ASEE Prism

Welcome to Prism Online

Sidebar/Sidebar/Content

On the Shelf

Mind Over Matter

Veteran IT consultants demonstrate how organizations can harness intelligent systems to serve, rather than replace, people.

Review by Robin Tatu

Radically Human: How New Technology Is Transforming Business and Shaping Our Future
By Paul R. Daugherty and H. James Wilson
Harvard Business Review Press, 2022.
280 pages.

The struggle of man versus machine is an enduring trope, powering plotlines from Icarus’s ill-fated flight on engineered wings to Hollywood’s Earth-subjugating Terminators. Recently, the narrative has focused on the uneven battle for jobs as increasingly sophisticated robots and algorithm-powered technologies automate whole employment sectors.

Two senior Accenture Technology executives, Paul Daugherty and H. James Wilson, offer a more optimistic view. In their 2018 book Human + Machine: Reimagining Work in the Age of AI, they argued that far from rendering legions of bank tellers, factory hands, and other employees obsolete, “smart” systems would empower people to create a brighter, more fulfilling future. In their telling, companies learn to harness technology’s emerging capabilities, driving profitability while freeing labor to perform higher-level tasks that require human judgment and decision-making.

Daugherty and Wilson’s latest book, Radically Human, continues to counter misconceptions and dystopian predictions. Even as we grow more reliant on artificial intelligence, they maintain, technology is becoming more nuanced, humane, and responsive to concerns from safety and privacy to racial bias and machine fallibility. New programs better mimic human learning and behavior, while monolithic legacy IT systems are being replaced by agile networks that employ cloud architecture. In the evolving relationship with machines, the authors assert, “humans and the human are in the ascendant.”

Beyond describing this emerging landscape, Radically Human details how to join in the disruptions. “To say that the pandemic accelerated the pace of tech adoption is to put it mildly,” note the authors, who calculate the rise at 70 percent. Yet much of the 2020 shift was haphazard. Daugherty and Wilson outline a framework for more systematic integration, with successful approaches taken by enterprises from the familiar (Starbucks, Walmart) to tech giants (Google, Fujitsu), start-ups, and university research teams. Their work draws on two extensive studies. The first surveyed 8,300 companies across 22 countries and 20 industries, half in IT. The second, of 4,000 companies, was initiated in 2020 in part to measure COVID-19’s impact. A helpful glossary defines such new terms of engagement as “data echoing.”

Readers interested in a holistic understanding of IT within their workplaces will find Radically Human an excellent guide. The book’s first part examines the “building blocks of innovation”—intelligence, data, expertise, architecture, and strategy—with model approaches. The section on intelligence, for example, describes the move from complex, often oblique deep-learning systems to AI that replicates certain aspects of human functionality. Case in point: Obeta’s electronics warehouse in Germany, where robotic “pickers” learn to measure, weigh, and evaluate each item before transport, enabling better handling of a wider range of products.

Succeeding chapters discuss how a shift to cloud computing and local datasets can lower costs while improving privacy protections and efficiency. Also highlighted is the use of swarm intelligence by Tesla, Etsy, and the US military to expand their capabilities. The architecture section expounds on new ways to store and use data by combining localized edge computing and cloud-based platforms that increase speed and responsiveness. Rounding out the framework is a chapter on strategy, which stresses the need for an informed, responsive approach to workplace technology.

Part two of Radically Human defines four key considerations for successful organizations: talent, trust, experiences, and sustainability. The authors zero in on such “human-centered” concerns as how to attract, retain, and develop employees. “All companies are now technology companies,” the authors underscore, noting that intelligent technologies are “the animating force throughout many leading organizations.”

While the global pandemic suddenly thrust many employers into greater tech use, it also demonstrated our collective ability to pivot, adapt, and move forward. For Daugherty and Wilson, the most notable AI development is not machines eclipsing humans but rather extending their reach and power to reimagine the future.

 

Robin Tatu is Prism‘s book editor.
© Amazon/Getty Images/Alexander Da Silva

Advances from AEE

Beyond Prototypes and PowerPoints

Engineering programs must not only teach design principles but also prepare students to make a lasting impact.

By Khanjan Mehta

Over the last two decades, numerous academic programs and student organizations have engaged engineering students in addressing the needs of low-resource communities in the US and around the world. Humanitarian engineering, development engineering, engineering for developing communities—there are many names for these efforts, but they share a common focus: sustainable solutions that benefit disadvantaged individuals, their communities, and larger markets and systems. The rigorous integration of an entrepreneurial approach has helped transform engineering design and service-learning programs into incubators for high-impact social enterprises that can transform communities and markets.

By engaging in these meaningful, authentic projects, engineering students develop 21st-century skills and expand their accomplishment. They develop confidence, agency, and self-efficacy and find their sense of purpose and belonging in the world. Students conduct original research and publish in peer-reviewed journals; develop novel technologies and field-test them with partners; build scalable technology-based enterprises; work to integrate research-based insights into policies; and champion social movements that can influence and improve the lives of millions of people.

Content knowledge is infinite, and specific skills might be obsolete by graduation. Hence, such impact-focused programs emphasize personal transformation and externally validated accomplishments beyond narrowly-focused learning outcomes. How are students advancing knowledge and contributing solutions not in some distant future but in the present? How do these immersive experiences lead to personal growth and professional recognition? Preparing the next generation of global problem solvers drives the philosophy, pedagogy, and operations of such programs. Learning is a beautiful rainbow on this long journey to sustainable social impact. What matters more is students learning how to learn, ask the right questions, engage with others, create value, find their place in the world, build organizations and systems, and get stuff done.

While such endeavors are usually well-meaning, creatively designed, and enthusiastically deployed, they do not necessarily result in positive long-term change. What makes projects more likely to succeed? How might we build courses and curricula that immerse students and faculty in global grand challenges and enable them to develop innovative, practical, and context-appropriate solutions? What kinds of partnerships do we need to build to realize these ambitious sustainable development goals?

These were the kinds of questions that led us to curate a special issue of Advances in Engineering Education on impact-focused education. We invited articles from faculty on courses and programs that 1) engage students in real-world technology projects related to social innovation and global sustainable development, and 2) prioritize (or at least give equal importance to) long-term outcomes rather than focusing on and designing programs around student learning outcomes.

The seven articles in this special issue describe proven academic models, student-centered pedagogies, and operational practices from innovative programs that, for example, strengthen water systems and integrate fuel-efficient cookstoves in Guatemala or educate refugees and street youth in Jordan and Kenya. A common theme across the programs is the emphasis on trust-based partnerships, and hence two of the articles specifically focus on practical frameworks and rubrics to develop equitable and meaningful partnerships that minimize harm for all stakeholders.

Legitimate questions have been raised concerning the relevance of higher education in the 21st century. Impact-focused education provides a philosophy and framework that address these questions and the evolving demands of students, prospective employers, and the world at large. A university is an institution where students find their place in the universe. Higher education has always been about expanding opportunities and transforming lives. The singular focus on making a real difference for disadvantaged populations provides a gateway for students’ personal and professional development as productive scholars, proactive innovators, and engaged citizens. Engineering educators around the world must lead higher education to articulate its rightful place as the epicenter of not only knowledge creation but also societal transformation in the 21st century.

 

Khanjan Mehta is the inaugural vice provost for creative inquiry and director of the Mountaintop Initiative at Lehigh University, as well as the lead instigator for several academic programs that engage faculty and students in ambitious, interdisciplinary, multiyear, impact-focused ventures.

Access the special issue of AEE at https://bit.ly/3N05Ld4.
© Getty Images

ASEE Today

Letter from the President

Reflections on Successes and Future Improvements

The year has been challenging, but we’ve achieved some victories.

By Adrienne Minerick

Dear ASEE colleagues,

One of the most valuable tools I’ve discovered in my career is that of reflection. This is my last column and is intended to be a retrospective on my term as ASEE President. To be honest, this has not been an easy year. At the outset, I optimistically envisioned projects with lofty goals connecting with you, regular communication, and a profound rethinking of engineering culture to incorporate analysis of the overlapping systems interacting with the engineered product.

This year, like many of you, I’ve struggled with burnout (https://bit.ly/3lBzihy) and have talked myself back from the precipice of quitting academia (https://bit.ly/3PEeCmI). It turns out that I’m not even close to qualifying for retirement at my institution. However, each time I’ve reached that point of overwhelm, I’ve reflected back on a Tomorrow’s Professor article (https://stanford.io/3MoQTFb) that has provided perspective and coping strategies so many times over the years. This year, it helped me focus on the goal of exiting the President’s role leaving ASEE a little better than when I entered. It is with this frame of mind that I am pleased to relay the progress that our ASEE team has made, which translates into improved membership experiences for you.

This Year’s Successes

I am most proud that ASEE is prioritizing scholarly avenues for members. It has been invigorating working with the Scholarly Publications Committee chairs, Nadia Kellam and Cindy Finelli, as well as Board members to chart a path forward that broadly includes all forms of scholarly transfer of information (for example, peer-reviewed publications, intellectual property, multimedia, video, and podcasts). Your approval of a Vice President of Scholarship position on the Board will ensure lasting impact, as will the new staff member at ASEE HQ focused on supporting existing journals, forming new journals, and implementing the new VP of Scholarship’s vision.

We’ve also made progress on visibility for professional-track engineering and engineering technology faculty. ASEE’s Director of Institutional Research & Analytics, Joe Roy, has led data collection for these positions so that they can be included in ASEE’s industry-leading compilation of college statistics and national trends, Profiles of Engineering and Engineering Technology  (https://bit.ly/3yEM1I1).

Our team continues to engage in mid- and long-range planning toward a growth mindset with fiscally nimble and strategic investments that innovatively connect members around engineering education. It is our top priority to retain existing members and recruit new ones.

ASEE has been undergoing a shift from a fairly steady, incremental evolution of services for members to a more nimble and responsive organization. ASEE Learning is one example of this (the overarching Professional Services sector is led by Chief Academic Officer Jacqueline El-Sayed). The small and efficient Education and Career Development team is winning grants that enable the delivery for members of just-in-time resources such as the DELTA New Faculty Institute, DELTA Future Faculty Institute, Master Class on Effective Teaching, and Essentials of Effective Proposal Preparation. A full listing of this rich content is available at https://learning.asee.org.

Areas for Continued Improvement

At the other end of the spectrum are those initiatives that I wish had turned out much better. The most prominent for our members has been the IT infrastructure transition. We know we live in a complicated world and as such appreciate when the complicated is organized into simple and efficient workflows. The complexity of individual software applications overlaid with the challenges of integrating multiple platforms became painfully apparent when we launched the new site for abstract submission. I’d like to extend a humble apology for a rocky abstract, draft paper, and final paper submission process.

This has been a steep learning curve for our team and may be a valuable illustrative example of the importance of the culture (what we say and how we do things) that we impart as we educate our students. While founding and serving as dean of the new College of Computing at Michigan Tech, I learned that computing fields tend to have a weak spot similar to those in engineering—namely faculty and students demonstrate greater comfort focusing on distinctly defined specifications and less comfort with squishier parameters.

In the context of ASEE’s infrastructure transition, we had a team selected for their technical expertise mapping assets in one platform to assets in a second platform, but not for expertise listening to users on the intuitive workflow and usability of the interface. Just as engineering without context yields less than robust solutions, web and database integration without centering the user experience yields frustrating software platforms. We have managed this challenge by taking steps to centralize feedback from users so that usability—not code—governs task targets and prioritizations.

You Make the Difference

Changing culture isn’t easy! You can help with our infrastructure transition by attending and providing feedback in the IT focus groups at the Annual Conference.
Changing culture within a hardworking team is challenging, and I’ve also learned that trying to organize a team and envision a strategy to direct evolution of engineering culture is daunting. Our goal is to incorporate systems-level analyses into our engineering curriculum and practice in a manner that prioritizes complementary and overlapping knowledge from the natural, digital, and social worlds in which our engineered solutions must function. As part of this effort to redesign engineering culture and practices, we will be hosting Engineering Culture Roundtable discussions each day of the Annual Conference. Please join us!

In closing, I’m excited about ASEE’s future! Thanks to the diligent members of the Commission on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, ASEE has become a leader in driving impact for racial equity, LGBTQIA+ inclusion, etc. via programming and initiatives. We will launch a new Hall of Fame to recognize exemplary members in honor of ASEE’s 130th anniversary in 2023 (look for nomination information in the fall). Division communications and record archiving will be revamped through the ASEE Hub. It’s an exciting time to be part of the ASEE family as we embrace a new era of scholarship and the education of engineers with tools and practices that yield sustainable solutions.

A heartfelt thank you to each of you, as ASEE members, for your role and participation in improving and adapting our profession for a better future.

Adrienne Minerick is President of ASEE.

Norman’s Notes

Adding Member Value

By Norman Fortenberry

Members,

I want to thank you all for your continued membership in ASEE and your contributions to the stronger, more vital, and vigorous organization we are striving to become. In particular, I thank you for your continued patience as we replace the Monolith system with three separate software platforms for our web pages, business platform, and paper management systems. Integrating these systems and replicating the full functionality of Monolith has been more challenging than anticipated, but we continue to make progress. And we believe you will be very pleased with the result. One final piece is still to come. In December 2022, the ASEE Hub will fully replace our current division and council listservs, with increased functionality.

Beyond our technical infrastructure, ASEE Headquarters is expanding our programming to provide greater value to members. By now, you’re familiar with our multi-topic Developing Engineering Leaders of Tomorrow in the Academy (DELTA) workshop series that includes offerings for future, new, and junior faculty as well as new chairs/heads and aspiring deans. We also offer more than 45 webinars and instructor-led courses on other topics. Find out more at https://learning.asee.org.

With support from a variety of funders, we have been able to undertake several new programs.

Fellowships

We’re supporting several new postdoctoral fellowship programs that place postdocs in start-up companies, on campuses, and at naval research sites.

  • The Innovative Postdoctoral Entrepreneurial Research Fellowship (I-PERF)
  • The Engineering Postdoctoral Fellowships (eFellows)
  • The Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) Postdoctoral Fellowships
  • The Naval Surface Warfare Center (Indian Head Division) Postdoctoral Fellowships

Learn more about these at https://www.asee.org/education-jobs/FELLOWSHIPS.

Other Sponsored Offerings
  • The Kern Foundation is supporting the Archival Publication Authors Workshop for Engineering Educators (APA-ENG) as a suite of activities aimed at increasing the capacity of engineering faculty to produce competitive manuscripts for refereed journals and other publications in the area of Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. https://apa-eng.asee.org
  • Under the umbrella of its signature Engineering for One Planet (EOP) Framework that seeks to equip engineers with skills, knowledge, and understanding to protect the planet and the life it sustains, the Lemelson Foundation is supporting a program to incentivize faculty to take on and follow through with this EOP work. https://eop-mgp.asee.org
  • On behalf of the National Science Foundation, ASEE is hosting community convenings for the foundation’s Engineering Education and Centers (EEC) Division. These include meetings for the NSF Engineering Research Centers program and the Revolutionizing Engineering Departments (RED) program, as well as a virtual workshop for semiconductor researchers in the US and Taiwan. https://ercbiennial.asee.org and https://redmeeting.asee.org
  • NSF/EEC is also supporting Defining and Building the Engineering Workforce of the Future, which will convene a think tank of subject-matter experts in a variety of future-focused disciplines to distill the knowledge competencies and skills required for a future-ready engineering ecoystem (FREE) as well as 150 educators to operationalize the learning outcomes. https://free.asee.org
  • And NSF supported our efforts to broaden diversity, equity, and inclusion in engineering. Initiatives included
    • A virtual community of practice (VCP) for LGBTQ+ Inclusion in Engineering (LGBTQ+ VCP)
    • A grant on Capacity Building for Research at Minority-Serving Institutions (CyBR-MSI) for the NSF Computer and Network Systems Division
    • A grant supporting the Engineering Deans Gender Equity (EDGE) initiative, which provides resources for the recruitment, retention, and advancement of engineering faculty who are women. https://edge.asee.org
  • Also sponsored by NSF is the Multiple-Institution Database for Investigating Engineering Longitudinal Development (MIDFIELD), which contains undergraduate student record data from 1988–2018. We are exploring integrating this data into our Profiles survey.
  • Autodesk is sponsoring a contest for instructors to design lesson plans that inspire students to create social change with Fusion 360. Lesson plans might focus on solving a lack of access to high-speed internet, transportation, or playground equipment—or any other issue that will light up students’ imaginations. www.autodesk.com/education/educators/asee

Norman Fortenberry is the executive director of ASEE.

YIRE Updates and a Look Ahead

By ASEE’s Commission on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion leadership team

ASEE’s Year of Impact on Racial Equity (YIRE) encompasses three pillars focused on engaging engineering and engineering technology students; faculty and administrators in colleges of engineering and engineering technology; and P–12 parents and guardians. As we wind down the year, the Commission on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (CDEI) wants to update members on activities associated with each pillar as well as next steps.

Pillar 1: Engineering Design Teams

For this pillar, we challenged the leaders of engineering and engineering technology student organizations, in a 90-Day Equity Challenge, to use the engineering design process to address an equity issue within the local chapter. Participants could choose from one of five equity foci: Culture, Leadership, Member Recruitment & Retention, On-Campus In-Reach, and Community Outreach. Ten teams submitted ideas in response to the request for proposals and at least one representative from each team joined the virtual kickoff that was held on January 17 (Martin Luther King, Jr. Day). The challenge culminated with a virtual wrap-up on April 18.

Eight teams completed the challenge. Each will receive a $1,000 prize and special recognition at the ASEE Annual Conference in June:

  • California State University, Fresno, American Society of Civil Engineers (Outreach)
  • The College of New Jersey, National Society of Black Engineers (Recruitment & Retention)
  • Grand Valley State University, American Society of Mechanical Engineers (Recruitment & Retention)
  • University of British Columbia, Bionics Engineers (Recruitment & Retention)
  • University of Georgia, Equity Engineers Council (Recruitment & Retention)
  • University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Engineers Without Borders (Outreach)
  • University of Wisconsin–Madison, American Institute of Chemical Engineers (Culture)
  • Utah State University, Society of Women Engineers (Outreach)
Pillar 2: Faculty and Administrators

This pillar of ASEE’s Year of Impact on Racial Equity incorporates five subcommittees committed to action in the following areas: Creating Inclusive Classrooms; Workload, Promotion & Pay; Learning from Existing Recognition Programs; Divesting from White Supremacy Culture; and the Deans’ Challenge. We look forward to providing blog posts and resources on our website about initiatives that are having an impact on improving conditions for BIPOC students, staff, and faculty.

Pillar 3: P–12 Parents and Guardians

This pillar focuses on “increased participation and comfort among Black and Brown K–12 children in pre-college engineering activities which communicate that an engineering career is an option for anyone.” To meet our goal of increasing recruitment and retention of students from traditionally marginalized backgrounds, pillar members developed different forms of communication (e.g., videos, interactive maps, curated resources) so that parents, guardians, and teachers would have broader access to engineering education best practices, engineering programs, and other initiatives.

We are providing race- and gender-matched engineering role models, via images and stories, to the audience of youth plus their teachers, parents, and guardians to actively displace the core assumptions of engineering’s White-centeredness. Similarly, we started conversations about engineering via social media to validate and encourage Black and Brown students to enter the field. We are also working on a video showcase of a day in the life of an engineering student of color. Finally, we developed a national interactive map that can help users identify outreach programs in their area.

Ongoing Work

CDEI plans to share information about all these initiatives on its website and at the 2022 Annual Conference via special sessions, a distinguished lecture, and in our exhibit hall booth. We also expect to report on more progress at the 2023 ASEE Annual Conference. Our presentations will highlight our impact and future plans.

The work of the Year of Impact on Racial Equity has had the express purpose of continuing to keep racial equity front of mind and front of hand. We want to ensure that the momentum that was created in Spring 2020 in the wake of the murder of George Floyd does not wane and return us to the status quo. This requires that we continue to push forward our initiatives both at our own institutions and on the national level. The activities of this year are just some of many examples of ways we have made strides toward racial equity in engineering—but also reminders that our work is not done.

ASEE’s Commission on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion leadership team is Jeremi London, 2021–2022 chair, Virginia Tech; Homero Murzi, 2021–2022 incoming chair, Virginia Tech; and Elizabeth Litzler, 2021–2022 past chair, University of Washington. Contact them at cdeichairs@asee.org.

Learn more at https://diversity.asee.org/deicommittee/yire.

The pieces in the Year of Impact on Racial Equity (YIRE) series in Prism are solicited by the Commission on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion and are under the editorial oversight of the Commission. Opinions expressed in the YIRE series are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the opinions of ASEE.

Engineering With the Planet in Mind

The industry demand for a workforce trained in environmental sustainability has never been higher, and the need for engineers who can make a positive impact has never been greater. According to a 2022 LinkedIn report, hiring for green skills has grown by almost 40 percent globally—but the supply of talent is not keeping pace.

As engineers design, build, and code our future, they have an extraordinary opportunity to drive inclusive and positive social, environmental, and financial outcomes. Yet engineering can also inadvertently exacerbate pollution, climate change, and health disparities. It is becoming a societal and professional imperative to ensure that engineers are prepared to innovate for a thriving world without contributing to these problems.

ASEE recently partnered with the Lemelson Foundation and its Engineering for One Planet (EOP) initiative to help close this green talent gap by catalyzing curricular changes in engineering through the new EOP Mini-Grant Program. It supports faculty teams in pioneering new teaching and learning approaches that infuse sustainability across engineering curricula. The program integrates justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion—with a particular focus on increasing participation of women and historically marginalized and underrepresented groups as project leaders and including minority-serving institutions as awardees.

ASEE will support up to 12 teams of engineering educators who pursue new ways to integrate sustainability into their programs. The teams will share ideas and best practices and explore ways to teach core sustainability competencies and literacy in all engineering disciplines. The goal is to generate innovative new curricula that can begin in one engineering classroom and spread within and across schools, while fostering diverse and inclusive learning environments.

Learn more about the ASEE Mini-Grant Program at https://eop-mgp.asee.org.

ASEE Convenes Summit on Future Workforce Needs

By Dora Smith and Dan Sayre

On April 25–26, ASEE’s Corporate Member Council brought together leaders from academia, industry, and government for its Industry 4.0 Workforce Summit. The event built on a previous series of webinars and aimed to collect insights and strategies for educating engineers and skilled technical workers for the coming decades.

Five key themes emerged:

University as a Service (UaaS)

The transformation to Software as a Service (SaaS) revolutionized what and how technology companies serve the market. A similar transition is underway in education. JB Holston of the Greater Washington Partnership, a civic alliance of regional employers, articulated the potential for UaaS—referencing models such as the employer-funded approach of Guild Education. Siemens USA CEO Barbara Humpton envisioned universities of the future serving lifelong learning needs through a membership model. Gregory Washington, president of George Mason University and former engineering dean, made the case that the US has evolved from a national, analog, industrial economy to a global, digital, knowledge economy, and universities must transform how they operate to meet new talent needs.

Diversity Is the Challenge; Diversity Is the Solution

Solving the US talent crisis requires creating pathways to opportunity for women and people of color who have been blocked from STEM careers by social, economic, and cultural barriers. University of the District of Columbia President Ronald Mason pointed to the roots of the talent shortage in wealth inequality, which is strongly correlated to race. Jason Tyszko, of the US Chamber of Commerce Foundation, showed how to scale proven talent supply solutions using the Chamber’s Talent Pipeline Management framework. The National Science Foundation’s Broadening Participation programs will help drive progress in connecting talent to opportunity, as will new public and private financing structures for education funding and loan forgiveness. Celeste Carter, lead program director of NSF’s Advanced Technological Education program, emphasized the critical role of community colleges in engaging diverse students in technical fields.

Democratize Engineering

NSF’s Acting Deputy Assistant Director of the Engineering Directorate, Don Millard, highlighted how the personalization revolution that has swept through industry is coming for education. Democratizing engineering requires shifting the model from one-to-many to many-to-one, he said. Programs such as NSF’s Revolutionizing Engineering Departments (RED) aim to drive the necessary organizational and cultural change. Lee Lambert, chancellor of Pima Community College, described how PimaFastTrack helps adult learners obtain industry-recognized skills in programs that can be tailored to specific employers. Coursera’s Skills Transformation Advisor Juliana Guaqueta shared research indicating that learners have the greatest interest in jobs such as data scientist and machine learning engineer but lack preparation. New businesses that provide MOOCs or digital credentials may be well positioned to help schools diagnose and remediate these gaps on a more personalized basis.

Adjacencies Are Key

Aligning the right partners is essential to scale and drive success. Adjacencies—within region, industries, and fields of knowledge—are where those partners will be found. Roger Tadajewski, executive director of the National Coalition of Certification Centers (NC3), spotlighted the organization’s student engagement pathway to develop highly skilled, job-ready professionals through programs and certifications across industries. University of Maryland President and former Dean of Engineering Darryll Pines described how the Greater Washington Partnership brought together academia and industry to address the regional talent shortfall through initiatives such as the Capital Collaborative of Leaders in Academia and Business (CoLAB).

Mentors Are Essential

Relationships are the key to changing systems and cultures, and mentors are needed in many areas. Martin Guay, vice president of business development for Stanley Black & Decker, pointed out that we don’t learn to ride a bike from a book—we learn from experience and each other. His company needs to upskill thousands of workers in the next decade, and he noted that this learning could be peer-to-peer. Ken Ball, dean of engineering at George Mason University, stressed that many faculty could use industry mentors to help better prepare students for the workplace. Chris Carlson, director of university relations at Northrop Grumman, emphasized that models such as the National Society of Black Engineers’ mentoring program Summer Engineering Experience for Kids (SEEK) increase the diversity of future engineers.

Additional content from the Summit will be posted at https://workforcesummit.asee.org. A synthesis of working group action plans and a post-event publication are forthcoming. Please reach out if you would like to join us.

Dora Smith is senior director for Global Academic Programs at Siemens Digital Industries Software and chair of ASEE’s Corporate Member Council (CMC);
dora.smith@siemens.com. Dan Sayre is president of the technology and content consulting firm New World Associates and past chair of the CMC; dan@newworldassoc.com.

Last Word

A Garden, Not a Pipeline

It is past time to revise our model for diversifying engineering.

Opinion by Laura Bottomley

Engineers tend to understand the world by making models, which require assumptions that are both implicit and explicit. We readily recognize that all models are imperfect and can’t represent every part of a problem. However, a model that doesn’t accurately represent the problem variables will lead to erroneous results. Why is it, then, when we are thinking about why there is not equitable representation of women and underrepresented minorities in engineering, that we don’t question the model?

We have explained diversification of engineering through a pipeline metaphor for a long time. The model has shown up in places from psychology literature to papers for IEEE and ASEE. We have certainly modified it over the years—leaky pipelines and such—but we still have not seen a significant difference. The use of this model has led to actions centered on changing the students, rather than on making any change in the way we do business in the education enterprise.

A pipeline shapes the raw material that is put into it, and there is typically only one way in and one (successful) way out. The assumptions of the pipeline model lead to actions that apply “treatments” to students and potential students. We attempt to change them to fit the engineering world, whether by learning sufficient math or how to deal with bias and harassment. This approach removes responsibility from educators. Teach all comers, and teach them the same. After all, engineering is completely neutral, just like science—right?

As good engineers, we need to recognize that our model is not generating the results we need, so we should change it. Suppose, rather than a pipeline, we consider the diversification of STEM through the framework of a garden.

As another model, this one won’t be perfect either. However, it may lead us to develop new actions, based on its metaphors, that the pipeline would not cause us to ideate. For example, thinking about students as seeds enables us to realize that each one has potential, regardless of its origin. Some seeds have more stored energy when they are planted; some students arrive on campus with more social capital. The job of the gardener is to provide the fertilizer and water that each seed needs and to till the soil so that the seeds can develop and spread their own roots.

This aspect of the garden model implies that classroom experiences need to be more carefully curated for the students who show up, rather than repeatedly applying the same lectures and assignments that the pipeline model encourages. After all, nothing changes in the shape of the pipeline, but a garden may need more water during a drought. Sometimes the only water that a student needs is having their instructor know their name. Sometimes they need more guidance on how to learn. During the COVID-19 pandemic, we’ve all seen that our students needed more guidance and support, and we did too.

What is compelling about the garden model is that it incorporates many of the research conclusions about factors that produce lasting results. The Engage Engineering project (https://www.engageengineering.org) cites three actions: deliberate teaching of spatial visualization, educator/student interaction, and using everyday examples. These all fit the model of a gardener rather than a sage-on-the-stage approach to engineering education.

What we are talking about is not semantics. We all have our mental models that guide how we navigate the world. These models can include various implicit biases, and if they don’t imply that we have any responsibility, then they certainly lead to the inaction that is keeping all kinds of minds from joining us in engineering. How many brilliant and creative students have been turned away from engineering because it presented to them as a round hole and they saw themselves as a square peg? How many students have never considered engineering because they were told they had to be geniuses in math? How many of us, as educators, have thought that certain students just didn’t belong in engineering? What model was the source of that thought?

A garden model may be just what we need to shake up our thinking and encourage us to acknowledge that we all share responsibility for tending our students. We need to change something! We have a lot of hard problems to solve, and we know that problems aren’t solved by the same kinds of minds that created them.

 

ASEE Fellow Laura Bottomley is an associate teaching professor of electrical engineering and elementary education at North Carolina State University. She also serves as director of Engineering Education, Women in Engineering, and The Engineering Place, the university’s K–20 education and resource headquarters for engineering and engineering education. This piece was based on Bottomley’s 2021 ASEE Annual Conference paper “A New Change Model for Recruitment and Retention of Underrepresented Groups in STEM” (https://bit.ly/3M0v3rj).

Second Act

Upstaged by more climate-friendly fuels, hydrogen returns in a strong support role in the burgeoning renewables industry.

By Thomas K. Grose

Remember the Hydrogen Economy? Early in George W. Bush’s presidency, his administration viewed hydrogen as the clean fuel of the future and imagined mass production of fuel-cell-powered cars by 2020. Congress went along, approving hundreds of millions of dollars for research and development. Enthusiasts touted hydrogen as nonpolluting because, whether digested in a fuel cell or burned in an engine, it emits only water and heat, not carbon monoxide and other toxins. It also has, by weight, three times the energy content of gasoline. Oh—and it’s the most plentiful element in the universe.

So, yeah: an energy system based on hydrogen and electricity sounded pretty great—until it didn’t. Hydrogen may reduce smog, but it’s not altogether clean. Though ubiquitous, the element doesn’t exist on its own. Nearly all of it is derived from natural gas through a process called steam methane reforming, which releases carbon dioxide. An alternate method, splitting water to release hydrogen, requires electricity, and power generation in the early 2000s depended heavily on fossil fuels. Both production methods discharged greenhouse gases and contributed to global warming. In 2009, the climate-focused Obama administration pulled the plug on Bush’s Hydrogen Fuel Initiative.

End of story? Not quite. Today, hydrogen is staging a comeback, though not in a starring role. There’s no longer talk of a hydrogen economy. However, energy experts expect it to play an important supporting role in a future zero-carbon world. What saved it? A burgeoning renewables industry. Electricity from wind and solar is now the cheapest on the market, and production is quickly ramping up. And if the power to split water through electrolysis comes from renewables, the resulting “green hydrogen,” as it’s called, would be 100 percent clean and help to decarbonize the world.

The war in Ukraine, which heightened concern about western Europe’s dependence on Russian oil and gas, adds a new reason to find hydrogen attractive. Climate considerations aside, hydrogen expands the mix of reliable energy options and can be produced anywhere.

An ‘Old Thing’ Rediscovered

Reaching a zero-carbon future would first require ridding all electricity production of emissions, then electrifying everything that can be electrified, from passenger cars to heating. But that would get only partway to the goal. Some processes are hard or impossible to electrify, particularly heavy-weight, long-haul transport—including trucks, ships, and aircraft; steel manufacturing; and production of fertilizers and other chemicals. That’s where clean hydrogen could make a difference. The prevalent element and its derivatives—especially ammonia—are now seen as an ideal way to decarbonize those vehicles and industries. “Hydrogen is an old thing, but it is now being rediscovered,” explains Michael Timko, an associate professor of chemical engineering at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute. “And it will have a role to play.”

The Biden administration certainly thinks so. But officials also recognize that for hydrogen to fulfill its role, a more climate-friendly variety will be required than is currently available. Green hydrogen now accounts for only 1 percent of global production. So last August, the US Department of Energy launched its Hydrogen Shot, an initiative to accelerate breakthroughs in clean hydrogen production and use and to reduce the price of green hydrogen by 80 percent to $1 a kilogram (2.2 pounds). The administration spent $285 million on hydrogen research in the 2021 fiscal year and received $400 million in the current fiscal year. Additionally, the $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill signed by the president in November 2021 authorized $9.5 billion for hydrogen research, of which $8 billion goes toward a network of regional hydrogen hubs to spur its industrial use. For the upcoming fiscal year, the White House is seeking $1.5 billion for hydrogen research.

Energy experts largely welcome DOE’s approach, but they are divided over various aspects. These include the department’s plan to make production of hydrogen from natural gas and other fossil fuels greener—but still not totally green—by combining it with carbon capture and sequestration (CCS). CCS traps most of the CO2 produced before it escapes into the atmosphere and then either buries it or turns it into a solid. Some experts object to DOE’s support for using electricity from nuclear plants to split water and to the department’s endorsement of using hydrogen to store excess energy from solar and wind farms. And there’s little enthusiasm for a plan to use hydrogen to heat buildings.

DOE’s drive to lower substantially the cost of green hydrogen and accelerate production draws wide support among experts. Doing this requires making electrolysis less expensive and building more electrolysis facilities, experts say. “Once it is done on scale, that will reduce costs. I am not worried about the costs coming down,” says Mark Jacobson, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University. Robert Brecha, a professor of sustainability at the University of Dayton’s engineering school, agrees. As the price of renewable energy continues to fall, that will increase demand for electrolysis, he says. “It’s economies of scale and also learning how to do things better to increase capacity,” Brecha says. Improved electrolysis technology would extend the life of its components and make the process more efficient, he says.

A Super-Efficient Catalyst

Toward the cost-reduction goal, Zhenxing Feng, an associate professor of chemical, biological, and environmental engineering at Oregon State University, says his team has invented a new type of electrolyzer catalyst that is more efficient than today’s commercial versions by nearly three orders of magnitude. Paired with electricity from renewables, he says, the catalyst can produce hydrogen at a cost that meets the Hydrogen Shot’s target of $1 per kilogram. “Ours can be very competitive, even compared to natural gas reforming,” Feng says.

In electrolysis, electrochemical catalysts increase the rate of the chemical reaction. Feng’s team found that the reaction can cause irreversible structural changes, making the catalyst less stable. After studying this restructuring, the team manipulated the surface structure and composition of the catalyst. Instead of the common commercial catalyst based on iridium oxide, they found that a catalyst based on amorphous iridium dioxide actually becomes more efficient once it undergoes irreversible changes. Their catalyst is also cheaper. Fifty percent of the commercial catalyst is iridium oxide, “and iridium is ridiculously expensive,” Feng says. His catalyst uses only half of that amount of iridium, and he predicts future iterations will require even less, making them much cheaper. He has already patented the technology and licensed it to a manufacturer for commercial production.

The cost of green hydrogen could also be lowered with technologies other than electrolysis. One that has received a lot of attention is a photoelectrochemical process that uses solar power and specialized semiconductors to split water. “The main advantage is you skip the middle part” of using solar power to make electricity first, Timko says, which makes it a more efficient process. Photoelectrochemical is “among several in-the-lab technologies that really look promising; we are tracking their development,” says José Bermúdez, an energy technology analyst at the International Energy Agency in Paris.

A Low-Carbon Option or a Gimmick?

Enough varieties of hydrogen production methods are in the works that the community of hydrogen fuel scientists has taken to color-coding them: green, blue, gray, brown or black, turquoise, purple, pink, red, and white. The three main ones are gray, produced conventionally from natural gas with methane steam reforming; blue, produced using the same method as gray but paired with CCS; and green, produced from water using carbon-free electricity.

Industry considers blue hydrogen a low-carbon option. DOE agrees, but a paper published last August by Jacobson and Robert Howarth, a professor of ecology and environmental biology at Cornell University, shot a huge hole in that claim. The paper posits that the total greenhouse-gas footprint of blue hydrogen is so large that it would be better for the climate just to burn the natural gas. “Blue hydrogen is a nonstarter. It’s only a gimmick to keep the fossil fuel industry alive. You’ve got to look at the upstream emissions,” Jacobson says. Besides upstream leaks from the production and shipping of natural gas, the authors take into account the burning of natural gas to power CCS technology. Additionally, Jacobson and Howarth contend that CCS technology has a poor track record and is expensive. They also note that it remains unproven whether CO2 can be safely buried as part of sequestration.

But Jacobson and Howarth haven’t dealt blue hydrogen a fatal blow. “I have a problem with that paper,” says Jacob “Jack” Brouwer, a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at the University of California–Irvine and director of the National Fuel Cell Research Center. He’s one of around 20 authors who plan to publish a rebuttal. “We question some of their assumptions and analysis,” he says. Bermúdez sees a role for blue hydrogen if it meets three criteria: that the CCS has a high capture rate; that the captured carbon can be safely sequestered; and that upstream emissions are greatly reduced. “We have to make sure emissions are kept to a minimum or avoided,” Bermúdez says. However, that may prove hard to do, he adds.

And Brouwer admits that if it were cheap and easy to plug upstream emissions, it probably would have been done by now. He also concedes that CCS remains an unproven, expensive, and so far ineffective technology. Nevertheless, Brouwer says, when it comes to achieving the goal of limiting global warming to no more than 2ºC over preindustrial levels, every single model “says we need some CCS investment to reach that goal.” Brouwer calls himself “a fan of ridding ourselves of fossil fuels as fast as possible” but thinks it is acceptable to use blue carbon in the short term to reduce emissions. A recent article by an international team led by Christian Bauer, a researcher with the Paul Scherrer Institute in Switzerland, says that under certain conditions, blue hydrogen is compatible with low-carbon economies, but adds that “neither current blue nor green hydrogen production pathways render fully ‘net-zero’ hydrogen without additional CO2 removal.”

Also contentious is turquoise hydrogen. It comes from a process called methane pyrolysis, which uses extreme heat to split methane into hydrogen and solid carbon, or carbon black, a powder that is mainly used in tire manufacturing but can also be found in products ranging from inks to plastics. The DOE is giving Monolith, a Nebraska company, $1 billion in loan guarantees to fund the scaling up of a small “clean” pyrolysis plant to commercial size. Monolith says its capture technology aims to reduce emissions by up to 80 percent. Brecha says making turquoise hydrogen requires less electricity, uses all the natural gas, and produces a useful product. “That’s an interesting feature,” Brecha says, but if the goal is zero emissions, turquoise fails the test. “The best case is 70 percent to 80 percent capture, and in practice it’s a lot less than that.”

24/7 Nuclear?

Pink hydrogen is made using electricity from nuclear plants to split water. The DOE announced last May that its Idaho National Laboratory was starting a pilot project, the country’s first, to use power from one of its lab reactors to run an electrolyzer. During times when the grid has ample power, nuclear plants’ operations are tamped down. Ideally, in the future, the agency says, the plants could instead operate continuously at full tilt and use the extra electricity to produce hydrogen. But nuclear power is expensive, and, unlike solar and wind, it isn’t likely to get cheaper. Brecha has doubts: “It isn’t clear to me why we would go that route.”

If the world looks to rely heavily on low-carbon hydrogen, more needs to be done to expand the infrastructure for storing and transporting the gas, which is extremely flammable when it mixes with air or oxygen. “There is essentially zero hydrogen infrastructure in the US,” Brouwer complains. Currently, hydrogen is stored in tanks in highly compressed gas or liquid form. It can be transported by compressing it into long cylinders that are stacked on a so-called tube trailer and hauled by truck. Hydrogen can be liquified by chilling it to -253ºC and transported in super-insulated cryogenic tanker trucks, DOE says. Ships are being developed to transport hydrogen by sea in liquid form, chilled to at least -253ºC. Hydrogen pipelines are costly to build, which explains why there are just 1,600 miles of them in the United States, mainly on the Gulf Coast. Better technologies to store hydrogen and move it around are needed, Brouwer says, and would also help to reduce its cost. Many researchers are investigating solid and liquid chemicals that bond with hydrogen so it can be handled at low pressure and near-ambient temperatures.

The challenge of storing and transporting hydrogen is among the reasons ammonia is seen as key to the future of this low-carbon fuel. Ammonia doesn’t bond with hydrogen, but it’s a hydrogen derivative that’s much easier to store and transport. Additionally, ammonia’s energy density by volume is almost twice that of liquid hydrogen. Ammonia is currently produced using the century-old Haber-Bosch process, which combines hydrogen and nitrogen under high temperatures and pressure. Nearly all ammonia production now uses gray hydrogen, so the process emits huge amounts of CO2. If the Haber-Bosch process used green hydrogen instead of gray, the resulting ammonia would be green, too—except that when ammonia burns, it releases another greenhouse gas, nitrous oxide.

A Greener, Cheaper Haber-Bosch

Since 2013, a research farm operated by the University of Minnesota has been making green ammonia from electricity supplied by wind turbines while working to improve the process. Prodromos Daoutidis, a professor of chemical engineering and one of the farm’s researchers, says that green ammonia, like green hydrogen, is still expensive, but the prices of both will likely fall in tandem. “However, if we can improve Haber-Bosch it will also make a significant cost impact.” His team is one of many looking to revamp the catalysts used to make ammonia, so far with mixed results. But most of his work focuses on ways to reduce the amount of pressure and heat needed in the process. Specifically, Daoutidis is looking at absorbing the ammonia in salt under low pressure. This is much more energy-efficient than the current practice of relying on high-pressure condensation, followed by refrigeration, to extract ammonia. Daoutidis says researchers are also working on ways to improve the catalytic converters to capture nitrous oxide from burning ammonia.

Nitrogen fertilizers, which use ammonia as their key ingredient, represent an obvious potential market for green ammonia. “Agricultural use of green ammonia could be immediate,” Daoutidis says. “It’s a drop-in replacement.” Green ammonia is also seen as a potential carbon-free fuel for the marine industry. “Hydrogen on its own as a liquid or compressed takes up way too much payload,” Bermúdez says, “so ammonia can definitely play a role.” Shipping experts expect the industry eventually to embrace ammonia as a fuel, but the required overhaul of the global shipping fleet will be costly—around $2 trillion, by one estimate.

In a zero-carbon world, the intermittent nature of solar and wind power means that utilities must have sufficient storage to ensure round-the-clock electricity for customers. That’s where green hydrogen can play at least a backup role. Experts generally agree that batteries provide better short-term storage of energy than green hydrogen. Paul Martin, an expert in chemical processes and a member of the Hydrogen Science Coalition (HSC), explained to CNBC that if one joule of electricity is put in a battery, 90 percent of it is returned, but 67 percent of the electricity used to make and store hydrogen is lost. However, batteries aren’t capable of long-duration storage because they self-discharge over time. “If you need to store it for a long time, the equation changes. And if there are massive amounts to store, hydrogen would still be cheaper,” Brouwer says. “You can’t just think about short-term efficiency.” Other experts say ammonia is ultimately a better option than hydrogen because it’s easier to store and transport.

The DOE’s blueprint for increasing the use of hydrogen stresses its potential for use in combined power and heat systems in buildings, but experts are skeptical. “It’s not a great idea,” Bermúdez says. “Electric heating is five to six times more efficient.” He and others say electric heat pumps are a much better, more efficient remedy.

There is no debate, however, that clean hydrogen will be central to cleaning up many industrial processes that now emit enormous amounts of CO2—particularly steel manufacturing, the source of nearly 9 percent of carbon emissions, and production of iron, cement, and some chemicals. In steel production, for example, hydrogen is seen as a replacement for coke, a coal derivative, as a fuel and an agent for the reduction of iron oxides. “Hydrogen will play an important role in the decarbonizing of industry,” Bermúdez says.

Although the Bush administration’s big hydrogen initiative focused on passenger cars, no one expects hydrogen to power many light vehicles. Nearly all major automakers are pivoting to electric vehicles, and market forecasts predict that EVs will soon dominate new-car sales. However, the batteries that eat up space in electric cars aren’t a viable option for long-distance trucks and other heavy-duty vehicles that suck up massive amounts of energy. “Fuel cells can achieve the power required for heavy-duty trucks,” Bermúdez says. As for aviation, Brouwer says that smaller, short-range aircraft can be electrified. Both hydrogen and ammonia have been suggested as possible fuels for large commercial jets. Jacobson says his lab has run models showing that a slightly larger but lighter-weight version of the Boeing 747 could be powered by hydrogen fuel cells. However, given the long lead times needed to design new aircraft and certify their safety,“biofuels might be the first choice for aviation,” Brecha says.

If hydrogen can’t perform every part in a green-energy future, it’s certain to belong in the cast. Operating in conjunction with a growing supply of cheap, renewable electricity, hydrogen will thus defy the F. Scott Fitzgerald axiom, “There are no second acts in America.”

 

Thomas K. Grose is Prism’s chief correspondent.
Design by Francis Igot

Pin It on Pinterest