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Shaina Dinsdale

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Q&A WITH EngHERO: Shaina Dinsdale

Shaina is an amazing engineer who has traveled the world and is full of wisdom. She has been in many occupations, in diverse regions of the world in search of the perfect occupation to satisfy her happiness, success and her values. Shaina Dinsdale

Q: What’s one thing you wish you knew about engineering back when you were in high school?

I wish I knew what it was all about. I have three older brothers who are all in engineering and I thought it was about building cars and airplanes. When I finally got around to doing it I loved it. The degree didn’t mean that now I’m certified to build a car, in fact and engineering degree could be applied in many different ways. My degree is what has helped me get to where I am today, it helped me build my future.

Q: What’s your proudest accomplishment as an engineer?

Actually, I have two. Oddly enough, graduating was a very proud moment. It took me a long time to understand that I was truly capable of earning the degree. I always had good marks and loved the classes but somehow never believed in myself. Graduating was the proof I needed and things came easily after that. A proud moment working as an engineer is definitely some of my recent work in Kenya. It was great because I was there as a consultant but my degree in chemical engineering was very useful to the team. I got to do both business and engineering and was such a strong contributor because of it.

Q: Tell me about a time in your career when your work has been about discovery or curiosity?

I think it was right when I got out of school. I moved to Switzerland and did research for a Chemical Mixing Company creating a design equation for their sales team. It took me hours of lab work to discover the best way to model what happens when two gasses pass through their static mixers.

Q: What are you doing these days?

I’m currently working as a consultant helping companies manage projects when they don’t have the capacity to do it in house. I would have to say determination and a lot of random events brought me here. I have learned that people you meet early on in your career are very important. You should never burn a bridge because at eventually you will need to cross it. I made many contacts in the first years of my career, which continues to help me today.

When I started out I wanted to move to Europe. I thought I would stay there for 5 years and be an engineer. But life takes to down different paths and now, I have worked in Switzerland, Canada, Kenya, and am currently in New York. Who knows where things will take me next.

Q: Do you feel your work contributes to society? How so?

Yes. As an engineer it always did, I was building things, improving how things worked or were made, was always working on something current. Now that I am more removed from engineering the contribution feels a little less direct.

Q: Why do we need more female engineers?

More female engineers will bring diversity into the engineering field. Diversity is great. It helps make better decisions and women should most certainly be part of those better decisions. We need more women to understand what engineering is about and know that they are capable of it. I think they need to know what a degree could do for them. If women know what it is about then perhaps we will see a change in statistics. Diversity helps make better decisions and women should most certainly be part of those better decisions.

Q: What advice would you give to someone interested in the field of Engineering?

Do your research and go for it! And to women who like chemistry I would urge them to explore chemical engineering. If you like biology, make sure you look at biomedical engineering…etc.

Shaina-Dinsdale-Journey-May

Erika Kiessner

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Q&A WITH EngHERO: Erika Kiessner

Erika Kiessner is an exhibit developer for an independent exhibit design and fabrication company. She creates all the cool interactive exhibits at places like the ROM or Ontario Science Centre!Erika Keissner Polaroid 2

Q: What’s one thing you wish you knew about engineering back when you were in high school?

I honestly wasn’t sure what I was getting into when I signed up for engineering. I just knew that it was a good place to go if you were good at math and interested in science. I guess I wish someone had told me how abstract it is. An engineering degree isn’t about learning a set of concrete skills. It is more about learning a set of mental tools and approaches for solving problems. Thankfully that toolkit can be useful in a lot of fields. I’m very glad that I did an internship as part of my degree. It showed me the kind of work that I wouldn’t be happy doing long term.

Q: What’s your proudest accomplishment as an engineer?

This question is hard since I don’t work as an engineer. I have done some work doing mechanical and electrical design for artists and I have developed some elegant systems for several art pieces. Ironically the mechanisms were all hidden away inside the pieces so no one but me could really appreciate them!

Q: Tell me about a time in your career when your work has been about discovery or curiosity?

I am very fortunate that most of my career has been about discovery and curiosity. I have done a lot of work for science museums and to properly design an exhibit to explain a concept you really need a deep understanding of that concept. Plus, one of my goals in designing a good exhibit is to get people curious. And to do that I have to be curious myself.

Q: What are you doing these days?

My job now is as an exhibit developer for a small independent exhibit design and fabrication firm called Aesthetec Studio, in Toronto. We do concept development, prototyping and electronics fabrication for exhibits for museums and other institutions. Basically anything interactive that is a hybrid of the digital and physical is in our wheel house. I started at the Ontario Science Centre as floor staff talking about science to visitors.

I knew before I graduated that I wasn’t interested in going into a traditional engineering job and through my undergraduate thesis, I got to know some people at the OSC. So I started on the floor and worked my way into designing exhibits, something I can definitely thank my engineering degree for.

I spent three years there developing new exhibits and that was where my career started. After the OSC I took a year to do a masters degree in Fine Arts, specializing in interaction design. This gave me another set of tools to apply to my practice and helped me look at my work in more than one way.

Q: Do you feel your work contributes to society? How so?

Absolutely. My work is meant to teach people about the universe and more importantly, get them excited about finding out how and why things work.

Q: Why do we need more female engineers?

I think there are two reasons. The first is that in any field that is involved in problem solving, the more perspectives that come to a problem the better scope the proposed solutions will have. The second is that engineering culture would be better served by having more women, for much the same reason.

Q: Why do you personally believe the statistics are the way they are in terms of females in engineering?

Not all of the streams of engineering have an unbalanced female to male ratio. At the University of Toronto, where I studied, chemical engineering was affectionately known as “Fem Eng” because it was predominantly women. Similarly, I would estimate that industrial engineering, the stream I studied was about 40% women. I believe computer engineering was a bit lower but the ones that really stood out were mechanical engineering and electrical engineering, in which there were far more men than women. So what I really wonder is why some types of engineering attract women and others do not.

Generally, I think males get more encouragement to be strong in math and science than women do. That is changing, I hope. I also think that females are more willing to assert themselves in these areas over any societal opposition, than they were a generation ago. The old guard is turning over into the new, and ever more women will get into engineering. At one time doctors were all men and now women are pretty much equally represented. I think engineering will go that way too.

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Check out Aesthetec Studio‘s work

Data Visualization in the AlloSphere

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Procrastinating? We’ve got just the thing! The YTT have pulled together a series of TED Talks that they LOVE. Grab some popcorn and get comfy, because you’re about to get seriously inspired by these amazing engineering projects.

What is this TED talk about?

This Ted talk is about how engineers, scientists and artists came to together to create a 3 story metal sphere called the AlloSphere. Arts, science and engineering all being molded into one great way to understand our universe. It allows us to see and hear things we were never able to comprehend before.

What’s awesome about it?

This TED talk allows to see, hear and truly study the human brain, artificial nature, multi-centre hydrogen bond, hydrogen atom and many more to come. This gives us the availability to widen our knowledge of many objects we could have never studied before. It takes you inside this object and truly allows you to understand it and build upon by recreating it in a larger size in the AlloSphere.

How did it inspire you?

It inspired me by allowing me to see how people in engineering are working together with many others to widen our knowledge of everything and anything. It opens up my mind to the fact that anything is possible and as we grow so does our ability to truly understand this universe and everything within it.

What surprised you?

What surprised me was that we are so far into understanding ourselves and everything around us. Such ground breaking research is being done around us every day and we know nothing of it. Our society needs to become more involved in furthering ourselves as well as honouring those who are advancing our knowledge every day.

Did you ever have an idea about developing something yourself that solves a problem in the world? Tell us all about it

I have never come up with a specific idea or product to aid in solving problems around the world but I do believe in the protection of our environment. Although I have never created anything myself I do try in my daily efforts to help protect our environment and solve our everyday issues.

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Visit the Allosphere Homepage

Tissue Engineering

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Procrastinating? We’ve got just the thing! The YTT have pulled together a series of TED Talks that they LOVE. Grab some popcorn and get comfy, because you’re about to get seriously inspired by these amazing engineering projects.

What is this TED talk about?

This TED talk is about tissue engineering. Scientists and engineers have been able to harvest skin cells and force them back into the embryonic stem cell stage. They can then choose what type of tissue to create (e.g. brain, liver, heart) out of these stem cells. They can then test different drugs on the tissues. This could potentially be the future of medicine, where drugs could be engineered specifically to your DNA so that your healthcare is personalized and works perfectly for you with very few side effects.

What’s rad about it?

This tissue engineering is amazing because it offers the possibility of a future of personalized medicine, where drugs could be tested specifically with your DNA to see if they work for you. This would reduce the need for animal and human testing, would save a lot of money, and would ensure the best healthcare possible. It offers so much hope for the treatment of so many diseases! There’s also the “cool factor” of it…how cool is it that they can create living, functioning heart tissue that actually beats!?

How did it inspire you?

This video was so inspiring because it was just so cool! I never knew that engineers could do things like this. I’ve always had an interest in the human body/medicine, but this opened my eyes to a whole new revolutionary technology that has the potential to change the world! I’m inspired to learn more about the topic.

What surprised you?

I was surprised that it was an engineer who created this concept! My perception was that engineers build and develop things that help society in general (devices, bridges, transportation, etc) and that doctors develop new biological medical technology. It was fascinating to learn that engineers can create things like this!

Did you ever have an idea about developing something yourself that solves a problem in the world? Tell us all about it

I have absolutely no idea how I would do it, but I would love to develop something that helps cure cancer in a way that doesn’t affect the rest of the body, something that is a better alternative to chemotherapy. I heard about this one study where they were trying to kill cancer cells by injecting the tumor with a virus. I’d like to help develop something like that that could help so many people who are suffering.

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Check out Nina’s Website

Abigail Hutty

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Q&A WITH EngHERO: Abigail Hutty

Abbie Hutty is a Spacecraft Structures Engineer at Airbus Defense and Space. She helped create the ExoMars rover , which is the Mars Rover prototype, and her job involves making technical decisions about the design development on the rover structure. She is an artist and an engineer and she won the IET Young Woman Engineer of the Year 2013.

Q: What’s one thing you wish you knew about engineering back when you were in high school?

That engineering is part of pretty much everything in our daily lives, and how high tech and cutting edge technology is always developed by a team of engineers! When I was at high school I shared the common misconception that “Engineers” were the people that came out to fix your home appliances in their overalls- I didn’t realize it included the design and development side too.

Q: What’s your proudest accomplishment as an engineer?

There are satellites in orbit with bits on them designed by me! That’s a pretty great feeling. You can see satellites sometimes with the naked eye, when the sun has set on Earth but is still shining on thing up in orbit- as they flash in the light from the sun they look like shooting stars. It’s great to go out and look up and know that something on that “shooting star” was once just an idea in your mind, that you developed and perfected, had made, and is now functioning all that way away!

Q: Tell me about a time in your career when your work has been about discovery or curiosity?

A lot of Airbus’ Science focused space missions are all about curiosity and discovery- exploring new worlds, imaging other planets, learning about our solar system, our galaxy, our universe. On a personal level though, the challenge of having to design such missions is so great that I am constantly having to learn about new things- for example today it was how the dust environment on Mars abrades the Materials we are designing our rover out of. You have to stay curious, and love learning new things and finding out about stuff like that.

Q: What are you doing these days?

I am a Spacecraft Structures Engineer at Airbus Defence and Space. My project is the ExoMars Rover- which means I am responsible for making sure the design is strong enough to withstand the launch, entry, descent and landing, and driving around on the surface, whilst also fulfilling all the secondary requirements that the structure fulfils- like thermal insulation, bio-containment, electrical grounding, and so on.

Q: Do you feel your work contributes to society? How so?

My work is helping to further mankind’s understanding of the Universe- so at the highest level, the findings from our missions contribute to society. On a more tangible level, though, discoveries and developments made in the Space industry to meet the unusual requirements up there, often then our found to have uses down on earth- like Teflon, which is now used on non-stick pans- that was developed as a Space material. You never know how something that you develop will one day be used.

Q: Why do we need more female engineers?

We need more engineers in general- a lot of the world’s biggest problems need engineers to fix them- power production, a growing population, an ageing population. Engineers, solve problems, and improve things. We don’t have enough engineers qualifying now to meet the future demand- so we need to increase the numbers entering the profession. If we aren’t targeting females as well as males we are missing out on half our potential recruits!

Q: What initially intrigued you to go into engineering?

I was first inspired to consider engineering when I saw a European Mars mission on the news, and saw that British engineers were working on parts of it. Knowing that such exciting projects were going on in the UK was a real light bulb moment for me- I had no idea. We always hear that high tech industries in the US or China are making these big leaps forward- but is going on all over the world, just some nations are less good at publicising their successes. Now I work on a Mars Mission- the very thing that inspired me to consider engineering in the first place!

Q: How did your project concerning the ExoMars Rover come about? What initiated this project? What new information do engineers and scientists plan to gain from this project?

ExoMars is a European Space agency mission- and its primary goal is to search for signs of life, past or present, on Mars. We have a large drill on board that can drill down up to 2m below the Martian surface, to where there is both protection from the harsh radiation environment at the surface, and where there are still water ice deposits. If life still exists on Mars, that’s where we expect to find it! No rover mission has ever had the capability before to take anything other than surface samples- so this is a really exciting part of the mission. We could be answering the question of whether we are alone in the Universe, or whether there is life right here in our own solar system- that would be a huge discovery.

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Check out Abigail on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=81J40tcMDX4