Doctors Without Borders is a non-governmental agency – or NGO – that operates around the world, providing free medical services where medical care is scarce or completely lacking. Very often, that’s in under-developed areas or in conflict zones.

Providing medical attention for immediate health concerns is critical, but what about long-term support? There are any number of concerns, from securing a source of potable water to generating energy to mitigating or preventing recurring disasters. Think of annual floods or droughts. These are infrastructure problems, and the solutions to many of these problems are technological in nature. We were wondering if there were similar organizations for engineers who wanted to volunteer their services to help build critical infrastructure where it, too, is lacking.

We asked one of our contributors, Cabe Atwell, to look into it, and Cabe came back with a great round-up of several such organizations where engineers can apply their professional skills to help out.

He also discovered that Purdue University has a program in Humanitarian Engineering. The courses available cover electricity & optics, chemical engineering, math, hydraulics, thermodynamics, and courses that are designed to plan products, which is to say to turn ideas into implementable projects.

Mary Pilotte is Director of Engineering Education Undergraduate Degree Programs, and an Associate Professor of Engineering at Purdue. We caught up with her earlier this week to ask her about the Purdue program and about humanitarian engineering.

Mary, welcome to the show. Tell us what humanitarian engineering is.

MARY PILOTTE: Humanitarian engineering is a great intersection between problem solving, solution finding and really putting yourself in the space of aiding the greater good of humanity. And so it’s an interdisciplinary program here at Purdue that allows students who like to take engineering to all corners of the world. And they can do that through humanitarian engineering.

BRIAN SANTO: When was the program established?

MARY PILOTTE: Humanitarian engineering operates as a concentration within the multidisciplinary engineering program here at Purdue University. Multidisciplinary engineering’s been around for 50 years at Purdue. And it’s been an incubator of what I like to describe as “the next big engineering discipline.” And that’s part of our legacy here at Purdue. The humanitarian engineering concentration has been around only for four years. And in fact, we just graduated our first official humanitarian engineer this year, although some students prior to this point had what we call a “self-designed” concentration and were allowed to create something very similar to this.

BRIAN SANTO: When the program was put together, were there any specific goals you had in mind in terms of the types of engineers you wanted to put out? Or the types of programs that they might get involved with?

MARY PILOTTE: As with many of our programs, our concentrations, students come to us often times with an idea. And we have many flavors of engineers in our program, as you can imagine. This is just another flavor. But what we saw was there was a deep desire to bring their passion for maybe service work in their church or in mission trips or even just trying to help their local communities with hurricanes and floods and poverty. So the students came to us with those sorts of interest areas.

From the other direction, the faculty, we have amazing faculty here in engineering education, which is the school that multidisciplinary engineering resides in at Purdue. Some amazing faculty who do engineering education with displaced people and in underserved communities around the globe. So it was kind of a nice convergence of research meets student interest. And then because of Purdue, because the power of the course offering that we have here and the great disciplinary diversity that we have on campus, we were able to pull together this unique concentration.

BRIAN SANTO: That’s interesting. The program thus far — and I understand that it’s young; you’ve only got your first few class of graduates. Have there been enough experiences between the faculty and the students in the program to characterize the types of projects that they’ve worked on? Or is it just kind of a grab bag of things so far?

MARY PILOTTE: Absolutely we have plenty to anecdotal evidence of students engaging with the researchers. So we really promote students getting lots of experiences, whether that’s experience in a research lab — which in these cases are often field work. Because you have to be in the field with the people to know what sorts of solutions are appropriate for their context. But we have students doing research in water filtration, in humanitarian aid, in creating learning and kind of, as I mentioned, in resource impoverished communities or displaced people camps around the globe. And so students have been doing that sort of work along with things like developing urban garden centers and helping with returning veterans even, who may face unique challenges. Humanitarian aid in Puerto Rico and other areas as well. They do work with, I don’t know if you’re familiar with engineering projects and community service. So that’s actually a service learning course that embeds kind of this humanitarian part of the students that are in our program.

BRIAN SANTO: You had mentioned that there’s adversity all over the world. You mentioned hydrology, providing clean water. There are endemic problems and then there are responses to disasters it sounds like. So the students you’re involved with have dealt with both types of situations.

MARY PILOTTE: Correct. There’s been projects in Indonesia involving a plain are there that continues to flood, that continues to displace people, that continues to contaminate water sources. That might be one example, where other examples might look more like a Katrina sort of disaster.

BRIAN SANTO: Just out of curiosity, have your students gotten involved with the power-generating element of some of these projects?

MARY PILOTTE: Yes. Absolutely. Often times, humanitarian efforts refer to kind of a WaSH focus, which tends to stand for Water, Sanitation and Hygiene. We’ve taken that and really expanded that to be water, agriculture (referring to food source and food safety), sanitation, health, habitat and energy. And we think those are important areas that students can develop more depth beyond their engineering core. That’s kind of how we bundle humanitarian efforts here at Purdue.

BRIAN SANTO: Okay. You mentioned earlier that it’s an interdisciplinary program. Do you try to give all students a full grounding in a variety of different subdisciplines? To what extent is it self-directed? Do the students come in and say, I have this particular category of problems that I would like to help solve. What are the courses I ought to take in order to be able to do the most good within that category?

MARY PILOTTE: It’s more of the latter. As you can imagine, there are so many types of need globally and domestically. And so rather than try and pigeonhole a student into an area that’s so generic that they can’t have immediate impact, we really let their heart and their own personal experience drive the focal point of their work. And so while we want them to have that WaSH background that we mentioned, we also want to make sure that if they have an interest in policy and politics around humanitarian aid, they can go deep in that area. If they feel like they’re more of an on-the-ground language and anthropology type person, they can go deep in that area.

So we really let them customize that, within certain constraints of course, to their own personal background interest and needs. Because these students, as you can imagine, don’t just become humanitarians the day they come to Purdue. They actually have been doing humanitarian work in their own right well before they arrive at Purdue. They just realize that there’s a professional outlet for them to continue their work. That might be their work through Cub Scouts or Eagle Scouts, or it might be, again, outreach through their church and faith communities, or just even supporting their local community through times of need.

We don’t really give birth to humanitarian engineers, we give wings to humanitarian people.

BRIAN SANTO: Oooh! That’s good.

MARY PILOTTE: Let’s hope that they believe that, too. We think they do.

BRIAN SANTO: It’s good. It is good. Again, I understand that the program is new. Have you seen any corporate interest in the program in any way?

MARY PILOTTE: Actually we have. And I have to be completely honest: One of the things that we take great care for here is not to just create degree programs to placate a student body, let’s say. We want them to find meaningful work and to contribute meaningfully in society. So it’s not helpful for us as a university to create degree programs that can’t help them achieve a meaningful, lifelong career. So let me say that first of all.

We do speak to students who are interested in humanitarian engineering, and we discuss the financial aspects. If you go to work in not-for-profit areas, that might look like a less lucrative area for example than a for-profit entity. What we’ve found is that the corporate social responsibility momentum that has begun to become embedded in for-profit companies, especially engineering-focused companies, our humanitarian engineers are a perfect match for the activities that companies want to put in place for corporate social responsibility. And so humanitarian engineers have that kind of heart of an engineering centered person… I should say head of an engineering-centered person within the heart of a humanitarian-centered person. So that’s a great match for that.

I could name brand, but I won’t, but there are many companies who specifically are very interested in our graduates. And that’s exciting. That there are many avenues beyond just not-for-profit. And I think that’s where we an have an even larger global impact, knowing that these multi-national brands are willing to really put their money where their value statements are and embed these very important engineers in their organizations.

BRIAN SANTO: That’s really quite heartening.

MARY PILOTTE: It is. It’s very heartening.

BRIAN SANTO: So can I ask you once again if you would reconsider identifying some of the companies that are interested?

MARY PILOTTE: I would rather not do that to them. But what I’ll say is, there is more than one. How’s that? There are truly many. And they’re coming from various areas. From various sectors, for example. From heavy equipment to supply chain to health care. That really means a lot to me because I think that no matter what type of disciplinary focus you might have as an engineer.. You may be more mechanically oriented or electrically oriented or systems oriented and still to be a humanitarian engineer. So knowing that there are firms where you can match your disciplinary chops with your passion is so important and very exciting for our graduates.

BRIAN SANTO: Do you anticipate any interest among older engineers in the program continuing ed or just a career change?

MARY PILOTTE: I think it would be a fascinating career change. I haven’t personally experienced that here at Purdue yet. Perhaps those engineers who have already graduated are going on and getting Masters in policy or in other areas at this point. I’m not really seeing returning engineers at this point in time.

I will say, however — and this is kind of akin to your earlier question — that we’re seeing a lot of interest also from the United States government. And from the various groups within the federal government looking for these types of graduates.

BRIAN SANTO: For their own purposes? To hire directly?

MARY PILOTTE: To hire directly.

BRIAN SANTO: Really?

MARY PILOTTE: Hiring directly. And so that’s very heartening, very encouraging, knowing that we’ll be having not only more humanitarian people in those communities, but we will have solution providers and people who think broadly about solving problems for the long run instead of temporary fixes.

BRIAN SANTO: Cool. Mary, is there anything I haven’t asked about either the program at Purdue or humanitarian engineering in general that you’d like to point out?

MARY PILOTTE: One thing I’d like to share with everyone is that often times engineers think that if you’re engineering in a new space that somehow you’re less of an engineer. I think humanitarian engineering is a perfect example of becoming more of an engineer. We’re here to make the world better, and bringing an ABT-accredited, solid engineering problem space and mindset to an area for our world, for our communities, to me makes you more of an engineer, not less of an engineer. And I’m very hopeful and very excited to se our program grow and frankly all the similar programs that might exist across the United States grow. Because I think this is a really important need for our world.

BRIAN SANTO: Fantastic. Off on a complete tangent, when you attend or teach at Purdue, are you ever obligated to actually drink a Boilermaker?

MARY PILOTTE: I don’t think you’re obligated, but I think most of us try it at least once.

BRIAN SANTO: Mary, thank you very much for your time today.

MARY PILOTTE: I greatly appreciate the opportunity. And again, we look forward to receiving many more humanitarians here at Purdue.

BRIAN SANTO: We should note that Purdue is not alone. Dartmouth also hosts a humanitarian engineering program. There is also one at the Colorado School of Mines, at Oregon State University, at The Ohio State University, and outside the US there’s a similar program at the University of New South Wales in Sydney.

By the way, Oregon State gets to be called OSU, while The Ohio State is properly referred to as THE OSU. True fact! Pops up whenever the Beavers and Buckeyes are playing each other.

Anyway. Humanitarian engineering. The article that Cabe Atwell is on the website at eetimes.com. It’s called “Humanitarian Engineering Organizations Develop a Better Global Future.” There’s a link on the web page with the podcast transcript. The story includes some suggestions where engineers who already have degrees can volunteer, including an operation called Engineers Without Borders.