longer hand pumps these are big groundwater systems and yet often about 60% of them are broken during peak drought. So our goal is to try to reduce drought emergency through better maintenance of this infrastructure. The way we do this is a combination of in situ sensors on these pumps, combined with remote sensing from satellites to try to improve preventative and proactive maintenance. Some of this work is led by another one of our PhD students, Dennis Machara Dennis is actually based in Nairobi. He works full time for the regional center of mapping for resources for development and is remotely a PhD student with us in Boulder, while actually in the context in Kenya. This is our current monitoring we have about 3 million people's water supplies that were monitoring on a daily basis so we've covered northern and eastern Ethiopia and northern Kenya and in combination, we're monitoring 3 million people's water supplies daily this work is funded by USA D NASA and the National Science Foundation. Another one of our major projects is USA D sustainable wash systems as Alice mentioned, all of this work elevates the question to systems level thinking for engineers. The US is a $15.3 million five year cooperative agreement led by Amy Javernick will and Carl Linden here at UC Boulder and funded by USA D over the past five years trying to look at the actual drivers and determinants a sustaining basic water and sanitation services. We also work on infrastructure. This is a pedestrian footbridge installed by NGO bridges prosperity. We've been contracted by USA D out of the development innovation ventures program actually that came out of the global development lab to run a five year impact evaluation of the health, economic and educational benefits attributable to these footbridges. So it's a 200 site five year randomized control trial that also includes other innovations like cameras next to the bridges to track use remote sensing to look at rainfall and flooding events to try to model and estimate the full impact of the bridges beyond just the data collected for the RCT so it's mixed methods between randomized control trials and other monitoring tools. All right, back over to you Jesse. All right, thank you very much, Evan, for that overview of the Morton Center over at Colorado Boulder, and thank you all the panelists for sharing some of your insights and experiences. So there's been a lot of great questions in the in the q&a. And I want to thank all panelists for for writing out in the chat some of the answers to those. I think I'd like to start our discussion by by getting into one of the one of the q&a questions asked how do you deal with IP and protecting IP. If you're going to be working with outside partners so the traditional process of protecting intellectual property and a technology transfer situation. We're working in a situation like this where a lot of the same structures may not apply and and Julia you you shared a thing about social IP and a new model for doing that. I was wondering if you could talk about maybe some of the other innovations that you guys have had in developing sort of multidisciplinary multi stakeholder collaborations. Of course, thank you so much, Jesse. And I think to quickly just recap the answer was, we were trying to really develop a licensing model that would at the same time, allow to protect the technology because I do believe that this is important I think in many ways we often think that to make something applicable and scale it in particular to global self countries, we need to have it as an open licensing model and I don't believe that this is the case because in many ways. If we want to get our technologies finance if we want to get BC's on board, if we want to really scale this technology and have an impact, we often need to have some kind of protection on this as well. And I think the way that we're trying to address this with the social licensing model so that it's actually made affordable for those who really want to have an impact with technology, but the those who don't have the strong impact dimension they do have to pay a fair share. I think to answer your your other question what are other innovative models. I was trying to touch upon a little bit on these multi stakeholder approaches that we're trying to establish and the idea really is how can we get different players around the table and I think the fundamental challenge here is that how do you translate from someone who is has a corporate mindset, someone who is an NGO background someone who is a researcher background, and I'm not talking about English right we're talking fundamentally different languages here English is maybe the common denominator, and the rest is something that we need to work quite hard and this is where I think what works well for us is we bring them together we we have full day workshops. We organize this in a way where we train our researchers to to present the research in a way that is digestible for non expert audience. And basically we really try to identify these uncommon ways like the tech for death project that I mentioned, where we bring together NGO partners with researchers with entrepreneurs in the global south. And actually all of this is financed by by policy by a political partner. And basically I think this is the way where where we really believe if we are able to break down silos and I think we've heard it several times from the other panelists. This whole system thinking approach how can we actually change the system instead of just doing business as usual and changing some small interventions how can we really get other players on board and and and open up our research and make it accessible and I think this is still something where we can work a little bit in our own world as researchers. And how can we make and disseminate our knowledge in a way that is meaningful and valuable and can be can be really used by by the general public including corporates NGOs and other important players. Thank you Julia. I was wondering if one of the other panelists had another interesting mechanism by which to try and catalyze some of these multi disciplinary multi stakeholder where we're dealing with, you know NGOs we're also dealing with governmental agencies we're dealing with outside organizations. So maybe someone would like to go and take the ball or I can pass it. I think maybe Arvind you could discuss discuss some of that. Thank you I think it's been interesting. And I look forward to actually sharing notes also with you via, you know, regarding their experience EPFL but the NGO partnerships has been very revealing and interesting to us it's a, it's actually a process by which our NGO partners submit these challenges and we kind of work through with them and what they might, you know, kind of unfeeling things and unpacking the details of those things. So that's really interesting. You know I just wanted to bring one, you know as you think of these NGO partnerships faculty tend to at universities tend to think of it more as research and research for impact opportunities actually the potential for organizations is much broader than just that. And I just want to highlight these things as people think of longer term NGO partnerships. Getting into these things I think it's very important to lay down what the value propositions of each side are the bigger picture value propositions everyone's working towards with common expectations and what needs to be done. The co creation side of things coming up with what are the real challenges. Oftentimes you have Oh, I need this and then you go back and work it back and it's really isn't really what is needed or something else or is it really is it a last mile problem that the solution already exists. It's for other reasons it's not there. I think that needs to happen beyond this research partnerships piece is there are really good opportunities for education training and certification. You know how can universities for example offer certifications you know maybe data science to develop and degrees for for the development sector. We also need to think of more about how can more engineers get into the NGO world and choose careers in the NGO world right so how do you make that whole interface internship programs. Many NGOs actually have internship programs trying to get engineers in on them. There are ways to articulate this and make it much stronger because the enterprise that the sector development sector itself needs more stem professionals working in them. And that's another way to drive the change not just through research and innovation and universities and you know, so that's something else to think about. So, broader partnerships the NGOs value proposition broader partnerships is, is I think the way to go over. Thank you, Arvin that's a really great point. I like to maybe Alice, go ahead. I just want to add one other concept here. In addition to the licensing and the patenting which often is to protect the quality of the technology and make it and make it more accessible is authoring papers together with communities. So if you're doing co design working with major players in a co design process they should be co authors of any publications that come out of it. That's a great follow up point and something I think that you know we are working to in the ASME research committee to try and get people to, you know, have that be a norm for our research community to really be, you know, crediting everybody equally for their contributions to research work. I'd like to maybe switch the focus from going to different types of organizations and multiple stakeholder organizations to the multiple disciplines that people have been talking about we've said interdisciplinary, we've said transdisciplinary we said multi disciplinary. I was wondering maybe if Amy, if you could talk a little bit about what it's been like just within the academic space like even in the same organization. Trying, what are some of the catalyst to get people to the table and get buy in or what are some of the mechanisms you use to really build these teams that have people speak different engineering languages. Yeah, like I think, I think, I think there's a lot of interest from faculty and just in general in terms of engaging on these types of problems I think part of the challenges that we see is that, you know, if they, if they haven't engaged in this type of topic before it's a you see it as a big a big kill a big kill to climb like they have a lot of interest and be able to do research that has this type of broad impact that we're talking about but if they if they haven't done that work before it's it's it's they they need some other kind of little hook to help them engage. And that's really one of the main things that we try to do within the center is to be able to like try to lower that barrier a little bit so they can get engaged and and work together with people who have the expertise, you know, working in the field to make it so they can make sure the research is relevant. And then they can bring, you know, bring the right people together at the table to the table so I think in general there's a lot of interest. So one of our approaches yeah we try to bring on people that work within the center that that can can can make that happen and that's how I think that's how we've gotten up to you know 30 plus kind of faculty working and engaging on these projects so it's by getting those research associates that are able to, you know, that know the language of the community know the language of the communities. The academic language and what some of the demands of the faculty members time are so trying to make it so we can make that make that bridge because this type of research is something that there's a lot more questions at play than than a typical engineering research project where you just have to go to the you know go to the lab and tinker on your on your different, you know device so what we really try to do in the center is try to make sure that we have access to expertise that can kind of make that make that bridge and make make the projects happen and without it I think it would be really difficult for a lot of the things that we're that we're doing. Well thank you Amy I think that's a really great point about thinking about where again what is the value proposition as Arvin mentioned but also lowering that barrier so that people don't see it as too big a hill so they can really engage giving them a way to engage. I'm going to ask one last question because we're almost out of time here and I again want to thank everybody for joining us. Alice, could you, I think Alison Arvin maybe, could you guys talk about, you know, thinking about this academic career path where you go from graduate student to assistant professor associate professor full professor. Well, how does that play into this need, you know, all of those evaluations that each of those points you talked about qualifying exams we talked about promotion and tenure at all of those points that sort of is looking towards the traditional checkboxes. Right the traditional ways of assessing candidates and people should you talk about some of the mechanisms you guys are looking at in order to try and change that to reflect this change that you guys believe is fundamental to the future of engineering. Well, we try to make the argument that what we're doing is developing students who have 21st century skills. And those are the skills that will be effective whether you're working with a multinational or nonprofit or an academic setting. So a lot of those multi discipline or these skills come from the early a bet 2000 work but they have broader and deeper meaning I think within the development context. For instance, multi disciplinary design and teamwork means is important, but it means more than just computer scientists working with mechanical engineers. It can mean working with community and having the humility to appreciate the indigenous knowledge of the community that you're working with ethics takes on different meanings I mean there's the ethics of does it work. Well it not hurt people, but there's the ethics of how you work with other people as well. And practical ethics of do you take a bribe because you only have two days in the field and they're going to put you in jail unless you give you the bribe. So I think experiments is a skill that we all teach in all of our courses, but when we work on human centered design that means integrating qualitative and quantitative data as well, and designing experiments with people. And so I think all of these put together with co design self reflection and business model really means that engineers that that work on these problems have much broader skills that are going to be useful for a wide range of companies and translation to practice. Thank you, it's Arvin. Do you have any last thoughts you want to add on. Yeah, I just, you know, to your point I'd like to say that you know I'm not going to just paper over the fact that there are challenges right for faculty members to continue to grow within an environment which looks more at traditional beans bean counting measures. But having said that, there are two things I'd like to say you know most, most, most schools and colleges, people really resonate with the notion of impact. You know, everyone is busy with things but you know if you can in your promotion documents. So, you know, not just describe how busy you've been but one difference it's made. I think it's resonating a lot more anymore. So, in fact, any major recognition or award. You know people are not going to be looking at how many things you've done, people are going to be looking at what difference to make. And so, I think the longer play of it is it's always been the case in academia that impact. And I do think that in development and for engineers working development faculty. They do need to put in a little more time to make sure the impact really happens. I mean it's even more contingent upon us, you know, in a normal research area you could publish and just be happy with the disciplinary impact, but in development engineering I think it is the onus is really upon us to make sure that it actually translates. And once it does. I think the message will be loud and clear and most universities recognize impact and reward it as well. Well, thank you very much, I think that's an excellent point and something for us all to think about I like to thank all of our panelists and all of our attendees I think we are at time I do want to share one last slide to encourage you to all come to our seminar series. It's a monthly series that started back in January of 2020 in December. Usually it's the second Wednesday of every month at 12 at noon Eastern Standard Time, but because we're having presenters from Australia, one time only it's going to be at 6pm Eastern Standard Time. So I apologize for people in Europe that that might be too late. But please come we're going to be talking about teaching humanitarian engineering from the Australian presenters and look for that seminar series on the engineering for change website through ASME. Again, just thank you so much for all the panelists sharing your insights. I'm going to try and incorporate them into my work and that's why I wanted to have all of you guys here speaking so I could learn. I hope that our attendees learned a lot. Thank you all for your precious time over over this challenging situation. I hope you guys all stay safe and I look forward to speaking with you and thinking about these issues for the future of engineering research in the future. So thanks again, and everyone stay safe and have a great day. Thank you. Thanks Jesse. Thank you everyone.