Engineering Our Future

By Deborah J. Ausman

Engineering has been a part of Rice’s curriculum since the university’s inception; in fact, many consider it Rice’s defining discipline. And although this tradition is honored by the George R. Brown School of Engineering, the school could never be accused of living in the past. Spearheaded by passionate new leadership and groundbreaking, interdisciplinary research, engineering faculty are working to make Rice the place where some of the world’s most urgent problems will be solved.

Solving problems is what engineers do. They take the theoretical and descriptive concepts developed by scientists in math, chemistry, physics, and biology and apply them to specific situations or problems.

An engineer’s eye is always on the application—be it the optimal functioning of a chemical plant or the inner workings of literal “chemical plants,” such as genetically modified bacteria harnessed to produce a specific chemical or therapeutic compound. Regardless of the scale, engineering encompasses four basic objectives: analyze the entire system and then design, optimize, and control it.

Today, engineers have the opportunity to apply their application-oriented outlook to questions of global interest. What types of energy sources will best sustain the planet’s growing human population? Can we develop less invasive, cost-effective treatments or even cures for devastating infectious diseases or cancer? How can urban infrastructure be modified to reduce environmental impact and support communities while still withstanding extreme events, such as terrorist attacks or hurricanes? Answering any of these questions requires basic research grounded in engineering fundamentals, along with a willingness to seek insights from other disciplines.

“We don’t know what we don’t know,” says Sallie Keller-McNulty, Rice’s new dean of engineering. “There’s tremendous pressure on engineers because of the enormity and complexity of the problems needing solutions, yet the actual solutions may be beyond what we can do right now. Our job as engineers is to push back on that pressure to find solutions now and define the paths worth exploring—to demonstrate that the scientific method really does live fundamentally in our bones.”

Bridging Disciplines

Before coming to Rice, Keller-McNulty, a statistician, never thought of herself as an engineer. But after immersing in the school of engineering’s culture and activities, she’s realized that she has been an engineer throughout her career. Even so, most universities don’t include statistics in their engineering schools—Rice is one of just four universities in the country that does. The placement reflects Rice’s uniquely broad program in engineering, one that defines the discipline as the application of science to real-world, practical problems.

“Statistics is the area of intellectual thought that’s about making decisions from data, and we do that by integrating all aspects of science and dealing with practical problems,” says Kathy Ensor, outgoing chair of the statistics department. “That is, in fact, engineering.”

The George R. Brown School of Engineering comprises eight departments. The roster includes the traditional engineering disciplines of civil, environmental, mechanical, electrical, and chemical engineering. But it also includes new or related disciplines: computer science, computational and applied mathematics, statistics, and bioengineering. More importantly, many of the departments encompass multiple disciplines that, at one time, were considered distinct fields. Mechanical engineering and materials sciences exist logically together at Rice, the design of computer hardware and components happens in electrical and computer engineering, research into urban impacts occurs in civil and environmental engineering, and chemical engineering recently changed its name to reflect the department’s research activities on biomolecular systems and components.

Even where the names don’t directly reference multiple disciplines, Rice engineering faculty routinely partner with colleagues in other fields of engineering and science. Ensor notes that her department’s strengths in stochastic processes, massive data sets, nonparametric function estimation, and statistical computing and simulation apply just as easily to genomics studies and management of financial information as to pure “engineering” problems, such as signal processing in electrical engineering or artificial intelligence in computer science. “Our emphasis on computation,” Ensor explains, “makes us a logical partner for any discipline that needs to integrate large quantities of information for the purpose of making decisions.”

Far-reaching interdisciplinary partnerships are especially evident through VIGRE, a program awarded to Rice’s mathematics, statistics, and computational and applied mathematics departments in 2003 through a National Science Foundation Vertical InteGration of Research and Education grant. VIGRE brings together undergraduates, graduate students, postdoctoral teachers and researchers, and faculty into integrated teams interested in exploring specific, interdisciplinary research topics. (See sidebar on page 31.) These teams work on topics ranging from performing theoretical studies of geometric calculus variations to quantitatively modeling the development of fruit flies to addressing specific computational challenges in medical imaging, finance, neuroscience, and process control.

VIGRE programs primarily target universities larger than Rice, where graduate students are saddled with heavy teaching loads and have little opportunity to engage in integrated research early in their careers. At Rice, explains Danny Sorensen, chair of the computational and applied mathematics department, VIGRE connects undergraduates to research and offers a way for graduate students to extend their experience by becoming the instructor of record in courses and seminars. “VIGRE is making all of our students—graduates and undergraduates—better prepared for the careers they will enter when they leave Rice,” Sorensen says.

Engineering That’s Bio-Enabled

With eight of VIGRE’s 13 research themes engaged in work directly related to biological systems or applications, the program reflects biology’s recent evolution from a descriptive science to an analytical, quantitative discipline. Biologists today are using the products of engineering—precise, automated instrumentation; high-performance computing; and statistical methods for sorting through massive amounts of data—to quantitatively model how different genes are translated into proteins and how pathway components are regulated to impact specific biological functions. This deep understanding of biological processes and components in turn enables engineers to harness and tweak the system to do specific, directed work.

The synergies between biology and engineering led to the chemical engineering department’s decision last year to change its name to the department of chemical and biomolecular engineering. According to Nikos Mantzaris, assistant professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering, some of biology’s most stubborn questions can be addressed by using classic principles of engineering.

In cancer, for instance, Mantzaris sees several layers of complexity that must be unraveled by researchers seeking to cure the disease. At the molecular level, ascertaining the triggers that cause cancer in an individual cell is critical to developing potential therapies. But ultimately, says Mantzaris, “you’re not curing cancer in one cell but in the whole population of cells that comprise a tumor.” Understanding the interaction between single-cell dynamics and those of a population of cells brings engineers closer to being able to design and control precise population behaviors.

“Such complex questions cannot be addressed by one discipline alone,” Mantzaris says. “Collaboration is the key.” He cites research by Kathleen Matthews, dean of the Wiess School of Natural Sciences and Stewart Memorial Professor of Biochemistry and Cell Biology, as an example of how chemical engineers and biologists can collaborate to gain a unique and more complete understanding of biological processes that also will facilitate the discovery and development of new products. Matthews has described the function of the key protein that regulates the expression of the enzymes responsible for metabolizing lactose in E. coli.

“Kathy knows exactly what to do to change the properties, function, and structure of the genetic network and protein involved in the expression of the lac operon genes,” Mantzaris says. “I don’t know how to do this, but I can take what she knows and use it to understand how a population of cells evolves in time.” Armed with this information, engineers can suggest to biochemists how to manipulate DNA to construct original genetic networks to do specific tasks.

“Let’s say I want to get to a particular product,” says Mantzaris. “The questions chemical engineers are posing are the following: What type of genetic network components can I put together to do the job? What genes can I add or delete to improve the process? How can I manipulate the environment to maximize product formation?”

This type of thinking has been common in the development of commodity chemicals and materials, but it’s been less common in the development of medical therapeutics. Systematic, systems-based approaches to biological processes, though, can help scientists mediate cell growth processes in artificial tissues, develop physiologically based pharmacokinetic models for predicting how drugs and chemicals are metabolized, and engineer new drug delivery methods.

Chemical and biomolecular engineering’s emphasis on the interacting components of biomolecular systems complements the clinical application of scientific research that occurs in bioengineering. Bioengineers describe their work as translational—moving knowledge about how a system works out of the laboratory and into disease detection and therapeutic strategies. At Rice, bioengineers are creating materials that can regenerate or replace bone and other tissues. And the department’s groundbreaking work in detecting and treating cancer will be consolidated this year into a PhD training program funded by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. The program integrates courses in cancer biology, clinical medicine, translational research, and bioengineering at Rice and the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center and should attract seven new graduate students to the institutions this fall.

“Rice and MIT are the only institutions receiving the award that do not have a medical school,” says Rebecca Richards-Kortum, chair of bioengineering. “It’s a testament to the strength of our program and the quality of the interdisciplinary work we are able to achieve both among our own faculty and with researchers in the clinics of the Texas Medical Center.”

Engineering Leaders

Compared to competitive programs nationwide, all of Rice’s engineering departments are small in terms of number of faculty and students. But this characteristic is what sets a Rice engineering degree apart. Smaller classes, taught by senior faculty, are able to innovate in ways not possible at larger universities.

At a typical university, for instance, students in computer science might use Dr. Java (an open-source development environment created by Rice computer science professor Robert “Corky” Cartwright) to learn the basics of object-oriented programming. At Rice, students in COMP 312 actually maintain Dr. Java—fixing bugs, extending the feature set, and even responding to customer requests and complaints. Extending this experience, students in COMP 415 spent the fall 2005 semester developing an application to the specifications provided by Dallas-based hedge fund firm HBK Investments LP. Microsoft Corporation provided software for the class, and for the “final exam,” students visited HBK to present their solutions.

Capstone design courses offered in several engineering departments provide similarly rich experiences to undergraduates, giving seniors the chance to demonstrate expertise accumulated over the course of their Rice careers. Capstone courses in bioengineering, chemical and biomolecular engineering, mechanical engineering and materials science, electrical engineering, and civil and environmental engineering task student teams to construct engineering products to solve specific problems. The courses require students to demonstrate not just engineering expertise but also the ability to articulate and sell their vision.

Faculty in these courses partner closely with Rice’s Cain Project in Engineering and Professional Communication to facilitate student work in these courses, a partnership that has, in some cases, led to curriculum changes downstream.Bioengineering, for instance, structured its initial curriculum to prepare students for the work they would do in the capstone course, and civil and environmental engineering is implementing a strategic plan this year specifically designed to provide students with the fundamental knowledge and communications acumen necessary to succeed both in the design course and in their professions after graduation.

“Ultimately, the BS is not the end of the road; it’s a stepping stone,” says Rick Barrera, chair of mechanical engineering and materials science. “We push our students as hard as we do because we don’t want them just to work in a company; we want them, eventually, to be the ones running the company.”

Rice’s close-knit environment also provides opportunities for students to engage in novel experiences outside the classroom. In 2003, Rice students formed a chapter of Engineers Without Borders (EWB), an international organization that designs, implements, and supports environmental and economically sustainable engineering projects in developing nations. The 75 students in the Rice chapter have delivered potable water to villages in El Salvador and Mexico, provided electricity and water purification systems to a village in Nicaragua, and built a bridge connecting two other Nicaraguan villages. The group recently hosted the EWB–USA International Conference, and the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering is leveraging the success of this program in developing future courses focusing on sustainability.

Engineering: The Solution to Global Problems

Engineering always has been about problem solving. Now, the problems are bigger. In addition to building physical bridges, engineers must maintain less tangible bridges to basic science disciplines, other engineering fields, and political and socioeconomic agents that regulate the continuing expansion and demands of human populations. Working from the solid foundation that comes from nearly 100 years of engineering prowess, the George R. Brown School of Engineering is well positioned to provide the products, technologies, and people that will resolve these global problems.