Justin Schwartz (second from left) speaks with President Eric Barron (left) and David Han (center), the association professor and vice chair of education in the Penn State College of Medicine, and two other attendees at the LPE symposium on biodevices in April. IMAGE: PENN STATE
Power in partnerships
Engineering solutions through interdisciplinary initiatives
7/17/2019
By Ashley WennersHerron
Engineering Penn State sat down with Dr. Justin Schwartz, the Harold and Inge Marcus Dean of Engineering, to discuss collaborative work within engineering, across Penn State, and with government and industry. This is an area of strategic importance for the College of Engineering, as a multifaceted society requires multi-disciplinary solutions.
Engineering Penn State (EPS): Why are interdisciplinary collaborations important? Is this an area the College of Engineering is championing?
Justin Schwartz (JS): There is almost nothing in our world today that is single-disciplinary driven. This has been the case for decades. When I was a kid, we thought about cars as a mechanical system. By the 1990s, cars were taken over by computers. Cars can fail for electrical and computer reasons, which can be caused by mechanical thermal issues. So, for decades now, almost every new breakthrough is the result of multiple disciplines working together to solve a problem.
In engineering, we like to think that engineering is the discipline, but all of the different programs within engineering would traditionally be their own fields. All the big problems and all of the big challenges cut across boundaries. Big solutions come from multiple views through many lenses. This is a major priority for the College of Engineering as we expand our research portfolio and work toward addressing society’s greatest challenges.
EPS: How does engineering evolve with other disciplines?
JS: The step beyond what we’ve traditionally thought of as being multidisciplinary — the sub-disciplines within the College of Engineering — is to bring in physics, chemistry, biology, mathematics, and the basic sciences. We know it as science, technology, engineering, and math, or STEM. It’s this linear pipeline of different fundamental sciences coming together to inform engineering, while engineering translates those basic sciences into a product or system to benefit people.
Going back decades, there wasn’t really a big biological engineering presence, and, now, it’s ubiquitous. That’s only happened over the past 20 years or so. It’s a good case study of how engineering’s interdisciplinary efforts evolve rather rapidly and significantly.
Another good case study is that of human factors. We used to think of human factors as belonging to psychology, but really, it’s the factor of humans within systems. How does the way a person will interact with a system need to influence design methodology and ideology?
The infusion of technology across everyday life has become so profound that interdisciplinarity isn’t just science influencing engineering or engineering subdisciplines influencing each other. Now, it also includes people. And it should be people centric. Humans are now a part of the systems. The more we integrate the human presence, the more impactful all of our efforts will be.
The other piece of this product acceptance is the development of new policies and laws to support or obstruct new technology. Right now, this is a hot topic for autonomous vehicles. What are the regulations in terms of liability and road accessibility? What are the policies for traffic that comprises both computer-driven and human-driven vehicles? What are the rules in terms of order of communication from an electrical system point of view?
There are so many places where we, as people, overlap with technology evolution and emergence.
EPS: There are so many different fields and possible interactions. How do you begin the conversations to prioritize which collaborations should happen now?
JS: Right now, we have several collaborations with other units in the University. One is the Law, Policy, and Engineering (LPE) initiative, which has clear implications for things like autonomous vehicles, nuclear security, cybersecurity, biodevices and the human-technology interface, energy efficient buildings, and so much more. It’s at the crux of how to bring law, policy, and technology development together to work hand in hand rather than against one another.
Another is Penn State’s partnership with Project Drawdown. We’re working with the Penn State Institutes of Energy and the Environment, as well as other colleges, to explore and enhance proposed solutions to reverse global warming. With Drawdown, the goal is to keep ourselves alive as a species. In other collaborations, we’re more focused on the evolution of the things we’re developing as we’re developing them. The outcomes — survival versus improved quality of life via new technologies — are different kinds of motivators.
Solutions for either type of motivation are different, too. Distributed solar power in Kenya won’t work the same in Norway. The decision making needs to have a high level of localization. This understanding is also evolving the field of implementation science, which initially emerged in the medical community.
Engineering needs to be interactive not just at the boundary, but also intertwined with our intellectual partners across the University and across the country.
EPS: Once you have the right players in the room, how do you make these conversations into something actionable?
JS: Sometimes that can be difficult, but not always. A lot of it comes down to opportunity space. We don’t have legal authority; we don’t have the ability to dictate what another country does. We hope that by getting our faculty together to talk from their disparate areas of expertise, we can cultivate an interest around a defined subject that may offer insight. When people from different backgrounds come together with a common purpose, a common “why,” and collaborative impediments are removed, great things happen. Human greatness emerges.
We’re part of a proposed planetary science collaboration among the College of Engineering, the Eberly College of Science, and the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences to begin to explore how to educate future mission leaders while also positioning Penn State as a leader in this area. A huge amount of science needs to go into the front end of planetary missions. There’s also a huge amount of engineering needed to translate the goal of going to another planet or moon into a viable idea. This is big science, with international implications for multi-country collaboration and competition. We need a lot of very different expertise to contribute.
On a topic a little closer to home, we recently hosted a Law, Policy, and Engineering (LPE) symposium on biodevices. We had faculty from the College of Medicine, Penn State Law, the School of International Affairs, the College of Engineering, and Eberly College of Science all together in the same room, along with leaders of industry. We talked about the obstacles to moving these devices forward, and the potential conflicts among social science acceptance, the business model of health care delivery, and the science and technology of developing a device that helps people. We can sometimes see the solution from our own perspective, but we don’t understand all the implementation barriers from other disciplines. Working together, and getting together to talk these things through, is so important in technological progression.
EPS: Is there space for Penn State born-and-grown collaborations to position the University as a place where that expertise can inform conversations and decisions on a larger scale?
JS: Absolutely. There is so much going on at Penn State that, when put together, we collectively become one of the dominant forces in planetary science engineering, for example. We welcome in outside expertise not only to learn, but also to better understand who we are and how to contextualize our joint knowledge. There’s a huge benefit in the honest assessment of understanding which puzzle pieces we’re missing.
Once we know which key pieces we lack, we can find them and make a more holistic picture. That takes us from powerful to dominant, and that’s when we go beyond impact.
We’re not going it alone, and we wouldn’t want to. We position ourselves as leaders in different fields, but we will always go further with important partnerships with other universities, government, and industry. A network of partners means we have a diversity of experiences and a network of sites, and we can reach more communities in different ways with the benefit of having that home influence. One example is our Larson Transportation Institute working with the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation. Professionals in the field come here to provide advanced training in managing accidents and managing traffic, and generally enhancing highway safety, while we have the research direction of understanding these areas to advance autonomous vehicles. It’s a highly beneficial relationship for both of us.
EPS: Are there future interdisciplinary collaborations for which you see a current need?
JS: There are a number in the process of emerging and expanding. We’re having a lot of good discussions, and there are a lot of people with really good ideas. For example, the College of Engineering will be contributing to the fight against addiction. That doesn’t really seem like an obvious fit, addiction isn’t an engineering issue, but like so many areas of human need, engineering is part of the solution. There’s so much work we can do with analysis and systems-based approaches to mitigate the issue.
For all major societal issues, there’s a need for interdisciplinary partnerships to support solving it. There’s also a need to educate future generations about this collaborative work. At Penn State, research, teaching, and service are deeply entangled with one another, to the benefit of everyone involved. As we continue to grow, we’re building our infrastructure to support these interactions.
The College of Engineering will begin construction on two new research and teaching buildings on West Campus in the next couple of years. The design will be focused specifically on enabling interdisciplinary work in the classroom and in the lab, with hands-on learning space and thematic organization rather than departmental designations.
We’re baking collaboration into our infrastructure, which drives our culture. This is the future of engineering, and our partners.
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