Washington Engineer - April 2010 Video Message
Read Matt's message
Hi, I’m Matt O’Donnell, Dean of the College of Engineering at the University of Washington.
I’m here to talk about the Grand Challenge Summits. These are an outgrowth of the movement several years ago from the National Academy of Engineering to define the major challenges for the 21st century. And out of that came the 14 Grand Challenge problems.
A little over a year ago Duke held the first conference, called a Summit, to look at these overall challenges and what they meant for the engineering profession in the 21st century. I attended that workshop, helped organize one of the workshops on healthcare, and frankly it was a blast. It was very exciting, very fun. The part that I took away the most is that it would really help to define, for our younger engineers, what they would be doing with the next 20 to 30 years of their careers.
We think Seattle will be a center of technical life in the 21st century. That’s why, when there was an opportunity to bring one of these to Seattle, I jumped at it, and our local community jumped at it. The topics reflect our strengths in the Seattle area. Clearly, three of our major strengths are in information technologies, life sciences and aerospace.
We’re focused on topics that relate to two of the challenges. The first is Engineering Better Medicines. That’s leveraging what we’ve seen here in the Seattle area using molecular tools, and the concept of engineering molecular systems, to fundamentally change the way in which we will deliver healthcare in the 21st century. So it’s ideal for us to be talking about that in Seattle.
The other topic is Engineering the Tools of Scientific Discovery, and we have two pieces to that. The first piece is space exploration. We have been the center of aerospace for a very long period, but now we’re seeing a transition, in the 21st century, of what it means to use aerospace tools to explore in space. So we’re going to talk about that topic in some detail with some interesting people.
But also, information technologies that have developed at the end of the 20th century and early 21st century have changed the way in which we ask questions in science. So we’re going focus on that. Just as in the history of mankind new technical tools have changed the way in which we do science, the new information tools developed over the past 20 or 30 years are fundamentally changing our approach to science. We think this is a wonderful way for us to look locally at the Grand Challenges.
I want everyone to come, because I know when I went to the first one at Duke last year I was jumping out of my chair at almost every talk, because it’s exploring “What does it mean to be an engineer?” but also, “How is engineering going to affect the world in the 21st century?”
First and foremost, this event is for students. I really want to see them attend. That’s because for what for us practicing engineers are interesting questions, is going to be their life. This will be their professional career over the next 20 o 30 years. Almost all who are going to be practicing engineers or computer scientists are going to focus on at least one of these 14 challenges.
I think for others to come, it’s to get the same feeling I had a year ago. These are fundamental issues for our society going into the 21st century, and the people we’re going to have to address these issues are absolutely top-notch. They may bring in some controversial issues. I’m going to be hosting one session, and I’m certainly going to be asking some controversial questions of our speakers and panelists. And that’s what I’m hoping you’ll see, you’ll have that kind of dialogue about these issues, to get people thinking about: What does it really mean to be an engineer in the 21st century?
I hope to see you at the Summit, and thanks for reading this issue of Washington Engineer.