Today’s engineering students have the mindset required to solve tomorrow’s biggest problems, says University of Texas at Austin’s Roger Bonnecaze. Will artificial intelligence be there to lend them a hand?
For the second installment of its Dean’s List interview series, engineering.com spoke with Roger Bonnecaze, Dean of the Cockrell School of Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin).
A chemical engineer by training, Bonnecaze is an internationally recognized expert in rheology and a leading authority on modeling and simulation for nanomanufacturing. He is a co-founding director of the Nanomanufacturing Systems Center (NASCENT), a National Science Foundation-backed research center dedicated to developing nanoscale manufacturing processes, materials and more. His involvement in NASCENT planted the seeds of SandBox Semiconductor Inc., which he launched with one of his PhD students in 2016 to create tools that accelerate process development in advanced manufacturing.
Bonnecaze became Cockrell’s dean in June 2022 after nearly 30 years on the engineering faculty of UT Austin. He has won numerous awards for his teaching and research, including the National Science Foundation’s Young Investigator Award.
The original transcript has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Engineering.com: According to the mission statement of the Cockrell School of Engineering, one of the school’s priorities is to foster entrepreneurship. Why?
Bonnecaze: “Our goal is to create students who are fearless and entrepreneurial in their mindset. What I mean by fearless is not reckless, but that they’re willing to consider very hard problems and are not daunted by them and will figure out a way to address them. They may not have the expertise on their own, but they understand that they can form a team, et cetera. And the entrepreneurial aspect is not just in spinning out startup companies, but in having an entrepreneurial mindset – looking for interesting problems that are important to solve, and then figuring out interesting, innovative solutions. That’s important for a student to be successful in engineering, whether they start their own company or work for a Fortune 500 company.
Were students as interested in entrepreneurship when you started teaching nearly 30 years ago?
No. There’s definitely been a shift in students’ interest in both engineering and entrepreneurship. Students in high school are more interested in engineering now than they were 30 years ago. And the typical thinking back then was that when you graduated, you would work for an established company or become a professor. Relatively few said, “Oh, I’m going to start a business.” Now, many more students think that starting their own business or joining a startup is a viable path. I attribute both things to the increased presence of engineering and startups in the media.
You have a startup of your own, SandBox Semiconductor, which you co-founded with Meghali Chopra, one of your former graduate students. How did that come about?
Meghali was a PhD student and was involved in the Nanomanufacturing Systems Center (NASCENT), which is a National Science Foundation-funded engineering research center (ERC) at UT Austin. A lot of companies are involved in ERCs like NASCENT, where I spoke with several chip toolmakers – the people who make the tools to make microchips. I was very surprised to learn that they don’t use simulations or modeling for etch-recipe development. They take a trial-and-error approach. I told Meghali that I think there’s an opportunity for us to try something different, and the core of her PhD was how to use models, even if you don’t know all the parameters in the model, to guide your experiments so that you can do them more efficiently and come up with etch recipes more quickly.
What have you learned from the experience of launching a company?
There are now several employees at Sandbox, so my current role is to give technological advice on how to proceed in certain product-development lines. But when it was just Meghali and me, we were involved in the whole process of getting the company launched.
One of the best experiences associated with that was the National Science Foundation I-Corps (Innovation Corps) program that I took part in. It’s a startup entrepreneur bootcamp that lasts seven weeks. One of the key teachings of the program is what they call customer discovery, which is basically where you go to the people you think would be your customers, listen to what their needs are and determine whether your business idea is aligned with those needs. This was an eye-opening experience because it helped us understand more clearly our value proposition to these companies and who our potential customers are. It also helped us understand the importance of customer discovery in starting up a new business.
To be honest with you, now I think about customer discovery whenever I think about launching new programs at the Cockrell School of Engineering. When people pitch new programs to me, I’ll ask them: Who will be served by these programs? What’s the need that’s being filled? What would be the overall benefit in the long term?
For sure, one of the classic mistakes made by budding entrepreneurs is to develop products before identifying a market need – the so-called “solution looking for a problem.”
Actually, another thing that came out of my experience with I-Corps program is that I now tell all faculty to participate in the program if they have the opportunity. They should do it even if they decide that their idea isn’t commercializable and they shouldn’t form a startup, because the experience changes your perspective on how your research might be perceived by an industry and even how to pick research problems if your goal is to spin out a company.
Apart from being more interested in entrepreneurship, what differences have you noticed between today’s engineering students and those you taught early in your career?
The biggest change is simply that there are a lot more women and a lot more students from historically underrepresented groups in engineering. That’s been great because they bring different life experiences and perspectives, which has been shown over and over to improve engineering product, and also because we want to bring all the intellectual capital possible into the engineering field.
The other thing that I’ve noticed is that students now are much more multidisciplinary in their thinking. There’s a lot more interest in pursuing minors or certificates that broaden their skill sets. So, for instance, they’re not getting their degree just in mechanical engineering, but also getting a minor in materials science or business.
These days, engineers are constantly being thrust into multidisciplinary teams, so it’s good to bring multiple skill sets to the table and to understanding how the skill sets of others might affect how you think about and solve problems.
Within this interdisciplinary trend, is there a noticeable number of students who are interested in subjects outside of the applied sciences and business? Are they also taking minors in ethics, philosophy or any other areas that might help them bring a more holistic perspective to their engineering work?
Yes! At the University of Texas we have something called the Plan II program, which essentially is a minor in liberal arts. Many of our engineering students participate in that program.
We also have some undergraduate programs that all students must take in their first semester or two. They’re meant to broaden the student’s perspective on things outside of their home departments. For the most part they’re not technical classes, and almost all the engineering students choose very non-technical classes.
How do you think the engineer of the future will be different from the engineer of today in terms of their skills, aptitudes or interests?
All engineering students will need to have facility with data, being able to understand data, to manage data and to extract value out of data efficiently. The goal isn’t to make everybody a data scientist, but engineers will need to use artificial intelligence, machine learning, et cetera to achieve whatever their specific project goals are.
Related to that is what I’ll call human-machine interaction in engineering, process development, product development, design and so on. You’ll take advantage of computers not just in the traditional way – such as for simulation, CAD drawings and that kind of thing – but also thinking about computers or even robots as a partner who helps you advance toward your technological goals. Don’t ask me to predict when that’s going to happen, but I feel that it’s coming, and I already see it developing in some areas.
What’s an underappreciated challenge faced by the engineering profession?
Honestly, we don’t have enough engineers for all the engineering work that needs to be done.
I’m going to sound biased when I say that an engineering education prepares students to think about problems in a unique way. They understand how to break problems down and to embrace data, which is valuable in areas well beyond engineering – dare I say politics, for instance. I’ve always said that an engineering degree is a great degree to get because, fundamentally, what we’re teaching people is how to solve difficult problems. And there is never a shortage of difficult problems that society faces.
What’s your elevatory pitch for the Cockrell School of Engineering?
What I think makes the Cockrell School of Engineering great is the people, facilities and opportunities that we offer our students.
We have world-class faculty who are teaching the vast majority of classes to our students. In terms of facilities, we have two brand-new buildings, and a third one is under design and will be completed in four years. In terms of opportunities, we have excellent career services, internship opportunities, opportunities to develop startup companies or guide students in how to develop startup companies, and a world-class makerspace where students can prototype and learn how to create new products for technological applications.
In May 2022, you were named Dean of Cockrell after about 10 months in an interim role. What’s your vision for the school and what changes do you want to make?
In a nutshell, my vision for the Cockrell School of Engineering is to be the most impactful public school of engineering in the U.S.
How are we going to get there? It’s really about picking challenging societal problems to address. It’s about providing an education that creates fearless entrepreneurial students. And it’s about creating an environment in which faculty, staff and students can all grow and become the best versions of themselves.
Read the first installment in our Dean’s List series, featuring Ian Robertson of the University of Wisconsin–Madison’s College of Engineering, in The Engineer of the Future is a Data Miner.