 Hello, my name is Yana Aranda and I'm the Director of Engineering for Global Development at the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. It is my pleasure to welcome you and thank you for joining us today on behalf of ASME. For those of you who aren't aware of ASME, although that's, I doubt that's very many of you, ASME is a non-profit membership organization for enabling collaboration, knowledge sharing, and skills development across all engineering disciplines. Towards the goal of helping the global engineering community develop solutions that benefit lives and livelihoods, and that particular point is very critical to the work that we do. One of the things that we focus on is really understanding the global forces shaping the technical landscape and the need for technology based solutions. Some of those forces include current gaps in essential infrastructure and technology. The reality is that today we still see a lack of basic services, critical infrastructure, and essential technology worldwide. Inequality is visible in the fact that 1.3 billion are still not connected to the electrical grid. That 40% of the population of the world does not have access to dignified sanitation. 52% of the world is still non-digitally connected. And 29% of the global population lacks safely managed drinking water supplies. So they do not have access to potable water. And the reality is that climate impacts could push 100 million people into poverty by 2030. The pictures you see here show all of the impacts that we're talking about. So the picture on the bottom of the corner of the Vanu Orleans flood by Hurricane Katrina, and the reality is that many of those individuals who were deeply affected were. In the lower lower economic realm and have not recovered since. So the world has been having a conversation. There's been a global dialogue around sustainability and what it means to have sustainable development for all the context for this is embodied in the sustainable development goals, which were ratified in 2015. And there are 17 of these goals, including everything from eliminating poverty to hunger, achieving gender equality, providing clean water and sanitation for all and affordable clean energy, decent work in economic growth, sustainable cities and communities, really understanding and taking action on climate change and so forth. The fundamental truth here is that technology and technology based solutions are essential to achieving every single one of these goals. And having an engineering talent pipeline that is prepared to engage effectively in addressing these urgent challenges is critical now and in the future. Beyond the sustainable development goals and the solutions that are necessary there, what is also really exciting is to understand that engineering workforce in any one country has direct correlation and direct impact on the economic standing of that one country. So this is a report that was completed by the Center for Economics and Business Research. This was supported by the Royal Academy of Engineering. There was an investigation done on the kind of the strength of any one country's engineering workforce and that is embodied in something called the Engineering Index. And all of the countries in the world for them are pretty much not completely, but most of them were mapped based on their engineering workforce. And what was visible was, and you can see it here, that there's definitely some lags in terms of workforce. But what's really interesting is to see that there's a direct correlation between the strength of the engineering index directly in terms of GDP per capital. So 1 percent, a 1 percent increase in the country's score on the index correlates to a 0.85 percent increase in GDP per capita. So direct link to how well a country is able to perform. And what's also really clearly evident is that there are still these engineering deserts that exist throughout the world. So for example, in Kenya, the Kenyan Board of Engineers estimates that there are presently about 7 to 8,000 engineers in the country and about 700 of them receive undergraduate engineering degrees annually. But to meet their economic development goals, they need an engineering workforce of about 20,000 within a decade at this rate. They are not on track to meet that demand. What's also interesting is areas which are engineering hotspots. And these are countries, for example, like India and Vietnam, which you can see is ranking very still kind of low on its engineering index. But what they do have is a growing youth population, tremendous economic development and huge needs for a new infrastructure. So all of these countries around the world represent areas of high demand for engineering talent and engineering capacity building. What other forces are really driving our work is this global perspective on social responsibility from industry and the upcoming generations of millennial centennials and more. So most businesses today are global. I don't think that would be a shock. Employees, value chains and markets are often outside the country of origin. And many of them are in fact are trying to grow their business in these frontier emerging markets. So companies are seeking engineers that can work effectively across cultural, ethnic and national boundaries and help their employers succeed in this interconnected world. Some major force driving talent and decisions around talent. And more than that, that work with purpose is really prioritized by the current and future workforce. We've seen that there's been studies done and this one thought is really interesting that 90 percent of millennials indicate that they want meaningful work and 50 percent would be willing to take a pay cut to do it. So there's a desire from this workforce to do work that is going to have a social environmental impact and they're making their decisions around which companies they are choosing as their employer in order to achieve that end goal. So all of these forces have been really informing ASME strategy around developing a portfolio that is going to enable us to meet the needs related to this global workforce. So ASME's vision has always been a world where everyone has safe water, sanitation, energy, food, shelter, infrastructure and can live in health, dignity and prosperity. And that vision is impossible without engineers, social entrepreneurs, technologists, really engaging to deliver on those needs. As I mentioned, there continues to be this critical gap of engineering talent and perspective and to diligence in the social innovation sector and we are working actively to resolve that. To ensure future innovations and success, we are really fostering engineering excellence across diverse global communities building the pipeline and capacity of technical talent globally to solve urgent challenges. We're doing this through our engineering for global development team and portfolio because we believe that everyone deserves the benefits of engineering excellence everywhere. Our work within this group is focused on providing knowledge, training and platforms that accelerate the development of impactful solutions and ensure public health and environmental sustainability across the globe. And I'm going to dive into each of these areas. So the first area is our knowledge as a public good offering and this is engineering for change. For those of you who are not familiar with engineering for change, engineering for change is a knowledge organization and digital platform and a community that was founded by ASME along with our colleagues from IEEE at the Institute for Electronics and Electrical Engineers, Engineers Without Borders, USA, EWB USA. The B4C platform and organization aims to prepare, educate and activate the technical workforce by delivering engineering insights, multi-discipline networks and critical information at the intersection of engineering and global development. To date, the community is over one million engineers, technologies and development practitioners around the globe and the nature of the information in case you're curious and you're wanting to explore includes a growing database of over 700 essential technologies in the sectors that are focused for us including water, sanitation, agriculture, energy, information and communication technologies, habitat, transport and health. Members who are joining our U4C for free can access research studies and field insights across the platform, learn about the latest developments in this sector, best practices and opportunities such as jobs, fellowships, funding calls and more as well as gain expert insights from our community of experts around the globe now over 500 strong. In addition to this work, we deliver training. Our training is focused on first and foremost social entrepreneurs developing technology-based solutions to advance social and environmental impact. This happens through our iShow platform or innovation showcase which is a hardware-led social innovation competition currently taking place in three countries, India, Kenya and the United States. You can see the dates here all happening in the spring and summer. iShow is really focused on supporting tech innovators in their engineering journey, design and engineering diligence processes uniquely focused on hardware. They iShow provides access to multidisciplinary expert insights and coaching as well as financial to support to advance these technology-based solutions. There are three winners that come out of each location and those three winners actually join us. I'll talk about this event a little bit later in New York for a bootcamp where they receive a customized then an engineering review that really prepares them to be ready for further investment and expedite their journey to market. In four years we're proud to say that we've received and reviewed over 400 applications, have supported over 100 startups and by extension in 2018 alone we have reached over 450,000 emerging market customers with solutions technology-based solutions that improve their quality of life. In addition to the iShow, we are focused on training future practitioners and social innovation. This is the E4C Research Fellowship and you'll obviously get to meet fellows today. We are really focusing with this annual program to support and advance the professional skills and networks of engineers who are interested in already engaging the social innovation space. Our fellows work with us annually to conduct technology research, collect field insights and conduct analysis and investigations on behalf of our sponsors and nonprofit collaborators. We're proud of our fellows to date. We've had over 46 fellows to date of which over 56% are women and these fellows have come from all over the world from India, Tunisia, Uganda and Venezuela, from Guatemala and Sweden, United States and Canada, Kenya, Spain and Panama and we couldn't be more proud of the work that they go on to do and the work that they help us to do. Last but not least, we provide platforms that convene our community to advance research and application of engineering for global development knowledge and celebrate the achievement of some of the key players and organizations in this space inspiring future practitioners and supporters of this work. These include, for example, our Engineering for Global Development Research Forum, which is hosted annually at the International Design and Engineering Technical Conferences that are part of the ASME conference circuit, as well as our Impact Engineering event, which is our signature event that we have annually in New York City at the NYU Tenant School of Engineering, bringing together our iShow winners from those three countries, as well as our community of practitioners and academia, industry and beyond, with Impact investors who are here in New York City to really celebrate and have critical conversations around issues of this intersection. All of this is really working to foster cross-sector networks and partnerships and prime the pump for further collaboration. With that, I'd like to thank you for joining us today. Again, I want to encourage you to reach out to us if you have any questions or want to have follow-up discussions. My coordinates are listed here on this slide, and I look forward to hearing from you and wish you a fantastic event. Take care.