Creatively Engineered
How Stephanie Amoaning-Yankson Finds Imaginative Solutions to Transit Challenges
Beginning a career in STEM was an easy choice for Stephanie Amoaning-Yankson. When contemplating career paths, Stephanie had three choices: she could either become a doctor, a lawyer, or an engineer. Inspired by her father, she followed in his footsteps and pursued studies in civil engineering, still unsure of where her career path would ultimately lead. She completed her undergraduate degree at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in Ghana and went on to complete her master’s degree at Georgia Tech. Upon graduating, Stephanie was left with the question that every student leaving school faces — what’s next?
“My career path hasn’t centered around one ‘big thing.’ It’s been a series of little things to challenge myself more. In school I wasn’t sure what the vision was, I just wanted to see how far I could go.”
Stephanie met an advisor at Georgia Tech who encouraged her to push herself further and earn a doctoral degree. Although earning her Ph.D. was not part of Stephanie’s original plan, she trusted this mentor and knew she could pursue another degree with her support and guidance.
“My advisor was an amazing woman. She cared about the success of our projects, but also cared about me. Really, she was just a relatable human being.”
This advice proved to be important for Stephanie’s journey, as it was during her doctorate program that she discovered her own personal brand of engineering. The civil engineering field can be perceived as a field with rigid systems — not necessarily a place for creative flexibility. While working on her dissertation, Stephanie was challenged to think creatively about how to increase the resiliency of transportation systems. Ironically, she was inspired by ecological systems, the opposite of man-made structures. Nature, as the most resilient system on the planet, is built to reorganize and return to homeostasis.
Stephanie ran with this idea and implemented her “out of the box” thinking into her dissertation, studying how transportation systems can fail gracefully while being redundant enough to withstand disasters. The largest challenge was finding the link between ecological systems and bricks, concrete, and steel. She soon realized that the link between nature and transportation has always been people. People, specifically management, is where Stephanie realized she could mimic the flexibility and resiliency of an ecological system. The human aspect, especially the planning aspect, is where Stephanie could apply design influences from nature.
“I think people tend to think that only ‘artsy’ people are able to be creative, but if there are people out there who are creative in any sense, they shouldn’t think that engineering has no room for their creativity.”
In Stephanie’s eyes, she isn’t a “woman in STEM” — she is pursuing her passion within a field that happens to fall within STEM. Her accomplishments exemplify how imagination and engineering can come together to solve our biggest challenges!
This story was written by Laurel Kremer, Wogrammer Journalism Fellow. Connect with her on LinkedIn.
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