Interaction

Spring 2008

Solutions for the good of all

By James Plummer

Engineers take basic scientific discoveries and turn them into things that are useful to people. In that role, engineers are the agents of progress for human society in a natural world. For most of

James Plummer

history, people did not consider environmental sustainability in deciding whether something was"useful." Now we must, and the urgency and complexity of this challenge vividly illustrates why we emphasize collaboration in our work. Technology cannot succeed unless its development is informed by the context and needs of the society it serves. To meet the goal of sustainability, engineering is necessary, but not sufficient.

Sustainably achieving continued improvements in the living standards of a growing global population certainly will require engineers to create new technologies and to derive accurate models of complex systems. We will provide society with choices by determining what is possible. But none of the choices we provide will produce real benefits if they don't incorporate the insights of the humanities and social sciences. This is exactly why Stanford is so well positioned to take on as ambitious a goal as the Initiative on the Environment and Sustainability. We have an excellent engineering school that is literally surrounded by excellent programs in the liberal arts, social sciences, natural sciences and medicine. At Stanford we have not only what is necessary, but also what is sufficient.

The level of activity within the School of Engineering dedicated to the mission of providing technical choices is simply astounding. More than 30 tenure-line faculty members have active research projects devoted to sustainable energy, with heavy concentrations on three themes: solar power, fuel cells and energy efficiency. Characteristic of Stanford, each is strongly supported by inherently multidisciplinary means. The first two are supported by the Global Climate and Energy Project (GCEP) and the last by the Precourt Institute for Energy Efficiency (PIEE).

The Energy and Environment building is the newest and most visible manifestation of Stanford's commitment to sustainable architecture.
Photo: L.A. Cicero

Each one of the school's nine departments has at least one faculty member whose research directly contributes to improving the sustainability of our energy future. The Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) recently adopted sustainability as its core theme.

Energy is a big issue within the broader sustainability challenge, but it is not the whole problem. Dozens of Stanford engineering professors and students, particularly within CEE and Mechanical Engineering, have been working for decades—with some great successes—to understand and combat pollution in our water, air and soil. More recently, CEE has begun refocusing its considerable expertise in building design and construction to ensure that our built environment has maximum environmental performance and minimal environmental impact.

Collaboration across the university

Including both energy and environmental projects, a total of 50 members of our current faculty—and hundreds of their students and research staff—are working on research directly related to environmental sustainability. They all publish original work within the subdisciplines of their traditionally defined fields. In this regard they are performing in line with traditional academic expectations.

But that's not the only culture within the school or the university.

As part of a Stanford community that seeks to meet the challenge of sustainability, we are engaged in building collaborations with colleagues in law, business, Earth sciences, medicine, biology, economics, sociology and numerous other fields to see our technological and mathematical innovations through to practicality in society. To be an engineer is to create useful solutions, after all, and to make solutions useful is to work with peers who can expand the understanding of the nature of the problem.

Perhaps the newest and most visible manifestation of this collaborative culture is the Jerry Yang and Akiko Yamazaki Environment and Energy Building (Y2E2), which brings together students, faculty and staff from many engineering and policy-focused departments and programs. Within Y2E2 are the offices of GCEP and PIEE and the Woods Institute for the Environment. All three of these organizations bring diverse minds together to focus on sustainability challenges.

Woods, through its Environmental Venture Projects program, has brought together 21 groups of Stanford faculty members over the last four years, each explicitly selected because they feature collaboration across department and school lines. Engineers have been part of 11 of those projects, including efforts to improve water sanitation, model the economics of California's water and sequester toxic metals such as lead. These projects have coupled engineers with colleagues in medicine, law and Earth sciences.

Sustainable built environment

This spring, a new research and teaching program emerged within Woods and the university's environmental initiative that further illustrates this collaborative direction. CEE Professor Ray Levitt and sociology Professor Douglas McAdam have marshaled the university's diverse intellectual resources under the umbrella of the Sustainable Built Environment, which refers to the environmental, economic and social sustainability of our buildings and infrastructure. Woods will give interdisciplinary teams of faculty seed grants to develop research proposals along these lines. Fundraising for the best of these projects will be part of the environmental initiative. Anyone who has studied the history of solar power, for example, will understand why engineering alone is not enough to put panels on buildings; economic, policy and legal issues also hold sway. This new effort recognizes the multifaceted nature of the challenge.

It would be a convenient half-truth to declare all this to be completely new or completely unique to Stanford. We've recognized the importance of interdisciplinary research and teaching for some time now, as have other peer institutions. Before Y2E2, the Clark Center proved a successful experiment in bringing together similarly diverse groups of human health researchers.

But understood in the broadest sense, this interdisciplinary push is new. For hundreds of years, university structures have evolved around distinct disciplines. Tenure and other incentives have driven people to specialize to the point where their work can become insular and very narrowly focused.

Especially at a time of urgent environmental concern, collaboration across disciplines is imperative. And so as we pursue innovations for the good of sustainability, we are pursuing innovations in how we approach our broader research and educational missions.

James Plummer is the Frederick Emmons Terman Dean of the School of Engineering and the John M. Fluke Professor of Electrical Engineering.