Mobilizing engineering and creating opportunity from crisis
Finalist Essay for 2021 EngineeringGirl Essay Competition
COVID-19 is an unprecedented challenge facing the global community. Though the global spotlight is often on medical practitioners and politicians, it is engineers who have stepped up as the “first responders” and designed solutions, created products, and identified processes that have helped humanity cope with this pandemic.
The initial challenge was to track the spread of the virus, identify effective steps to prevent infection among the population, and maintain supply chains. The COVID-19 pandemic is so unique in its manifestation that the resulting economic and social fallout has been compared to “freak events (like)… the Great Depression of the 1930s, the Black Monday stock market crash in 1987, and the 2007–2008 financial crisis” which overturned all data trends. Traditional simulations of normal human behavior are broken because they rely on historical data to identify trends and make predictions but the medical symptoms of this virus were inconsistent. Models based on machine learning to maintain secure supply chains are rendered ineffective due to the extreme fluctuations in the demand for necessities, such as toilet paper, masks, and hygiene products during the early phase of the crisis.
Despite this, ironically COVID-19 served as the “perfect trigger” for the engineering world to build better machine-learning solutions that can be trained on risk modeling, using dynamic data to help predict socio-economic changes for future pandemics. As the National Medal of Science winner, Theodore von Kármán said, “Scientists discover the world that exists; engineers create the world that never was.” Engineers transformed alcohol distilleries to produce hand sanitizers, built protective equipment like 3D printed face shields, and repurposed automotive and aerospace factories to build ventilators and combat the supply shortage. Without getting much visibility, these “unsung heroes” continued on their mission to help prevent the spread of the virus, protect people most at risk, and make lives better in quarantine.
Additionally, engineers used their problem-solving skills to create solutions ranging from designing minor devices like contactless door openers to crafting more long-term, robust applications, like virtual teleconferencing to support employees working remotely for extended periods of time. In fact, the COVID-19 pandemic has fast-tracked innovation and engineering in many different fields including education, manufacturing, and supply-chain management.
The pandemic has created new paradigms for work, education, and social life. Many organizations have crowdsourced engineering ideas to design unique solutions that may help people lead normal lives despite the virus. Students at the University of Southern California created an innovative design to produce continuously self-disinfecting masks that reduce contamination by combining copper within N-95 filtration materials, creating reusable resources. Cybersecurity engineers created secure networks and high-speed wifi infrastructure allowing workers to work remotely. IT engineers collaborated with educators and medical professionals to deploy digital learning for students and provide remote health diagnosis respectively. Supply chain engineers tested global supply chains to ensure food security. Chemical and bioengineers scaled up antiviral drug production and precision vaccine administration. Environmental engineers played a pivotal role in developing safe drinking water through wastewater treatment technologies while monitoring the “presence, persistence, and transportation of viruses” in the environment. Industrial engineers were instrumental in ensuring safe elections by minimizing wait times, addressing staffing shortages, converting sports arenas to polling locations, and designing protective equipment for comfort and safety.
Engineers in developing countries have adapted their responses to the specific needs and regulations of their communities. For example, facial recognition technology has been widely used in countries like China for contact tracing, which otherwise would have been impossible given its population size. The realization that Black and LatinX communities have been most impacted in the US by the virus prompted engineers to design future pandemic preparedness solutions that are specifically targeted to these communities, by providing low-cost testing and robust supply chains.. Engineers have come to realize the importance of ethical practices while designing solutions, ensuring it benefits larger populations and is more inclusive for the greater good of humankind. While COVID 19 is indeed a dreaded pandemic that has killed over a million people worldwide, it has also proved to be an opportunity that allowed engineers to engage across disciplines, stress test existing systems, and design innovative solutions to help humanity recover from this crisis.
Works Cited
1. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.nationalacademies.org/news/2020/07/troubleshooting-the-pandemic-engineers-pitch-innovative-solutions-to-help-address-covid-19
The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NAE) launched the COVID-19 Call for Engineering Action in April to incubate ideas for innovations that could help respond to the pandemic through crowdsourcing. Six hundred ideas were entered in the challenge. I found the first article informative because it helped me to understand how engineers helped to troubleshoot solutions to prevent the spread of the virus, help people most at risk, and make life easier under social distancing protocols. The second article provided the transcript for an interview with the NAE President that helped me to understand how the engineering process worked and how the solutions that were designed could help us to prepare for future pandemics.
2. Adam Cooper Lecturer in Policy Research and Practice. (2020, August 13). Coronavirus: Why we need to consult engineers as well as scientists for solutions. Retrieved from https://theconversation.com/coronavirus-why-we-need-to-consult-engineers-as-well-as-scientists-for-solutions-134460
This article helped me to understand how engineers approached the coronavirus problem (as opposed to the scientists) and the important role they played in designing solutions during the pandemic.
3. Cooley, L., & Linn, J. F. (2020, June 04). Developing countries can respond to COVID-19 in ways that are swift, at scale, and successful. Retrieved from https://www.brookings.edu/blog/future-development/2020/06/04/developing-countries-can-respond-to-covid-19-in-ways-that-are-swift-at-scale-and-successful/
I was curious to learn about how engineers in developing countries responded to the pandemic, especially since they had to operate within very different sets of parameters and design solutions that could be quickly implemented, scalable, and have a high success rate.
4. Engineers step up to fight coronavirus. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.asme.org/topics-resources/content/coronavirus-update-engineers-to-the-rescue
The article from The American Society of Mechanical Engineers provided information on how engineers helped to provide medical and protective equipment during the initial phase of the pandemic.
5. Heaven, W. D. (2020, May 12). Our weird behavior during the pandemic is messing with AI models. Retrieved from https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/05/11/1001563/covid-pandemic-broken-ai-machine-learning-amazon-retail-fraud-humans-in-the-loop/
This article demonstrates how Artificial Intelligence models are not able to provide accurate predictive models and highlights the unique nature of the pandemic. This was an interesting read because it focused on the difficulty of the challenge because previous solutions had been rendered useless.
6. How Engineers are Working Through the Coronavirus Pandemic. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.asme.org/topics-resources/content/how-engineers-are-working-through-the-coronavirus-pandemic
This article includes the results of a survey that focuses on engineers and how they have struggled to cope with new working environments as a result of the pandemic while remaining productive. I found the article interesting because it shifted the perspective to the conditions of engineering work and their adaptability.
7. Team, T. (2020, May 28). How The Current Coronavirus Stock Market Compares With Great Depression & Great Recession Markets. Retrieved from https://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2020/05/28/how-the-current-coronavirus-stock-market-compares-with-great-depression--great-recession-markets/?sh=68849683e1e9
This resource illustrates the unprecedented nature of the COVID-19 pandemic and compares it to other historical crises like the Great Depression of 1929, Black Monday of 1987, the 2000s Recession, and the Great Recession of 2007–08. The article was useful because it helped me to highlight the scale of the crisis.
