Concerning the Telephone Engineer

Educating the Humanitarian Engineer

The creation of new technologies that serve humanity holds the potential to help end global poverty. Unfortunately, relatively little is done in engineering education to support engineers' humanitarian efforts. Here, various strategies are introduced to augment the teaching of engineering ethics with the goal of encouraging engineers to serve as effective volunteers for community service. First...

The Robot Engineer

We described preliminary work on designing a “robot engineer”. Somewhat similar to the idea of a robot scientist, the robot engineer is a closed-loop system that designs tools for a robot, and even complete robots, that are tested in simulation, manufactured and realised using 3D printing. The artefact is then evaluated on real-world tasks, feeding back to the original design. The system builds...

The Ohio State Engineer

The virus as metabolic engineer.

Recent genome-wide screens of host genetic requirements for viral infection have reemphasized the critical role of host metabolism in enabling the production of viral particles. In this review, we highlight the metabolic aspects of viral infection found in these studies, and focus on the opportunities these requirements present for metabolic engineers. In particular, the objectives and approach...

The little feathered ecosystem engineer

All animals have an effect on the environment, but some key species – called ecosystem engineers – can have a particularly large influence. Their impact can be positive, by creating and maintaining habitats and increasing biodiversity, but they can also be negative, by destroying habitats and reducing biodiversity. Interestingly, the magnitude of the effect that an ecosystem engineer has on the...