Continuing and future challenges in engineering fall into four buckets of endeavor, interconnected and interpenetrating: Sustainability, Health, Security, and Enriching Life, roughly mapping to the Maslow hierarchy of needs for an individual, now applied to society at large. With the extraordinary advances in technology, including AI and Generative AI in particular, they also directly encroach on non-engineering and society-centric disciplines, signaling the emergence of new multi-disciplinary, multi-hyphenated areas of specialization. The resulting lack of synchronization of the corresponding Societal and Technical Readiness levels demands trustworthiness from our engineering graduates. We suggest that to address this, engineering education will have to incorporate the development of outstanding character in addition to outstanding technical competence.
Along a related theme in this intersection, the quantitative understanding of social phenomena, which has benefited from the introduction of physical analogs and models (Econophysics), can benefit from parallels with a different scientific field (Econochemistry), or, as presented in this talk, from Chemical Engineering. We will discuss how such analogies can provide new insights, including the emergence of a singularity, namely faster than exponential growth, in innovation, or the modeling of contagion, such as in the recent pandemic.
Yannis C. Yortsos is the Dolley Professor of Chemical Engineering and, since 2005, serves as the Dean of the USC Viterbi School of Engineering. He received a BS (Diploma) from the National Technical University of Athens, Greece, and MS and Ph.D. degrees from the California Institute of Technology, all in chemical engineering. Yortsos is a member of the US National Academy of Engineering (NAE) (2008), an Associate member of the Academy of Athens (2013), and a Foreign Fellow of the Indian National Academy of Engineering (2024). He received the Ellis Island Medal of Honor (2014), the ASEE President’s Award (2017), the Gordon Prize of the NAE (2022) for co-founding the Grand Challenges Scholars Program, and a Los Angeles area Emmy (2022) for the documentary Lives not Grades. He is the editor-in-chief of PNAS Nexus, a multi-disciplinary journal of the National Academies (NASEM). His research interests are in the flow, transport, and reaction of processes in porous media.
