Congress Keynoter Amadei Headlines Successful Congress

Benedict Bahner
ASME News Online

Sustainable engineering played a major role at the 2007 ASME International Mechanical Engineering Congress and Exposition in Seattle last month, where the topic was examined in countless technical sessions. It was the foundation for the products being introduced by start-up companies at the Innovation Showcase. It was also at the heart of the human-powered water still design challenge that students tackled at the Student Design Competition finals.

The humanitarian efforts of Engineers Without Borders are "not charity," Bernard Amadei said during his keynote speech at the Congress last month. "We are teaching communities how to be sustainable — how to take care of themselves," he said.

But nowhere was the subject of sustainable engineering more profoundly highlighted than in the Congress keynote address Sunday night given by Bernard Amadei, the founding president of Engineers Without Borders-USA. During his impassioned comments, Amadei urged engineers in the audience to use the wealth of skills and resources at their disposal to provide relief for the world's poorest populations.

During his presentation, "Engineering With a Human Face," which he dubbed "Engineering to Eliminate Poverty," Amadei said, "We need a mindset change. We need to reinvent engineering. We need to develop a new generation of engineers for the 21st century. The new generation must be facilitators of sustainable development, promoting social change and economic change — not just the developers of technology that they are now. Engineers [must be viewed] as peacemakers, community builders, and social entrepreneurs."

"We need to be the change that we want to see in the world," Amadei said during the conclusion of his address.

Amadei cited a number of statistics during his "wakeup call" to engineers, noting that 20 percent of the world's population lacks clean water, 40 percent is without adequate sanitation, and 29,000 children die from hunger every day. "It would only cost $40 billion to address the needs of the poor," he said. Yet "we spend $1 trillion on weapons every year. That is $31,000 a second on protecting ourselves. Those statistics are unacceptable."

Amadei noted that many young engineers are answering the call for change. Engineers Without Borders, which implements sustainable engineering projects to improve the quality of life in the world's poorest countries, has grown from 10 project team members in 2000 to nearly 10,000 in 2007. It now has some 250 professional and student chapters in the United States.

After his keynote presentation, Amadei met with a number of students and engineers who had questions about participating in Engineers Without Borders.

During the past seven years, humanitarian efforts by Engineers Without Borders have included the installation of solar-powered lighting at a community school and a water purification system in Brazil; the construction of a water supply and purification system in Rwanda; the creation of a dam and irrigation system on the Kumudo River in Ethiopia; the creation of a natural water filtration and storage system in Honduras; the installation of solar panels and electrical wiring in buildings in Belize; the construction of a children's dormitory in Thailand; and a health clinic in Peru.

ASME President Sam Zamrik welcomed audience members to the keynote presentation and introduced Amadei.

However, the young engineers participating in these endeavors need mentors, Amadei pointed out, and he appealed to ASME members in the audience to consider the mentoring challenge. "It only takes an hour or two hours a month. If you mentor young engineers, they will become great colleagues," Amadei said.

The keynote, which was met with a standing ovation, was one of the major events at the 2007 Congress in Seattle, which drew nearly 3,000 attendees. More than 2,000 presentations made up the event's 460 technical sessions. This year, the sessions were grouped into a new multidisciplinary track structure in which each track consisted of technical symposia and topical sessions.

ASME President-Elect Thomas Barlow addressed the audience after Amadei's speech.

At the Early-Career Forum on Sunday, early-career engineers and students networked with industry professionals to gain firsthand knowledge of key trends and opportunities in the always-changing employment marketplace. Topics in the forum covered effective communication in the workplace, factors involved in pursuing opportunities in engineering management, and tips and strategies for building a strong relationship with supervisors.

The Career Fair on Sunday, Nov. 11, was one of several programs targeting students and early career engineers at the Congress. Others included the Early Career Forum, which preceded it, and the Early Career Development Series sessions that were held the following day.

The forum was followed by the Career Fair, featuring on-site recruiters who responded to questions from attendees and shared information and resources. Exhibitors at the Career Fair included Boeing, FM Global, Microsoft, Toyota Motor Engineering and Manufacturing, Haskell Corp., Schlumberger, Bechtel National, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, and Soloy Aviation Solutions.

The Inspire Innovation Workshop on Saturday, Nov. 10, showed participants effective strategies for building working relationships with schools and school systems, and provided lesson plans and materials for use in the classroom.

The Exposition, which ran from Monday through Wednesday at the Congress, was composed of nearly 40 exhibitors, among them Altair Engineering, Autodesk, CD-adapco, Comsol, Design Simulation Technologies, FMC Technologies, IOTech, Knovel Corp., Maplesoft, Microchip Technology Inc., National Instruments, North Carolina State University, Polytec, Proto Manufacturing, Software Cradle Co., Tekscan Inc., ThomasNet, and Veeco Instruments.

ASME Programs, Engineers Without Borders, the Georgia Institute of Technology, and the University of Maryland also had booths on the show floor, as did a number of prominent technical publishers, including Begell House, Cambridge University Press, CRC Press-Taylor & Francis Group, Elsevier, McGraw-Hill Higher Education, Oxford University Press, Prentice Hall, and John Wiley & Sons.

The Congress also featured several tours in the Seattle area, including tours of the Applied Physics Laboratory at the University of Washington and the Hiram M. Chittenden Locks. The two tours of Boeing's Seattle airplane facility proved so popular that tickets for both tours were sold out within a week of going on sale.

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