Mikhail Chester
Associate Professor Mikhail Chester from the School of Sustainable Engineering and the Built Environment was selected as one of 84 of the nation’s brightest young engineers to take part in the National Academy of Engineering’s 24th annual U.S. Frontiers of Engineering symposium.
Engineers ages 30 to 45 who are performing exceptional engineering research and technical work in a variety of disciplines will come together for the two-and-a-half-day event. The participants — from industry, academia and government — were nominated by fellow engineers or organizations.
Chester’s research focuses on developing an understanding of how urban systems have been deployed, frameworks for assessing their energy and environmental impacts, and strategies for transitioning infrastructure systems for 21st century needs. He aims to develop the science for understanding how embedded infrastructure design enables emergent behaviors that are unsustainable in order to help transition to a future of lower energy use and environmental impact through analysis and breaking dependencies.
Darshan Karwat
Darshan Karwat, senior sustainability scientist and assistant professor who jointly serves the Polytechnic School and the School for the Future of Innovation in Society, was selected to be a speaker at the event. Karwat runs re-Engineered, an interdisciplinary group that embeds peace, social justice, and environmental protection in engineering. He spent three years as an AAAS Fellow in Washington, D.C., first at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on the Innovation Team, where I worked on climate change resilience and low-cost air pollution sensors; and then at the U.S. Department of Energy in the Water Power Technologies Office, helping design and run the Wave Energy Prize.
The 2018 USFOE will be hosted by MIT Lincoln Laboratory in Lexington, Massachusetts, September 5–7, 2018, and will cover cutting-edge developments in four areas: Quantum Computing, Technology for Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Relief, Resilient and Reliable Infrastructure, and Theranostics.
“It is critically important to bring young engineers from different technical areas together to spark innovation,” said NAE President C. D. Mote, Jr. “The Frontiers of Engineering program does this by creating a space for talented engineers to learn from each other and expand their technical perspectives early in their careers. Congratulations to this year’s FOE participants.”
Sponsors for the 2018 U.S. Frontiers of Engineering are The Grainger Foundation, National Science Foundation, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, Air Force Office of Scientific Research, DOD ASDR&E Laboratories Office, Microsoft Research, and Cummins.
The mission of the NAE is to advance the well-being of the nation by promoting a vibrant engineering profession and by marshaling the expertise and insights of eminent engineers to provide independent advice to the federal government on matters involving engineering and technology. The NAE is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, an independent, nonprofit organization chartered by Congress to provide objective analysis and advice to the nation on matters of science, technology and health.
