The Ongoing Transformation

New York City is the perfect place to understand the importance of modern engineering, but the most valuable lessons won’t be found at the Empire State Building or in Central Park. To truly discover what makes modern life tick, you have to look at the unloved, uncelebrated elements of New York: its sewers, bridges, and elevators. 

On this episode, host Lisa Margonelli talks to Guru Madhavan, the Norman R. Augustine Senior Scholar and senior director of programs at the National Academy of Engineering. Madhavan wrote about the history of this often-overlooked infrastructure in a trilogy of Issues essays about New York City’s history. He talks about how the invention of the elevator brake enabled the construction of skyscrapers and how the detailed “grind work” of maintenance keeps grand projects like the Bayonne Bridge functioning. He also highlights the public health and sanitation-centered vision of Egbert Viele—the nearly forgotten engineer who made New York City livable. 

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Read Guru Madhavan’s New York Trilogy:

Learn more about the invisible work that undergirds modern life by checking out Madhavan’s latest book, Wicked Problems: How to Engineer a Better World. 

Read the 2019 article Madhavan cites about how engineering benefits society. 

Lisa mentioned riding on a tugboat pushing a barge full of petroleum, but she misremembered!  The repairs were then occurring on the Goethals Bridge, not the Bayonne. Here’s the whole story of “A Dangerous Move” from the New York Times. 

The United States spends more on healthcare than any other high-income country, yet we have some of the worst population health outcomes. Our health care system is designed in such a way that racial and ethnic disparities are inevitable, and the differences are extreme: the life expectancy difference between white women and black men is over a decade. How can we fix the system to ensure health care equity for all? 

A new National Academies report called Ending Unequal Treatment: Strategies to Achieve Equitable Health Care and Optimal Health for All tackles this question. Building on a 2003 report on racial and ethnic disparities in healthcare, the new report finds that little progress has been made in closing those equity gaps over the past two decades.

On this episode, host Sara Frueh talks to Georges Benjamin, cochair of the report committee and executive director of the American Public Health Association. They discuss how the health care system creates disparities and how we can fix them. 

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Check the end of any recent study, and there will be a list of study funders and disclosures about competing interests. It’s important to know about potential biases in research, but this kind of transparency was not always the norm. Understanding bias in research and helping policymakers use the most reliable evidence to guide their decisions is a science in itself.

Lisa Bero, a professor at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, has been at the forefront of understanding how corporate funding biases research and how to assess what scientific evidence is reliable. She talks to host Monya Baker about her investigations into the tobacco and pharmaceutical industries, techniques industries use to shape evidence to favor their products, and the importance of independent research to inform policy. 

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Octopuses are famously smart: they can recognize individual humans, solve problems, and even keep gardens. They are also a popular food for humans: around 350,000 tons of octopus are caught worldwide each year, and demand is only growing. Some governments and start-ups have invested significant resources into domesticating octopus, and the world’s first octopus farm may soon open in Spain’s Canary Islands. 

But should octopus be farmed at all? That question is being debated in several pieces of legislation right now, including a bipartisan US Senate bill. For Jennifer Jacquet, professor of environmental science and policy at the University of Miami, the answer is a resounding no. For the last decade, she has worked to end octopus farming before it begins, as she wrote in Issues in 2019. On this episode, Jacquet discusses why octopuses are poor candidates for farming, the growing social movements around octopus protection, and why we need public conversations about new technologies before investments begin. 

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In this installment of Science Policy IRL, host Jason Lloyd goes behind the scenes of the White House Fellowship program with Lav Varshney, associate professor of engineering, computer science, and neuroscience at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Varshney served as a White House Fellow from 2022 to 2023, where he worked at the National Security Council with Anne Neuberger, the deputy national security advisor for cyber and emerging technology.

In this episode, Varshney describes the day-to-day experience of working at the White House, gaps in the innovation system that science policy can help fill, and how making artificial intelligence systems more transparent could define the future of AI applications.

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In our miniseries Cool Ideas for a Long, Hot Summer, we’re working with Arizona State University’s Global Futures Lab to highlight bold ideas about how to mitigate and adapt to climate change. The miniseries has explored how economics can be used to advance environmental justice, how solar-powered canoes can protect the Amazon from deforestation, and how refugees create communication networks to respond to climate change.

On the final episode, host Kimberly Quach is joined by ASU professor Melissa K. Nelson. Nelson shares her thoughts about the impacts of climate change on Native American communities, agriculture, and what can be learned from Indigenous sustainability practices. 

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See more of Melissa K. Nelson’s work on her website. 

Listen to the Cultural Conservancy’s Native Seed Pod, a podcast hosted by Nelson about Native foodways, ancestral seeds, and traditional ecological knowledge, and visit their Native Foodways page. 

Visit the Native American Food Sovereignty Alliance and the Traditional Native American Farmers Association websites to learn more about Indigenous farming techniques.

Learn more about indigenous practices and environmental sustainability by reading Traditional Ecological Knowledge Learning from Indigenous Practices for Environmental Sustainability edited by Melissa K. Nelson and Daniel Shilling. 
Check out the other episodes in our Cool Ideas for a Long Hot Summer mini-series!

In our miniseries Cool Ideas for a Long, Hot Summer, we’re working with Arizona State University’s Global Futures Lab to highlight bold ideas about how to mitigate and adapt to climate change. 

On this episode, host Kimberly Quach is joined by ASU assistant professor Faheem Hussain to learn about how Rohingya refugees are using social technologies and what they can teach the rest of the world about communicating in disasters. Hussain is a researcher whose trajectory was changed when he visited a Rohingya refugee camp in Bangladesh. There, he learned how the community uses an innovative combination of online and offline technologies to create networks to share information. 

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In our new miniseries Cool Ideas for a Long Hot Summer, we're working with Arizona State University’s Global Futures Lab to highlight bold ideas about how to mitigate and adapt to climate change. 

On this episode, host Kimberly Quach is joined by ASU associate professor David Manuel-Navarrete to talk about his Solar Canoes Against Deforestation project. Working closely with Ecuadoran engineers and the Kichwa and Waorani people, Manuel-Navarrette’s team has been helping to develop a solar-powered canoe that can bring renewable energy and sustainable infrastructure to the Amazon. The story of the canoe offers lessons about how to meaningfully work with communities to understand their needs and co-produce solutions. 

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This has been a record-breaking summer all over the world. Many cities have recorded their hottest days ever, and June 2024 was the hottest month on record worldwide. Mitigating and adapting to the impacts of climate change, including extreme heat and long summers, will require a lot of bold new ideas. 

This summer, we’re highlighting some of those ideas in a mini podcast series, Cool Ideas for a Long, Hot Summer. Over four mini-episodes, we’ll explore how faculty members at ASU’s Global Futures Lab are working with communities to develop cool techniques and technologies for dealing with climate change. 

In the first mini-episode, host Kimberly Quach is joined by ASU assistant professor Danae Hernandez-Cortes. Danae shares how economics can be used to advance environmental justice and how policies can affect communities who are most harmed by climate change. 

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Since 1973, the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s (AAAS) Science and Technology Policy Fellowship (STPF) has brought thousands of scientists and engineers into the policy world. The fellowship is a very popular pathway into science policy, and AAAS fellows have featured in several episodes of our Science Policy IRL series. 

In this episode, we talk with the STPF fellowship director, Rashada Alexander. After completing a chemistry PhD and postdoc, she applied for an STPF fellowship that placed her inside the National Institutes of Health, where she worked for 10 years. 

Alexander talks to us about how her fellowship experience helped her look up from the lab bench and find meaning in her life. In particular, she found ways to build relationships, learn how to read a room, and navigate organizational structures—skills that are not always valued in scientific labs. She explains why scientists and engineers should apply for this transformational experience. 

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