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NSF Processes That Fostered Extraordinary Engineering Impacts on Society
In addition to Engineering Research Centers, NSF has established many other funding processes and mechanisms to support engineering research and education, collaboration between industry and universities, professional development, and the role of underrepresented minorities in engineering fields. Specific examples mentioned by Louis A. Martin-Vega, professor of engineering at North Carolina State University, who moderated the fourth session at the symposium, were the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program, which started at NSF, and the Grant Opportunities for Academic Liaison with Industry (GOALI) program, which seeks to stimulate collaboration between academic research institutions and industry. The presenters during the symposium’s final session also described “not simply the processes that we’re talking about but their stories,” said Martin-Vega. “All of them have been involved in receiving [NSF] support, and it is through them that we hope to see the tremendous impact this makes and the extraordinary impacts it has on engineering.”
FROM OUTSIDE TO INSIDE NSF
Andre Marshall, vice president for research, innovation, and economic development at George Mason University, gave the session’s lead-off presentation. During his undergraduate years at Georgia Tech, Marshall was a General Electric Foundation scholar, a program that supported underrepresented minority STEM undergraduate students, in part through summer employment at GE. For his master’s degree, also at Georgia Tech, he was a GEM Consortium fellow, another effort that supports underrepresented minority STEM students that has an indus-
try summer work component. During his PhD at the University of Maryland, he was funded in part by the Department of Defense, and after completing his PhD he worked in industry at Rolls-Royce as a senior project engineer developing technology for a NASA program. He returned to the University of Maryland in 2001, working primarily on research funded by NASA and NSF, and moved to George Mason University in 2021, where he is president of the George Mason University Research Foundation.
Marshall’s first NSF award was from the Small Grant Exploratory Research (SGER) program, which funds small-scale, exploratory, and high-risk research in the fields of science, engineering, and education. “I was struggling to get NSF funding, and this program was suggested to me by a mentor who was also struggling to get NSF funding, so we worked together.” This award established a track record for NSF funding that he could reference in future proposals, and through it he developed a relationship with a mentor who left an indelible mark on his career.
After two unsuccessful bids, he was awarded a prestigious NSF Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award, which provided flexible and sustained funding that supported his first PhD students and laid the foundation for the rest of his career. As a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineering (PECASE) recipient, he went to the White House and met the president, “which was truly an unforgettable experience.”
The NSF Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) program, which supports the building or acquiring of shared research equipment, provided Marshall and his students with the means to work on reducing uncertainty from computer models and providing new insights to industry on the performance details of their engineered devices and instrumentation. It also attracted new collaborators, both in academic institutions and industry, and provided a unique capability that Marshall leveraged for a nascent tech startup. The I-Corps program, an immersive, entrepreneurial training program that facilitates the transformation of invention to impact, provided additional assistance in getting ideas out of the laboratory and into the marketplace. This program teaches customer discovery, a value-first approach that emphasizes interviewing potential customers to understand their needs and where they see opportunities, instead of a technology-first approach, where researchers attempt to tell potential customers what their technology can do. “Learning this value-
first approach changed my research priorities,” said Marshall. “I became dedicated to use-inspired research.”
He leveraged the unique measurement capabilities developed by his research to forge relationships with industry through a Grant Opportunities for Academic Liaison with Industry (GOALI) award, which fostered research collaboration between the university and industry. Students got “great experiences,” he said, working closely with industry collaborators and spending summers at large research organizations in Fortune 500 companies.
“As a university researcher, I’ve benefited from NSF’s innovative discovery-based programs and translational programs. [And it] is not only me who benefited from these programs but my entire research team, which of course included undergraduate, master’s, and PhD students and postdoctoral fellows, all supported by NSF on our research, discovery, and translation journey together.”
In 2017, following the encouragement of his mentor, Marshall joined the NSF staff on an Intergovernmental Personnel Act assignment. These assignments bring fresh perspectives to NSF from across the country and research community, thereby shaping new direction for research, research infrastructure, and education, including in interdisciplinary areas. Before coming to NSF, Marshall had followed solicitation rules and guidelines “somewhat blindly.” His experiences at NSF showed him the ways in which programs are driven by high-level goals, including stewardship of taxpayer dollars, a deep commitment to thought leadership, and a focus on societal impacts. “Of course there are many, many more, but those really left an impression on me, and I’ll carry them with me throughout the remainder of my career.”
He started his assignment at NSF as a director of the Industry-University Cooperative Research Center (IUCRC) program, which connects university researchers with industry partners through proven frameworks to create and sustain centers that bridge the cultures of industry and universities. In 2019 he began helping lead the I-Corps program. In 2012 he had been a member of the 83rd team to participate in the program, whereas today more than 2,000 teams have gone through I-Corps. As a program director, he worked to focus partners on a few “north stars,” including deep technologies, commercialization, and inclusivity, all of which are aligned with NSF’s interests.
While at NSF he was also able to build a unique partnership with the GEM Consortium, the program that had supported him in graduate school. The consortium overlapped substantially with the 100 or so
I-Corps university partners, but neither was aware of the overlapping interests between the programs. “I can’t tell you how satisfying it was to bring together two institutions to create something new and hopefully enduring that is going to result in the next generation of tech startups from underrepresented founders.”
Careers are built over time, and people need to be willing to take risks if they are going to succeed, Marshall concluded. “It’s important to encourage faculty members to take that risk, because you don’t know where it’s going to lead. And oftentimes, exploring a broad parameter space can result in the biggest impacts”
MULTIPLE PATHWAYS TO DISABILITIES RESEARCH
As the National Council on Disability has affirmed (2015), “the disability community knows better than any other how being involved in planning from day one is critical to a successfully accessible product, regardless of how many years in the future it lies”. That is the premise of the work done by Rory A. Cooper, who holds a distinguished professorship in the Department of Rehabilitation Science and Technology at the University of Pittsburgh and a number of additional professional titles. A US Army veteran who incurred a spinal cord injury in service and uses a wheelchair, Cooper received all his degrees after becoming injured. He is also an athlete who has finished multiple marathons and has inspired others both to go into engineering and to compete in wheelchair races. “You can be a role model even when you least expect it,” he said.
As part of his work to address the needs of students with disabilities in engineering and the sciences, he has been involved with NSF’s Research Experience for Undergraduates program for over 20 years—“this is one of the most wonderful programs NSF has.” Over 200 students have been supported by NSF through the ASPIRE REU program at Pittsburgh’s Human Engineering Research Laboratory, where Cooper is founding director and a senior research scientist, and more than 1,000 have received other supplements through foundations and other agencies, including the US Department of Veterans Affairs. The participants have been about 55 percent women, more than 20 percent have been from racially and ethnically diverse populations, and more than a quarter reported an impairment that limits one or more daily activities. The program has resulted in peer-reviewed journal publications, poster and meeting presentations, and expansive interactions with mentors,
presenters, and other students, all while building technologies that promote social mobility, health, and participation. As an example, Cooper showed a video of a waterproof wheelchair that allows people with disabilities to enjoy waterparks and other venues where the wheelchair could get wet.
Cooper’s work also has been supported by NSF’s Experiential Learning for Veterans in Assistive Technology and Engineering (ELeVATE) program, a holistic college transition and success program that provides support to veterans in engineering or technology programs. Each participant works on a research or development project under the guidance of a mentoring team that includes a veteran in the community who has successfully transitioned to gainful employment and is able to link participants to job opportunities, and more than 80 percent of participants are currently enrolled in or have completed a two- or four-year STEM degree program. In addition, Cooper has participated in the I-Corps for Learning (I-Corps L) pilot program, with a focus on scaling and replication of ELeVATE at academic institutions nationwide.
Cooper also described his support from the Advanced Inclusive Manufacturing: Making Community College Technician Education More Accessible for Everyone (AccessATE) program, which is designed to make training and employment opportunities available to people with disabilities. Among the products of this support were curricular materials that promote inclusion, accommodations to maximize participation, technical and job training skills, and partnerships with other institutions and funders.
Cooper’s work includes development of user interfaces for assistive robotic manipulators that help wheelchair users or people with disabilities do daily tasks. Many people have difficulties using current robotic interfaces, he said, and the new interface will reduce frustrations so people can learn how to control the robot quickly and easily. One veteran “was so excited that he just pointed to the robot and said to his caregiver, ‘That’s what I want.’”
The University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University partnered on an NSF Quality of Life Technology (QoLT) ERC to create a scientific and engineering knowledge base that enables systematic development of human-centered intelligent systems that coexist and cowork with people, particularly people with disabilities. Contributions of the ERC have influenced the growth in human-centered design in robotics and intelligent systems and established new fields of study such as soft
robots, virtual coaches, and human-robot collaboration, Cooper said. QoLT alumni have also moved on to influential positions with Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and other organizations.
Finally, Cooper’s work has been supported by the Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship (IGERT) program at NSF. People with disabilities were particularly attracted to the IGERT program, Cooper reported, because it features collaborative research that transcends traditional disciplinary boundaries and requires teamwork that helps students become leaders in the science and engineering of the future.
“I’ve had the privilege to participate in a number of NSF-affiliated programs,” Cooper observed. “And to do the work that we do, and others do, sometimes it takes multiple NSF programs.”
SUPPORTING PARTNERSHIPS WITH INDUSTRY
Harriet Nembhard, the Roy J. Carver Professor of Engineering at the University of Iowa, shared three stories to describe the mechanisms of funding opportunities through NSF—one of a hero, one of a teacher, and one of a mentor.
At a Big Ten Academic Alliance deans’ leadership institute that she attended, participants were asked to name their heroes as part of describing their leadership philosophies. After some reflection, Nembhard decided that her hero is industrial engineering. “I’ve been an industrial engineer since I was seven years old, although I didn’t know that that’s what it was called until much later.” Her father was an airline pilot, and from an early age she could identify planes and even their engines. “But my curiosities were always, How does the luggage get from the sidewalk to the correct plane? Or how do you determine that the small planes are parked here and the large planes are parked here?” As an undergraduate at Arizona State University and a graduate student at the University of Michigan, she’s had “amazing opportunities to study and train in the field of industrial engineering,” she said.
Her second story was about a teacher. As part of an NSF “birthday” celebration, the agency’s Twitter account called on followers to share a tweet about their experiences with NSF. “I proudly tweeted out that my first NSF award was a $15,000 GOALI. It was small, but it validated my drive for applied research in collaboration with industry.” The name of the program—Grant Opportunities for Academic Liaison with Industry—“really resonated with me.” She wanted to be an academic
working in partnership with industry, and her academic journey has involved industry partnerships ever since.
After that initial grant, she won Phase I and Phase II Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) awards, as well as an award through the Industry-University Collaborative Research Centers (IUCRC) program. “I consider this community of industry experts as one of my most important teachers throughout my academic career,” she said.
Her third story was about a mentor. In the early phases of her career, mentoring programs for new faculty did not have the structure that they have at many institutions today. Instead, NSF essentially served as her mentor. “Some of my most robust, insightful conversations about my research plans have been with NSF program directors. Collectively, I think of them as a multifaceted mentor across my career—perhaps, one might say, a mentoring network. But it has always felt more personal, more of an investment than that. They really have invested in my success.” She was invited to serve on review panels and program directors suggested people at other universities with whom she should talk. In her development as an engineer and scientist, NSF—through its practices and operations—always seemed to be building inclusive excellence in scholarship, “even before doing so had that name or that framework. I could always count on NSF program directors to help me shape and strengthen my ideas, link me to others in the academic community, and engage me on key panel experiences.”
The context of these experiences also has been important, Nembhard said. As an industrial engineer, her work has always been very multidisciplinary. Her first GOALI project included industrial engineers, mechanical engineers, and computer scientists working with a mid-sized textile manufacturer to minimize waste when changing from one product design or textile pattern to another. Textile production accounts for 20 percent of industrial pollution globally, she said, and “the global problem to address the environmental issues and protect the health of workers in this industry remains a challenging one.” With the STTR project, she worked with a small startup that focused on lithography to develop a gel casting process using nanoparticles to enable the production of micro devices with nanoscale features. She has developed and patented a tiny forceps for minimally invasive surgery so that a biopsy can be done for just a few cells, reducing the trauma for patients. In addition, she led the NSF-funded Pennsylvania State University site for the Center for Health Organization Transformation, which works with companies, hospitals, and academic medical centers on applied research projects in healthcare delivery.
NSF’s support for innovation through its funding mechanisms has changed the culture of academia, Nembhard said. “When I started the IUCRC work, there were colleagues who were critical of the work because they deemed it to lack rigor, because it was affiliated and in collaboration with industry.” But the naysayers quieted when the IUCRC mechanism led to the involvement of more than 200 faculty and graduate students and well over 50 companies. “The imprimatur of NSF was an important factor in overcoming some of those earliest objections,” she said. “But the other part of this is that, due to these experiences of engaging with industry, as I have across my career, I have some unique abilities and insights in connecting with external stakeholders in general.” This experience has also given her perspective on connecting with junior faculty, since “many of them have an appetite for this sort of industry work, have curiosities, or want to have a startup early in their careers. I can let them know that I would be fully supportive of a block of time to immerse or reimmerse in an industry environment, because I know how those partnerships helped to sharpen our focus on key challenges.”
Partnerships are a critical part of strategic plans, she said. Her college of engineering is small, so she has faced the problem of leveraging with industry and with a nearby medical campus. She and her colleagues have been intentional around helping engineers think about pursuing medical degrees, and they have sent students to medical schools around the country. When students graduate from these schools, they provide unique opportunities for partnerships with the healthcare and other companies in which they work.
Nembhard concluded her presentation by discussing next steps. A prime opportunity, she said, is to build more robust reappointment, promotion, and tenure systems that recognize and reward industry partnerships. “Just imagine if one-third of our faculty say that they are deeply engaged with industry in some of these next-level mechanisms and capabilities. NSF has been setting this visionary agenda, particularly in the engineering directorate, around these type of mechanisms.”
ANALYZING ENGINEERING DESIGN
Engineers have many goals and things that they may need to learn to achieve those goals. Cindy Atman, professor of human-centered design and engineering at the University of Washington, focused on a particular pathway to achievement: engineers who want to change the world in a
positive way need to know about design thinking, and one way they can learn about design thinking is through reflection.
Atman said that her own goal was to change the world, “but a little twist got thrown in on graduation day.” A mentor told her that she should think about following up her bachelor’s degree in industrial engineering with a PhD, “because we need people like you teaching at the university level.” The thought had never occurred to Atman, and she ended up working in industry, getting a master’s degree, working on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, and then getting a PhD. “I realized at that point that not only could I change the world being an engineer myself but I could also help teach engineering students how to change the world themselves by helping them learn how to think about the impact of engineering on society and the globe.”
To teach a subject, you need to define it, Atman said. She has always been drawn to a definition offered by William Wulf, a previous NAE president: engineering is design under constraint. It is constrained by nature, safety, environmental concerns, cost, reliability, constructability, maintainability, and many other such “-abilities.” But engineering is also creative and directed toward what can be. With this definition in mind, Atman, with several different forms of NSF support, has studied how engineers design in order to inform the teaching of design.
Using research methods from cognitive science, Atman and her colleagues gathered data from 177 engineers with various levels of expertise who solved particular design problems while talking out loud. For a particular study involving a subset of 50 senior and first-year engineering students, the researchers transcribed the audio files and assigned individual phrases to categories: problem definition, information gathering, generation of ideas, modeling (prototyping), feasibility analysis, evaluation, decision, and communication. The resulting data showed that graduating seniors were significantly more likely than first-year students to have higher-quality designs (Atman, 2019). In addition, the graduating seniors made more transitions among design activities, scoped the problem more effectively by considering more categories of information, and progressed further in the design process.
The researchers next represented each individual’s design process in a timeline, enabling them to examine how people allocated their time across categories. More experienced designers who developed better designs did more thorough problem scoping at the start of the process before turning to modeling, continued to gather information throughout the process, transitioned and iterated throughout the process, and
stuck with a particular activity when needed. The better designers had “a lot more fluidity, a lot more complexity and agile movement from one activity to the next.” Using this approach, the researchers were able to identify an optimal project envelope, called an “iterative cascade,” of activities, which provided a way to teach students about the best way to design. “Students really resonate with this,” she said. As a former student recently told her, “If I ever find myself getting stuck in one mode or stage, I remind myself that the iterative cascade is where the magic happens.”
Atman’s current work is trying to make this approach accessible to a larger audience. This includes an app (Design Signatures) that allows engineers to code their own design processes, create their own time-lines, and reflect on their design processes and what they might want to change. A seminar enables engineering students to represent their design processes and interpret them through multiple lenses. Both the app and seminar materials are available on the Design Signatures1 website. As one student said of the experience, “I was struck by the fact that there are multiple ways to ‘get to’ design…. This realization powerfully shapes how I collaborate with people.”
INCREASING INDIGENOUS REPRESENTATION IN ENGINEERING
The American Indian Science and Engineering Society (AISES) is an Indigenous-led nonprofit organization that was founded in 1977 and seeks to increase substantially the representation of Indigenous peoples of North America and the Pacific Islands in STEM studies and careers, explained Sarah EchoHawk, the organization’s chief executive officer. It has three focus areas. First, it works to ensure that students have access to Indigenous-designed STEM programming and vital services, including scholarship and academic support as well as mentorship and guidance throughout their educational journey from preK–12 to undergraduate to graduate studies. Second, in the area of career support and development, the organization works to ensure that professionals are supported as they enter and progress in STEM careers by providing internships, fellowships, training, networking, and direct connection to the vast network of employers who partner closely with AISES to hire talent in the corporate, government, and public sectors. And third, in
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the area of equitable and inclusive educational institutions and work-spaces, it works closely with its network of preK–12 schools, colleges and universities, and workplaces representing all sectors to ensure that students and professionals have access to equitable and inclusive educational institutions and workplaces where they can prosper throughout their educational and career journeys.
AISES has more than 6,000 members, about 200 college and university chapters, and more than 200 affiliated preK–12 schools. It provides more than $13 million in scholarships and has an annual operating budget of more than $10 million. The organization publishes Winds of Change magazine, which each year features the top 50 workplaces for Indigenous STEM professionals and the top 200 colleges and universities for Indigenous peoples, and it holds a national conference that includes the largest college and career fair in the United States for Indigenous students and professionals.
NSF has provided funding to AISES to conduct primary and secondary research on the factors that contribute to persistence and success among Indigenous scholars and professionals in STEM. This includes the 50K Coalition and Engineering Plus awards, which are both aimed at increasing the representation in STEM of groups that have been underrepresented. For example, the 50K Coalition is seeking to increase the number of engineering bachelor’s degrees awarded to women and underrepresented minorities in the United States from 30,000 to 50,000 annually by 2025—a 66 percent increase.
AISES has also used NSF awards to support several programs that advance Indigenous educational initiatives. The agency’s Innovation Technology Experiences for Students and Teacher (ITEST) program is exploring the impact of culturally informed, girl-focused curricula on engaging Indigenous girls in computer science. A literature review of STEM education for Indigenous learners produced under a core research grant has improved understanding of the strategies known to improve the educational outcomes for Native students. Lighting the Pathway to Faculty Careers for Natives in STEM has sought to increase the number of American Indian and Alaska Native students who persist in STEM and pursue faculty positions. Native STEM Portraits is a longitudinal, mixed-methods study of the intersectional experiences of Native learners and professionals in STEM, with the goal of understanding and making visible how Native STEM students, faculty, and professionals encounter, navigate, respond to, change, and are changed by the culture, systems, and processes that either sup-
port or hinder the persistence of Native individuals in STEM higher education.
“We have access to the communities where this research is being conducted, or should be conducted,” said EchoHawk. “One of our biggest challenges is invisibility. We generally aren’t in the conversation. So I appreciate being invited to this symposium, and I appreciate people thinking about including Indigenous peoples. We are here, and we are trying to do the same kind of work that you are trying to do…. Research needs to be done in conjunction with our people, not for our people.”
FROM PRACTICE TO EDUCATION
Alice Agogino, Roscoe and Elizabeth Hughes Professor Emeritus of Mechanical Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, was the fourth woman hired in her department, and none of the previous three had received tenure. “I got the impression that I would never get tenured either, but I was going to make the most of it!” Receiving an NSF Presidential Investigator Award “laid the foundation for other things” she would do at Berkeley, including the creation of the first integrated artificial intelligence hardware lab on campus, developing open source software that became the basis for database-driven internet commerce (“we should all thank NSF for funding me and my students so you don’t have to pay a license for selling something or buying something on the web that is configured through a database, which is just about everything in the world these days”), work on database-driven multimedia design and research, and translation to education and practice.
Agogino’s educational work led Berkeley to be included in 1996 in the Synthesis Engineering Education Coalition, an NSF-funded union of eight diverse institutions aimed at designing, implementing, and assessing new approaches to engineering education. These new approaches emphasized multidisciplinary synthesis, teamwork, and communication; hands-on design, prototyping, and laboratory experiences; open-ended problem formulation and solving; examples of best practices from industry through multimedia case studies; and inclusive and diversifying practices. The multimedia case studies of engineering design—which were used at all levels of engineering education—considered many perspectives including industrial design, design for assembly, design for manufacture, custom-driven design, design trade-offs, design for the environment, design for ergonomics, and the social implications of design. The coalition and the follow-ups it inspired “were trans-
formational in revitalizing engineering education for the future,” said Agogino, influencing such work as the NAE volumes The Engineer of 2020 (NAE, 2004) and Educating the Engineer of 2020 (NAE, 2005).
Agogino has been very interested in increasing the diversity of the people involved in design, which led her to be involved in such projects as developing spatial reasoning software and 3D visualization to help women improve their spatial reasoning. “After our interventions, there were absolutely no statistical differences by gender in spatial reasoning skills, and everybody’s skills increased greatly.” Grants in this area led to the development of digital libraries to provide location-sensitive learning resources, educational games using interactive multimedia to introduce students to mechatronics design, and community-based design programs. She worked with girls in low-income migrant worker communities and in Native American tribes, and she and other faculty members at Berkeley also engaged in various forms of nontraditional engineering. For example, she was part of a group that won an NSF Research Traineeship award aimed at actionable research and global impact, which includes a focus on food, energy, and water systems in Native communities. “We want to empower students with the ability to develop scalable and sustainable approaches to complex societal changes, both globally and locally,” she said.
Agogino is also the chief executive officer of a company called Squishy Robotics, which is a spinoff of her work with NASA on planetary probes. Built to work in space, the probes also can serve as rapidly deployable mobile sensors for disaster response and monitoring on Earth. Dropped from up to a thousand feet in the air, they can provide life-saving and cost-saving information in real time to first responders, such as in the early detection and prevention of wildfires or methane leaks. “We’ve been quite successful in the media, which has greatly helped us in our customer development. But we also had to think about different forms of communication, such as trade journals, popular journals, and some of the professional journals that we participate with.”
GROWING THE INSPIRATION TO BECOME AN INVENTOR
Based strictly on statistics, the likelihood that Arlyne Simon—biomedical engineer and solutions architect at Intel Corporation, and author and founder of the Abby Invents picture-book series—would have grown up to become an inventor was very small. Statistics indicate that 82 percent of 40-year-old inventors are men, Caucasians are three times as likely to
become inventors as Blacks, and children in the top 1 percent income households are 10 times as likely to become inventors as those born to families with below-median income. “Typically, three strikes and you’re out. That would be me.”
After growing up on the Caribbean island of Dominica, she moved to the United States for college and earned an undergraduate chemical engineering degree at Georgia Tech. She then went to the University of Michigan to pursue a PhD in macromolecular science and engineering. In a photo taken the day after she defended her dissertation, she is the only woman and the only Black person in a group of 14—“and there are still three guys who are missing.” But the team was tremendously collaborative, and her PhD advisor, Shu Takayama, “remains one of the best mentors I could have ever had.” One day he called her into his office and told her that she should file a patent on the work she was doing. “I remember sitting in the chair in his office in utter disbelief, asking, ‘Are you sure?’ At this point in my life I still thought of an inventor as someone who looks like Albert Einstein, certainly not somebody who looked like me.” But Simon did file a patent.2 In 2021 she was one of 120 women in STEM honored with life-size statues at the #IfThenSheCan exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC.
At Intel, Simon has worked on computing solutions embedded in medical imaging equipment like ultrasound machines. She is also author and founder of Abby Invents, a K–5 invention and education company. “My personal mission is to inspire kid inventors everywhere.” Her method is threefold. She makes inventing fun by telling stories of how she fell in love with science and by hosting innovation workshops in which she challenges kids to find problems to solve at home, in schools, and in their communities. She tries to make inventing relevant by talking about how inventions can help people. “I talk about blood tests that I invented, how we’re able to diagnose patients faster. I talk about designing syringes and how we’re able to deliver drugs to patients more accurately. Or [I talk about] what I do today—designing ultrasound machines and allowing moms and dads to be able to see the first image of their unborn baby.” And she has sought to make inventing magical by writing a series of children’s books featuring a girl inventor named Abby who, in every book, invents something and gets a patent for it. She has also created trading cards featuring women in STEM roles and
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2 Simon, A., Frampton, J., White, J. and Takayama, S., University of Michigan, 2014. Systems and Methods for Multiplex Solution Assays. U.S. Patent Application 13/918,494.
has collaborated with teachers to start a free professional development workshop series, InventionLIT,3 for K–5 educators, that uses children’s literature as a launch point for invention education. Over 100 free lesson plans are available. “We show educators how they can be comfortable with bringing inventing to the classroom.”
Simon suggested that NSF devote more attention to invention education, which is more open-ended than other forms of STEM education. “If we take more of an open-ended approach with invention education, you may say, ‘How can we go from point A to point B?’ and the students may build a bridge or may build a car or may build an airplane. That way, you’re encouraging kids to think out of the box and be innovative and creative.”
Students do not have to wait until their 20s or 30s to learn that they can be inventors, she said. The Abby Invents picture book series is meant to show the joy in discovery. Children learn that they can be problem solvers and that learning can be fun. They also learn the three criteria for a patent: Is it something novel? Is it useful? And is it not easy to guess how it was made? “Now what can you do? You can patent it!”
Simon described in more detail an invention she developed in graduate school involving the detection of graft-versus-host disease after bone marrow transplants. Instead of an invasive biopsy, the diagnostic involved a blood test that can accurately detect and quantify elevated levels of protein biomarkers in the bloodstream of patients experiencing a reaction.
She was among the initial cohorts of participants in the NSF’s I-Corps program, which encouraged participants to “get out of the building and talk to at least 100 people in your ecosystem, which we did.” Communities generally know much more about the problems they face than do people outside those communities, she said. “The lessons I learned from this experience were invaluable.” For example, when designing syringes to make them compatible with syringe pumps, she and her colleagues, by talking to clinicians, were able to write guidelines through international standards organizations specifying minimum allowable flow rates for different-sized syringes.
Simon concluded by saying that she uses the lessons she learned from the I-Corps program every day. “It’s all about ‘how do you understand end users’ pain points to create solutions that the market needs?”
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SUMMING UP THE SESSION
During the session’s discussion period—led by moderator Louis Martin-Vega—several of the presenters were joined by Mona Minkara, assistant professor in the Department of Bioengineering at the Northeastern University College of Engineering, who does computational modeling of pulmonary surfactants. Blind since childhood, she had research experiences each summer at Wellesley College and was supported by NSF while in graduate school. “NSF has been part of my journey since the beginning, and I’m very grateful for that.”
Minkara pointed out that not long ago, people with disabilities were not necessarily mentioned in discussions of diversity. Now it has become accepted that people with disabilities can do research that is not related to disabilities, and NSF supports their progress in STEM.
The presenters also were joined by Sheri Sheppard, Richard W. Weiland Professor Emeritus in the School of Engineering, Stanford University. “Real-world engineering is about partnerships,” she said. “It’s about relationships, it’s multigenerational, it’s multidisciplinary, and it’s interconnected.” NSF’s perspectives have matured as the agency has come to understand the importance of these characteristics of engineering research and practice.
Sheppard also pointed to NSF’s maturing views around diversity. The Foundation has sought to understand the structural components of who is attracted to engineering and how that may make engineering inaccessible to some.
TRANSITIONING TO OTHER SOURCES OF FUNDING
The members of the panel also discussed the issue of transitioning from NSF funding to other funding models since, as Sheppard observed, “we can’t be and shouldn’t be dependent on NSF for a long time.”
Agogino pointed out that many projects NSF funds are not going to be commercially viable. As a result, partnerships with other institutions are necessary. She in particular mentioned the need to work with local and state agencies in transitioning successful NSF-supported programs to other sources of funding.
Marshall broadened the discussion to state innovation systems in general. For example, state and local governments could get involved not only to benefit education but to further economic development.
PROMOTING DIVERSITY, EQUITY, AND INCLUSION
In a discussion of the role of NSF initiatives centered on diversity, equity, and inclusion, Nembhard observed that “inclusive excellence is not a compromise but rather an approach.” Achieving excellence requires inclusion and diversity, which entails providing opportunities for people to become engaged. NSF has become invested in this approach. “It’s been in the DNA of NSF, and it’s important to build on that.” She made the observation that attitudes toward diversity, equity, and inclusion are perhaps at about the same place now that attitudes toward industry involvement were 20 years ago, and added that “it’s interesting to think about the opportunities to keep building on that.”
Martin-Vega expanded on this point by recalling that when he was a young faculty member at the University of Florida, he was involved in the creation of an industry-university center on manufacturing systems supported by a small Florida high-technology grant. At the time, the state had a fair amount of electronics manufacturing, but academics rarely worked in industry. Yet he knew another faculty member whose specialty was snakes, and every summer he spent three months in the Philippines studying snakes. “What’s wrong with this picture? Somebody’s not going to be a faculty member at a medical school teaching appendectomies who has never taken out an appendix.”
Partnering with industry may seem obvious today, said Martin-Vega, but it took years to change the culture. “This is the evolution of what’s happening with the issues related to diversity, something going from peripheral to central.”
Nembhard remarked that academia is now competing with industry for good people, which means that academia is going to need to provide young faculty members with flexibility even before they get tenure. “We have to get beyond this mindset of faculty do X until tenure and then can start a company or do Y.”
ADVICE TO YOUNG ENGINEERS
Martin-Vega asked what advice panelists would give to students who are considering engineering as a profession.
Atman suggested that engineers need to learn to “dance with ambiguity.” They need to lean into the unknown and ask questions, “because those are the frontiers that we need to be progressing into.”
Minkara said that even when engineering does not seem like a viable path forward, “there are so many opportunities to still go for it. Even if you don’t know how you’re going to do it, take one step at a time.” She continued: “I can speak for myself as someone who was told that it was not possible to pursue the path that I wanted…but there are so many opportunities and programs to apply for, to be able to pursue that path.”
Sheppard recommended that students get out and talk with engineers. “Sometimes we’re hard to find. We’re less than 1 percent of the adult population. That’s why all of us have a role in being accessible.”
Simon suggested supplementing engineering classes with classes in the arts, business, public policy, music, or literature. “Don’t be afraid to venture out of engineering and try a class in a different discipline.”
Marshall recommended getting work experiences, even in high school, “any opportunities that you have to connect with industry.” Those experiences will inform future pathways, he said. “I still put my summer internships on my CV because they were so impactful in setting the trajectory for my career.”
Finally, Nembhard urged students to strive to connect to the moral authority of engineering. “Humanity needs what we are doing, and it expects that you can be very well trained as an ethical thinker, as a global citizen.”
