For the inaugural installment of its Dean’s List interview series, engineering.com spoke with Ian Robertson, Grainger Dean of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s College of Engineering.
Robertson leads a school with nearly 5,000 undergraduates, 1,600 graduate students and an annual budget of more than $200 million. Robertson joined the College in March 2013 from the University of Illinois, where he’d been a faculty member since 1982. During his 31 years at Illinois, he headed its Department of Materials Science and Engineering from 2003 to 2009 and led the National Science Foundation Division of Materials Research from 2011 to 2013.
Robertson’s research into how microstructure evolves in materials exposed to extreme conditions has led to increased understanding of macro-scale property changes. He’s the author of more than 240 research publications on materials science and the winner of numerous teaching and research awards, including two from the U.S. Department of Energy.
The original transcript has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Engineering.com: As an expert in materials science, what excites you most about the field?
Robertson: One of the exciting things that I see coming along has to do with AI and deep learning. How do you use those tools to explore material space? Can you use them to find a new material, a new composition or a new structure that we can make? I think the role that data mining will play is going to be huge.
But that’s not just in materials science. We generate vast amounts of data from almost any experiment we do, but we don't interrogate all of it. Some experiments will generate terabytes of data, but how do you process that much data? You don’t. But if you can use AI to probe the data sets that we have, we can find things we would normally miss.
So, employing data and data-driven techniques to help us get more information from experiments is another area I believe is going to be big in the future. Our undergraduates are going to have to learn these tools to be successful. We need to be teaching our students how to use computational and data methods to solve problems.
Over the past two or three decades, engineering schools have made a focused effort to build more links to the business community. What’s the role of business and entrepreneurship in engineering schools?
Having companies engage with students is incredibly important for the simple reason that you need to practice engineering, and these companies are practicing engineering. And so, having employees of certain companies come in and even teach parts of classes is immensely important. They bring in a different perspective, the “here is how you're going to apply this knowledge when you come out and work for us.”
We get companies to sponsor our design projects, not just with financial sponsorship, but also with a commitment to provide their engineers to be part of the student teams. So, when the students have a question, they don't just come and ask the professor – they go and ask a working engineer. The true value is the engagement with the engineering community and learning how it works in an actual engineering environment. This is also good for the companies, because they get to see our students and identify the ones they’d like to try to recruit. This is different from them being engaged with the internships or the co-op program.
From the research point of view, I think the university’s joint partnerships with industries are also important. If we look at where the new funding in the federal government is coming from, it's going be to try and improve or restore the U.S.’s technological advantage in key industries. We certainly lost the advantage that we used to have. We need to reestablish that. That's going to mean that industry needs to work with us so that we're working on technologies that are relevant to industry and can have an impact on their business.
Before committing themselves to an engineering education, what do young people need to know about the profession and the educational experience?
If I think of where we have challenges, not just in the U.S. but around the world, engineers are going play a huge role in solving them. They won’t provide the full solution, because some of the solution is going to be how we adjust socially to new practices and technologies. Something we're talking about a lot today is how we’re going to power our future world. We're going to move away from fossil fuels, and we're going to find new ways to work with renewable energy. But that requires a different mindset.
We’ve also got to think about how we use and design products. How many computers have we thrown into landfills? Where will all the elements come from that go into a semiconductor or a lithium battery, or that go into your Prius or Tesla, if there is a finite natural supply? We’re going to have to rethink products, not from the cradle to the grave but from cradle to cradle, and design them thinking about which elements we’ll recover at the end of a product’s life and how to use them in a different product. But you're going to have to recover them first. So, if I think of where the future of engineering is, and the impact of future engineers, it’s in making the world livable.
We can tell people who are thinking about engineering, “You're going to change the world.” And I think that's an important message for us to deliver to them.
What’s your advice on getting the most out of an engineering education?
Don’t just stay in the classroom. You have to go out and practice engineering. University of Wisconsin is a Tier One research university, so we encourage our students to get into the labs of our faculty and learn what the technology might be 10 or 15 years from now. Students should also go out and get experience in industry and learn how they can put what we teach them in the classroom into practice – that should be part of their educational experience. They can also get beyond-the-classroom experience as members of engineering-student organizations or as participants in innovation and design competitions.
What’s an essential quality of someone who wants to pursue an engineering education and career?
They need to always be curious and willing to learn, because in engineering you have to keep thinking of what's possible and how you can solve the problem. Also, engineering is changing so quickly at the moment that if you stop learning, you're going to be left behind. You’ll need to do lifelong learning and you're probably going to change jobs five or six times.
According to some academic research, engineering programs are much better at attracting a diverse student body than they are at maintaining that diversity through the four years of engineering school. Why do students from underrepresented communities drop out of engineering at higher rate than average?
I think all of us would recognize that there has to be a change in the culture within our schools, not just in engineering, but in many other schools and colleges. We have to make it so that the learning environment, whether it's in the classroom, research lab or cocurricular activity, is inclusive. If we create that right environment, everyone will achieve their full potential.
In which ways has engineering been exclusive?
Part of the problem is that the profession has been typically dominated by white males. So, how do you change that thinking? I'd say the first step is to accept that we have a problem. A lot of the efforts we've been making over the last five or six years have been to get people to accept that we have a problem and that we need to deal with it. Now let's start working on the initiatives that will make the change.
What are some of the initiatives you’ve established to address this diversity gap?
We're focusing on creating a culture of belonging, starting with belonging in the classroom, which is where our students spend the majority of their time. One way we're beginning to do this is that we're training faculty, instructors and teaching assistants about inclusive teaching practices. For instance, how do you build a diverse and fully functional team, one that’s not dominated by one or two voices, but where everyone has an equal voice on the team?
There are also safe spaces where students can be with people like them, who understand their experiences and have the same challenges they do, and where they can work together. It's something the students wanted, and it is impactful.
We're also looking at opportunities to integrate DEI into our curriculum to highlight the importance of these aspects in the practice of engineering, which will also unite the future generation of engineers in helping to advance a culture of belonging in their fields.
There’s been a movement in recent years to augment STEM education with arts, making it STEAM. Is it a worthwhile notion, and have you seen any benefits from that in your classrooms?
STEM students need more understanding of the arts, the social sciences and the humanities, but it should go both ways. If we can find ways to get people in the social sciences and the humanities to understand more about technology and how it impacts them, I think that would be a tremendous step forward. I say that because when we look at the number of people in decision-making roles, their usual experience with science or technology education is that they hated those courses and wanted out of them. So how do you get those people to understand and appreciate the value that technology, engineering and science bring to society?
Have you seen an improvement in the quality of first-year students because of increased emphasis on STEM education at the high-school level in recent years?
No, not enough. If you look at the push for more computer science and programming at the high-school level, it has had a big impact on students who want to pursue computer science or computer engineering. But if you look at mechanical or civil engineering, that’s still not really in the high-school curriculum. As more appears on TV and in newspapers about the challenges we face, whether it's in energy, water quality, air quality, transportation or quantum computing, that’s likely to generate more interest in engineering. But can we get more high-school teachers to understand more about engineering and how they could bring it into their curriculum? I think that's the thing we still need to do more of.
What message did you give your last group of graduating students?
It was quite simple: never stop learning. Continue to be curious. I think that's what makes a really good engineer. You need to be a good problem solver, but you also need to keep learning.