GUEST DETAILS
Roma Agrawal is an engineer, author and presenter who is best known for working on the design of The Shard, Western Europe's tallest tower. She studied at Imperial College London and the University of Oxford. Roma has given lectures to thousands at universities, schools and organisations around the world, including TEDx talks. She has also presented numerous TV shows for the BBC, Channel 4 and Discovery, and hosts her own podcast, Building Stories.
Her first book, BUILT (2018) won an AAAS science book award and has been translated into eight languages. 

MORE INFORMATION
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Engineers Journal AMPLIFIED is produced by DustPod.io for Engineers Ireland.

QUOTES
"I really love the idea of responding to what's there. This building could only have been on this particular site." - Roma Agrawal 

"There's lots of different systems that have to work together to make sure that a big skyscraper stays stable." - Roma Agrawal 

"A building like The Shard, we predict might move about half a metre. What's key as a structural engineer is to make sure that we don't feel that." - Roma Agrawal 

"As a student, I don't think I ever understood how essential the skill of being able to work with other people is to be an engineer." - Roma Agrawal 

"I think being enthusiastic about what you do is a big thing. I think we're all too modest." - Roma Agrawal 

KEYWORDS
#construction #theshard #site #management #wind #design #collaboration #engineering

TRANSCRIPTION
For your convenience, we include an automated transcription.

Dusty Rhodes  00:01
Right now, on AMPLIFIED, engineering The Shard.

Roma Agrawal  00:03
What we did was a method called top-down construction. So that means we're building downwards and upwards at the same time. That technique had never been used before in a building of this size, and definitely not to construct the core of the building, which is the central spine of the building.

Dusty Rhodes  00:21
Hi there. My name is Dusty Rhodes, and welcome to AMPLIFIED the Engineers Journal podcast. Skyscraper building is not exactly up there for things Ireland is famous for. But what if you were charged with designing one for the centre of one of our major cities? How do you handle working in a constricted space? How high can you go? What forces are you dealing with as you go up, and what foundation do you support the whole thing on. Our guest today is going to share some amazing stories about all of these challenges because she spent six years of her life designing the foundations and the spire for the world-famous Shard building in London. She is a structural engineer whose many accolades including being voted the UK's young Structural Engineer of the Year becoming an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering and a fellow of the institution of structural engineers. It's a pleasure to welcome Roma Agarwal, how are you, Roma,

Roma Agrawal  01:11
I'm great. How are you doing?

Dusty Rhodes  01:15
Very good. Listen. Let's get straight into the Shard. How did you get involved in designing the foundations and the spire on this world-famous skyscraper? 

Roma Agrawal  01:25
Sure. So I guess the short answer is, I managed to get a graduate position with a company back in 2005 and the first project that I worked on was a footbridge, which is in Newcastle. And I spent about 18 months working on that in a very small team. And then once that was coming to its end, my boss said to me, Roma, do you fancy working on The Shard? And I did a very kind of cool and composed Yes, yes. That would be lovely, while secretly, kind of screaming in my head,

Dusty Rhodes  01:58
amazing. Listen The building itself is famous for having many angled sides. To say it stands out the minute you see it, which point towards the sky. But there's a historical story behind that, related to the ground. Tell me about that.

Roma Agrawal  02:15
It's a very interesting point, because a lot of people say, Oh, why is this building at London Bridge? It should be in the City of London, or Canary Wharf, or somewhere where there's other tall buildings. But actually, The Shard couldn't have been anywhere else, because the geometry of The Shard is inspired by the site which was bombed during the Second World War. So the London Bridge station sits on top of these old Victorian arches which have been there since the 1800s and a portion of those were destroyed, leaving quite a jagged shaped site. So what the architect Renzo Piano did was to look at the shape of that site, kind of draw, I guess, an irregular, octagonal sort of shape, and then project the sides up at about five or six degrees lean. And that's what created the geometry of The Shard. So it's completely a site specific piece of architecture. It's not just a rectangular building that you could stick

Dusty Rhodes  03:09
anywhere. So it wasn't a design feature. Was something that essentially was helping it deal with the actual ground that was standing on, yes,

Roma Agrawal  03:17
and it was also a way, I guess, of using every millimetre of space that was available on this construction site, because you're in the middle of London, it's an extraordinarily expensive and busy part of the city. And so, you know, people really want to maximise the space that they're creating in a, you know, commercial building. So, so from all of those different perspectives, it really made sense. And I think design wise, I really love the idea of responding to what's there, rather than just saying, Okay, here's a generic building that could be anywhere, but no this, this building could only have been on this particular site.

Dusty Rhodes  03:52
So how did that site and that particular constraint, if you want to put it that way, with the design, how does that impact the design of the foundation?

Roma Agrawal  04:00
So the foundations were such an interesting part of the building, and sadly, the bit that nobody ever sees again once it's finished, what we were looking to do was to go down three levels of basement. A lot of the plant of the building is down in the basement. So the huge air conditioning and air, sorry, air cooling units that push the air around the building, huge water tanks, you know, the sewage system, all sorts of stuff that such a tall building absolutely needs, but you don't want to see that stuff. So stick that in the building. There's space for parking 12 cars, very specific. So we needed to go down about three stories. And what we did was we put up what we call a sea camped piled wall. And for those who are not engineers in your audience and have never heard of that, what it means is that you basically put in some softer piles, which are big concrete columns that dig straight down into the ground. And then between the softer piles, you put in a hard. Pile. You're basically creating the walls of a bath, in a way. And then you can dig down in within that wall structure. And that structure is designed to keep the water out. There's a lot of ground water in London, because we're next to the river, keeps the water out. And the wall that we created the basement also, you know, really does reflect the shape of the site. So again, we were really maximising how much basement area we could get.

Dusty Rhodes  05:28
How do you need to think about the design of a foundation for a skyscraper in particular? I mean, a lot of people listening will be well used to buildings, you know, five, maybe 10 stories maximum here in Ireland. But when you're dealing with a building that's got almost 90 stories, what? What are the differences when designing the foundation? What are the considerations?

Roma Agrawal  05:47
I mean, the obvious one is that the loads are huge. So we've got, we've got a lot of loads coming down. So we really need to think about kind of the deep ground conditions. Now, I mentioned London River. The Shard is also very close to this river, and we have about 50 meters of clay. And clay is quite a changeable material. So when it's wet, it sort of shrinks down a little bit when it sorry, the other way around, when it's wet, it expands. When it's dry, it shrinks. And so there's this movement, this seasonal change that happens. So we really needed to think about that. So in the case of buildings that aren't that tall, you would be able to put a raft foundation in so big concrete slab, and you can place the building on top of it, and it sort of stays, you know, good enough, stable enough, but with the type of loads we were talking about with The Shard that just simply wouldn't have done the job. So what we needed to do was to make sure that our piled foundations were bearing or sitting on top of a very compressed, strong layer of what we call the Thanet sands. So if you imagine putting your finger on a table and pressing down on it, the table is just sort of receiving all that force that you're chucking onto it, and that's what the Thanet sans are doing for The Shard. So there's lots of different systems that have to work together to make sure that a big skyscraper stays stable. But also, yeah, does it doesn't settle or settle unevenly, because we definitely didn't want the leading tower of Shard to be happening.

Dusty Rhodes  07:20
And are there special considerations when you're building beside a river, there must be

Roma Agrawal  07:25
So the waterproof thing is, is very, very important. The groundwater is, is changeable, but it's pretty high, and we were definitely going meters and meters below the water table. So the pressure that the water table is putting onto the walls of the foundation increases as you go deeper and deeper. So not only do we need to make sure that we're holding the ground up and that the ground is not going to move too much, because that ground around The Shard was carrying a train station, a bus station, a hospital and all the numerous other buildings that live around London, there's a tube line not too far away. So we don't want that ground to move too much, and we need to keep the water out. So we had actually, you know, a few different layers of waterproofing redundancy to make sure that, yeah, even if water trickles did come in, there's a place for that to drain away.

Dusty Rhodes  08:18
And what about interacting with other people? Because, you know, you mentioned that there's a tube station other major facilities nearby. Did you have to interact directly with them to find out kind of the way those facilities were designed and to see what it was that you could and you could not do, or were you just kind of going it should be like this? And I imagine the former. Yeah,

Roma Agrawal  08:39
definitely the former. And people often ask me what my biggest challenge of working on The Shard was, and I think that's the answer, really is, you know, managing and working with all these different stakeholders, as we call them. And I spent nearly two years of my time on The Shard doing that, and that is one of the least glamorous bits of the project. So, you know, I did that. Then I did the foundations, which are super, really important, and then I did the pretty bit at the top, which I'm sure we'll talk about. But yes, in dealing with stakeholders, you know, we want to build this building. We want to make sure it's safe, and all the people around us want to make sure that their structures Stay safe, and that's a perfectly legitimate requirement. What was complicated in this case was how many different stakeholders we had. And I mean, that is fairly usual for, you know, big city sites. I think the scale of this building made everyone, perhaps a little bit more cautious, you know, again, rightly so, really looking at all the risks involved. So yeah, so we interacted with all these different stakeholders. And one of the things that I remember we did was we put about 1500 prisms, little ones all around the construction site, inside buildings, inside train stations, inside tube tunnels, and we had lasers pointing. At these prisms that and they caught, you know, they logged the x, y, z coordinates of all these, these prisms. And then, as we were digging the foundation, we were monitoring how much each of these points were moving, and we also had a prediction of how much we thought they would move, which was done by some very clever geotechnical engineers, and we had to keep an eye, you know, there was a system in place that if the movement on a prism went above what we expected, then there would be a ping, and we would need to go and check if this was okay. Is it going to recover? What's happening? And so that was interesting. I think there was a couple of people in my team, luckily, not me, that got a text message every time there was a ping. I don't think that would have been a very relaxing time for them.

Dusty Rhodes  10:53
Moving away from the foundation and kind of just thinking about going up the building literally. Can you tell us a little bit more, in a little bit more detail about the vertical and the horizontal forces which affect the overall stability of a skyscraper,

Roma Agrawal  11:07
sure. So it's the same as any other building or bridge that you might be dealing with, so wind and gravity. So you were lucky that in the UK, we don't need to design for earthquake loads, because that obviously makes things far more complicated. So we're primarily looking at wind and gravity, and we look at what's called accidental loads. So, you know, in the 1960s there was a building called Ronan point which suffered quite a bad collapse because a gas cylinder exploded in one of the flats. So we're looking at, you know, unusual loads like that. And then we're looking at ground movement, you know, how much is the ground going to shift and move underneath the building? We looked a little bit at temperature as well. So particularly for the spire, which is the very top of the building, because that was all exposed steel, we did a short, you know, little check on, well, how hot might the steel get, and how cold might it get, and, you know, how much might it therefore expand or contract into different seasons. But we didn't really find that there was much of an impact there. What's interesting to me, particularly, you know, I was a graduate engineer when I started on that project, was we have all these codes and regulations that we're using to design the building, but for the wind side of it, that stops at 100 meters and The Shard is 300 meters tall. So what normally happens is that, you know, there's two options. One is that you can do a software analysis of different wind loads. What we did was to get a specialized company to create. I think it was a one to 400 scale model of The Shard filled with wires and lots and lots of sensors on all the different faces of it. It's put onto a turntable and it's put into a wind tunnel. So in a similar way that you might test an f1 car to see how the wind or the air is aerodynamically flowing across this piece of engineering. We did the same to The Shard. So we twisted that turntable in 32 different positions around the circle. And we checked, is it 32 or 36 I don't know one of the two Well, 360 degrees,

Dusty Rhodes  13:16
so might be 36 every 10 degrees?

Roma Agrawal  13:18
Yeah, I was thinking about that. And then we basically measured what the wind forces were on the different faces of the building. And again, the taller you go, the higher and the more complex the wind forces can get. So we needed to check how much we expected the whole building to sway or to move under the worst case storm for 100 years. But we also needed to check that individual panels of glass didn't experience so much suction or pressure that they would crack. So we're looking at the wind on all these different scales,

Dusty Rhodes  13:58
and does the wind vary a lot? As you say, that means 300 meters tall. Does the wind vary a lot from, I would imagine it's different from at the top than what it will be at the ground. But are there many variations as you go up?

Roma Agrawal  14:12
So I mean, overall, you would get a fairly steady increase as you're going up. But that increase, the rate of that increase can increase so it can get sort of stronger and stronger and stronger a bit more suddenly, the the further up you get. And this is particularly important for the design of the spire again, which is, you know, the very top bit of the tower where you we had The Shards, you know, which is where the building gets its name. So these are big, long, cantilevered, so sort of free standing bits of steel and glass, which are essentially unsupported, and they're quite vulnerable to this deflection, to the movement that can happen from the fairly strong wind loads.

Dusty Rhodes  14:55
So what is holding them in place? Because you said it's not connected. It to the building. So

Roma Agrawal  15:00
I often describe it as a vertical diving board, or a diving board at a slight angle. So you've fixed one the bottom end of it, and then the other bit is, is flexible. And in this case, our diving board was made up of a steel frame. So we do have, you know, steel columns there. And we love triangles. You know, engineers, I've got a tattoo of a triangle on my finger. It's a really important shape in structural engineering. So we've created some triangular what we call trusses to try and help keep that stable, and then the glass is attached to that. So what we could do, in this case, particularly for that very top section, is make sure that the joints between the glass could take a little bit more movement than they needed to take elsewhere in the building. So we kind of anticipated that, yes, it will move more. There's more wind load, but let's design that in and make sure that the glass panels will be okay. So it's all sort of taken into account and put in there, into the design I've

Dusty Rhodes  16:00
heard with a couple of skyscrapers, especially when the group told they can actually move, like a number of inches, or even a number of feet, when, when it is particularly windy, is it the same as a shard?

Roma Agrawal  16:11
Absolutely. So I think children and also any grown ups that that aren't engineers, are always totally gobsmacked when I tell them that all structures move and that The Shard sways. So a building like The Shard, we predict might move about half a meter. So so it's not a huge amount, really for a tall building, but yes, it sways. What's key as a structural engineer is to make sure that we don't feel that. So if you think about when you're on an airplane, you're clearly traveling very fast, but if there's no turbulence, and you're just going at a steady speed, you don't feel like you're moving. However, when there's turbulence, you really feel it, because that's a sudden change in the speed that you're going, so you're kind of being buffeted, and so we just need to make sure that the building's not going to be buffeted in that way, that you know the accelerations that the human experiences in the building will be below a certain level, so you don't feel it in your gut. You don't feel seasick.

Dusty Rhodes  17:15
And tell me more about the spire, because it is possibly the part of the building that is most exposed to the elements and the most difficult to get at. How in your design were you thinking about combating corrosion and fatigue? Yeah, those are

Roma Agrawal  17:30
great questions. There was so many different things we have to think about. So we've talked a lot about the wind. Fatigue is a really interesting one. So fatigue is, again, for the non engineers out there, if you repeat the same motion again and again and again and again and again, then metal suffers from what we call fatigue and breaks what we so we did look at the fatigue for the spire. Fatigue is incredibly important on roads and in airplanes as two examples, because the number, so we look at the number of cycles, what is the number of times

Dusty Rhodes  18:05
that an aircraft takes off in lands? Yeah,

Roma Agrawal  18:07
yeah. And also, it's the wings. When it's being buffeted in the air, you have these, like, continuous, you know, massive cycles of the same joints being being subjected to fatigue. It's actually not the same in a skyscraper, because the wind forces on generally not that high. And then you have the odd storm, and then you have the odd very bad storm. You don't get the same number of cycles that you would for, say, an aircraft or for trucks driving over the same joint in a bridge. So we looked at it and figured out that actually, it's not going to be a problem here, but we still make sure that the grade of the steel we're using, the strength of the steel, you know, what mixtures it has in it, exactly what its composition is, is conducive to being exposed, first of all to the elements, but also being exposed to these cycles of movement. So it's all painted to, you know, with layers of paint that are specifically designed for being outdoors, and that, you know, will require a little bit of maintenance and touch up every 25 to 30 years. Go have a check see what's going on. But yeah,

Dusty Rhodes  19:20
I was, I'm fascinated to know how you get guys or ladies or people up there to maintain the spire. And it fascinates me in that I'm a radio guy. So I see these antennas, and there's always a light at the top of these 300-metre antennas, and I always go, who changes the bulb,

Roma Agrawal  19:43
not me. I can tell you that I do not like heights, which is ironic. I know don't like don't like heights. I very clearly remember actually climbing up from so it was level 69 to level 72 on a ladder. This was before the lifts and the stairs had gone in. Yeah. Yeah, and I don't think I've ever been more scared in my life. And I got to the top, and this was even before all the glass had gone in, so obviously there was lots of safety netting and all the things. But I got up there and I told the guy, I said, mate, I'm not coming down until the stairs are installed, because I'm just gonna sit here. How long is it gonna take? In a few months? Fine, I'm here for I'm here for the long run. Sorry, so you were saying about so what was really interesting, so it was not only the maintenance of the spire, but actually building the spire, right? Because you're sending people up quite high to do up bolts and nuts and bolts and get bits of steel in, and then the glass and everything. A lot of them are rock climbers or some sort of adrenaline junkie that train to fix steel so that they can basically get paid to do what they love. And isn't that just isn't that crazy? And I love that, because it's not the other way around. It's not the steel. I mean, sometimes, of course, it is that the steel fixes get trained up to go up and do these things at height. But it's also people going, I love, I love being hanging up from a harness 300 meters up in the air. Yeah, teach me how to do nuts and bolts and I'll go get paid for it. Yeah, not me. There's not enough money in the world for that.

Dusty Rhodes  21:13
Tell me, do you know much about the big now, you're the expert, but at the very top of the building and at the very bottom of the building, but the in between bit the actual building itself. I mean, there's offices and there's a hotel and there's apartments and everything in that. Do you know how each of those spaces influenced the choice of materials that was used? Yeah,

Roma Agrawal  21:32
absolutely. So I did spend one summer designing the steel beams for the office floor. Again, one of the less glamorous parts, I do have to say, the least glamorous thing I designed for The Shard, or you could say the most, was some steel to support marble urinals in the hotel. So you heard it here first, maybe not first, but you've had it here. So the yes, the different materials we used in the different bits of The Shard was actually quite an unusual thing to do. So most skyscrapers have a single use, so they're either offices or their hotels or their apartments. And then there are some big, mega skyscrapers around the world that do what The Shard does, which is a mix of all the above. Now, what we normally do in the UK is we use steel beams with a little concrete topping slab for Office floors, because you have bigger head, you know, headspace above you, the steel beams have holes in them, and offices require lots of ducts, so whether that's for cables and for, you know, air conditioning, for water and so on. And the second thing is that offices don't really need as much daylight. I guess you could have bigger floor plates, and there are bits which are farther away from windows, and that's kind of okay, whereas, if you're building an apartment building or a hotel, you want daylight, you want windows on every flat on or every room that you're dealing with, so that they tend to be smaller floor plates. First of all, they don't have as many services. You don't need as many ducts and so on. And you want good acoustic separation. So you don't want sound to be transmitting from one level to the next. So you tend to just go for a concrete slab. And what that does is it reduces how much space each floor takes up. So just to give you some numbers, for the office floors in The Shard, we they were 3.65 meters, if I remember correctly, because I am going back over a decade, whereas for the concrete floors for the hotel, it was around 3.2 meters, or 3.4 meters. So you've basically reducing you can squeeze more floors in essentially, you know, as you stack them up. So, so that's what we did. So we said, Well, if that's what we would have done in a separate building, why don't we do that on The Shard? So the office floors are lower down in the building, where the floor plates are bigger and they're made of steel, and then you go higher up, floor plates are smaller, they're made of concrete, and that's where the hotel goes. So just kind of actually very logical. When

Dusty Rhodes  24:05
it's explained to you, it's very logical. I hadn't, I hadn't thought about that before. Roma, you weren't the only one to work on The Shard. I'm just wondering, like, how

Roma Agrawal  24:14
many who told you otherwise,

Dusty Rhodes  24:18
you gave it away, or you said I'm not going to bow floor 76 tell me how many people in all Do you know? Did it take? Yeah,

Roma Agrawal  24:28
I mean, I only joke because, you know, it's obvious that engineers work in teams, and you can't do anything without 1000s of people in the case of The Shards. So you know, a lot of again, when I talk to young people, and even when I think about it myself, the complexity of the number of people with the different expertise that get involved in the building is kind of mind blowing. So I was in a team of structural engineers, which varied between, say, eight and 15 of us. Okay, so relatively small team. Then you had mechanical engineers. Electrical engineers, public health engineers. So you had all these engineers. Then you had all the architects, and there were two different practices working on it. And there was dozens of them. You had the quantity surveyors that look at the cost for everything. You have the contractors, obviously, that are building. And there were hundreds of them. There's the client, the developers, the hotel people, the office tenants. I mean, it just snowballs when you really think about how many people are involved. And then, of course, all the interiors, like, you know, the designing of all of that, and all the people working on site. So it was, you know, literally 1000s of people. And, yeah, I mean, for me, it was a once in a lifetime experience. I guess for most engineers working on a project like that, is a, is really a once in a lifetime experience?

Dusty Rhodes  25:44
Is that because of the building and the iconic design of it, or is it just sheer size of it that made it a once in a lifetime experience? Yeah,

Roma Agrawal  25:53
I think it's both. I think it's working with the team at Renzo Piano. You know, working with such incredible architects is is rare for so many. Well, such famous, big name, international architects can be quite rare. And yeah, we, I mean, it was a high stakes project in a way, and we had a very clear deadline that the outside of the building needed to be finished for the 2012 Olympics opening ceremony as well. So, so there was a bit of pressure on that as well.

Dusty Rhodes  26:22
Listen, let me ask you about because you said the amount of other consultants and architects and engineers that you're working with, and obviously you have to get on with people and all that kind of stuff. But for you, how did working with that number of people impact the design?

Roma Agrawal  26:37
So the way I think about it, so first of all, as a student, I don't think I ever understood how essential the skill of being able to work with other people is to be an engineer, and I think that's changed in the education since I was studying. So I think they're doing more group projects. They're doing more interdisciplinary projects at university to give students a taste of that I didn't have that to the same extent. So I came into work and went what, you know, I did a small project first, which was a very small team, and I think that was really good for me to just get, get my hands in, understand the engineering, the technical side, and have a bit of experience working with all other people. And then going onto The Shard was, you know, the other end of the scale, really, and it is absolutely crucial that you understand how to work with other people. You know, we were talking about some of the challenges on The Shard, so, yes, one of the big challenges working with all these different consultants is that everybody's got their own perspective on how, on what they need for the building and how to solve the problems. Okay? And I think what we have to keep reminding ourselves of is that we all have the same end goal. We all want this building to be built, and we want it to work well, okay, so, so that's the sort of umbrella under which we're all operating. And then within that, the structural engineers want to have nice, straight, consistent steel beams. The mechanical engineer wants lots of holes in my beams, not, you know, they're not my beams, in our beams to put the ducts through. And then, you know, the electrical engineer wants something else. And the quantity surveyors are saying, That's too expensive. What can we do to try and make this a little bit cheaper? The architects are saying, how do we make these nuts and bolts up in the spire look absolutely brilliant, the contractors are saying, but we need to build it safely. So I think, because it was The Shard, and we all really, really, really, were very motivated to make sure it was a great product. I actually think, you know, I'm not just saying this, we did work really well together. We had and also, I think the other thing that made a difference is we, because it was such a long project, and there were so many years spent on it, you know, we were working together for years on end, which also can sometimes be unusual. We were an international team, so I loved all the different perspectives that brought you know, there were practices based on Canada in the Netherlands, in Paris, in London, in Hong Kong, everywhere. So overall, I think we did well.

Dusty Rhodes  29:12
Do you have any particular story that you remember that can explain how something arose and you all work together to fix it?

Roma Agrawal  29:20
So one that comes to mind is, is how we constructed the basement. So we talked about the time scales that we were working to. So, you know, we've got this deadline. Cost, obviously, is always the forefront of everyone's mind, because budgets are really, really important, because you can't build a building if you just carry on increasing costs. And then we were also thinking about the ground movement, which we've discussed a little bit or a lot, and what we ended up doing so the structural engineers, the contractors and the quantity surveyors, the project managers, came together and said, you know, how can we build this building, or the base basement in particular, in a way that will help lead. Create some of these risks, you know. So we have this risk register with big red things going ground, movement, timescales, budgets, you know, how can we actually bring these and, you know, get some creativity out of it. And what we did was a method called top down construction. So that means we're building downwards and upwards at the same time. So in very, very short, we actually essentially built the ground floor slab first, and then we left a hole and dug underneath the base, you know, underneath the ground floor slab, while we started building upwards at the same time. And I, you know, I can spend an hour just explaining how that was done, so I'll spare you, but the upshot was that that technique had never been used before in a building of this size, and definitely not to construct the core of the building, which is the central spine of the building. And this required a lot of work between the structural engineers, project managers and the contractors to say, how can we logistically make this work in a way that's buildable safely to the budgets and time constraints, but that doesn't compromise the stability and the structure as you're doing it?

Dusty Rhodes  31:15
I want to move away from The Shard and just talk about kind of engineering and engineers in general, because, like, the team and the amount of people you said that were involved with that, and the quality of them and from all over the world, and you were, like, right in the center of that amazing. And then when you look at that, I mean, it is a feat of human engineering, you know, and any of those iconic buildings around the world are, why is it that we do not, in our society have engineers who are like rock stars? Do you know what I mean? It's kind of like, you know, kind of you two will go, Yeah, whatever bloody blood album was, that was our latest thing, you know. Why don't we look at The Shard and go, you know, such and such a person did that?

Roma Agrawal  31:58
Because, I guess one of the big reasons, which we've just discussed, is that it's not just one person that's done that, right? Like there is such a huge, massive team that gets involved in it. So you tend to have the starchitects, as they're called. So we might know Renzo Piano was the architect, or we might know Norman Foster built this other thing, or David Chipperfield built that. So we tend to know the names of the architects more. But again, they work in huge teams, and again, it's never one person that's created something. So I think, I think there's that, I think culturally, something has really shifted, particularly in the UK. If you think 250 years ago with the Victorian engineers, you know, Brunel was a rock star. I'm not sure he was the nicest of men from what I hear, but he was certainly a rock star in the sense that people knew who he was, and he was very good at PR, from what what we can understand by today's standards, you know, he knew the politicians. He knew funders. He went out there, got fancy pictures taken of himself and invited famous people to the opening of things that he did, or particular thing so he knew how to play the game as it were, and then we seem to have lost that at some point. And it's a very complicated I don't know if anyone really fully understands why that's the case, but I grew up in India, so I spent 10 years of my very formative childhood there, and being an engineer, there is the thing people aspire, or definitely parents aspire for their kids to become now,

Dusty Rhodes  33:27
let me ask you about that. Would you say that it's the same in the in the UK, that parents aspire for their kids to become engineers? Or it's absolutely

Roma Agrawal  33:36
not, no, no. So there's a bit cultural difference.

Dusty Rhodes  33:39
Is it? Is it just the money where they go? Ah, engineering, good money in that, or is there something else behind it?

Roma Agrawal  33:45
I mean, it can't be that simple, because engineers can make decent money in the UK as well, and it's a good steady job and and, you know, technology is always flying forward and all of this. So it can't just be that. One of my theories is, growing up in India, your science education is more emphasized, whereas I think in the UK, it can be the other way around. So I always loved math, science, physics. That was like, yeah, that's that's fine. That's normal. And actually, you know, potentially to the detriment of history and English and literature and so on. So I studied all that stuff, but I don't think I was ever massively inspired by it, and so I barely did any writing until I was in my 30s. So and I think over here, it's sort of the other way around. I think maybe perhaps it's a rapidly developing country, India. So you see roads being built, buildings being built, bridges going up. And so you understand that, Oh, wow. You know, there's engineers responsible for making these big changes to our lives, whereas in the UK, I think we generally see it as being noisy and a nuisance construction, which can be no doubt. And the thing that I always say is the only time I ever hear the word engineering art in public. Think is when your train is delayed because of engineering work. So there's not a nice connotation to that. I think, yeah, it's, I mean, it's a complicated cultural situation. And then, you know, we could talk about the whole gender thing, which is a whole other topic that,

Dusty Rhodes  35:17
listen, it just amazes me, because everybody's going on about, you know, kind of engineering, and they can't get enough engineers yet. You know, the whole industry is so male dominated. It's like, imagine if you just had the same amount of women coming into the business. Then we'd have more engineers than, well, maybe not that we need, but we'd certainly have plenty of them. But I think it's interesting what you say about India being a fast growing country, and there's a lot of construction and everything going on around you, do you think maybe it's a case then of you cannot be what you cannot see. So when you were growing up, you were seeing all of these constructions going up and engineers putting it all together and figuring out all the problems. And because of that, it made more sense to you to get into

Roma Agrawal  35:59
it, possibly. But it's also just talked about more in everyday life. And in fact, what you'll find in India is that there are comedians or actors or artists or dancers who said, Oh, yeah, my parents forced me to become an engineer. Made me do engineering, and then I've my rebellion is to get away from that and become a comedian or something, whereas it's almost the opposite here, where, you know, the rebellious thing, especially for a girl, to do, is to become an engineer. So it's all it's very cultural. I think that's an important thing to remember. And somebody told me, and I think this is correct, that 70% of computer science or computer engineering. Software Engineering undergraduates in Iran are women. If you go to places like Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea, there are a lot of women studying maths and physics and so on. So it's a cultural thing. I have a little girl who's now five, and when she was a baby, I wanted to buy her digger onesies, like I wanted pictures of construction vehicles on on her clothes. So where did I have to go? I had to go to the boys section. So, you know, from the minute they're born, we've decided some kind of stereotype or part for them, and then where, you know, consciously and unconsciously filling their heads with that nonsense. No, when you

Dusty Rhodes  37:24
say that, that reminds me of my childhood, which was a long time ago, but I find it absolutely amazing, and not in a good way, that life is still like that. It's like little lady bird books. I want to be an engineer, and I bet you it's a blue color on the cover. Yes, that's just bananas. Listen, but affecting change. Okay, so you you've grown up in a different culture, and now you kind of overhear more Western European things. What would you say to engineers who are listening today? How can they change people's perceptions of engineering?

Roma Agrawal  37:57
I think just talk about your work in an excited way. I think being enthusiastic about what you do is a big thing. I think we're all too modest. I think, you know, we we say, oh, yeah, I just, I just did a little bit of work on this little thing. Yeah, I'm, you know, I'm this type of engineer. And we just, we just do little robots that may solve cancer one day or, you know, we don't really know, we're not really sure. I just think people should be, you know, they're passionate about their work, that's why they're doing it. So I would really love for engineers to share that passion, and that could just be with their families. It could be with young people in their lives. It could be with their children's schools. It could be people that they meet at a dinner party. I think just, first of all, just talking about engineering in everyday life is great. You know, we talk about books, don't we? We talk about music, talk about this as well.

Dusty Rhodes  38:46
Engineering. I picked up a little networking tip that I never thought would work, and I've put it in place since, and it works a treat, and it relates directly to what you've just said, and that is, when you're at an event or something, just kind of go you're talking, how you doing? Oh, yeah. So what's your name? Where are you working for? So what's the big problem wrecking your head this week? And it's amazing that people, oh, man, I'm working on this building, or they come out and they actually tell you, it's really interesting. So I think that's good. What you say about people with engineering, and you can kind of go, Matt, I had a really interesting problem this week because they gave me a lump of steel and they said, support this marble urinal. That kind of a way, like, you know. How did you do that? Like, you know, so, so, that kind of a way. Listen. Let me wrap up by asking you about a pivot, because all of this talk of engineering you've gotten out of the game. You terrible woman, you've decided to pivot. You're in a you've become a writer and a public speaker and a podcaster. Tell me. Tell me about the books that you've written. Yeah,

Roma Agrawal  39:53
I've unfortunately become that statistic of the woman in her mid 30s that has a child and quits her engineering job.

Dusty Rhodes  39:59
Ah. Yeah, is that? Is that why you do this? Because you said, I want more time and I want to be at home and family is more important for now?

Roma Agrawal  40:06
No, it's much more complicated than that, actually, because the pandemic had hit at the same time, and also I had written two books while I was working as an engineer, and I didn't think I could do pandemic new baby, write and be an engineer. I thought four things was a bit too much for me, so I said, I need to pick three of these things. So so the book, the writing, became the focus. And I said, I'll give myself a year, and it's now been five. So yeah, so I stopped the formal engineering practice five years ago, but I'm very much still in the world. So I've now published four books about engineering. Two of them are for adults, two of them are for children. They are aimed at the general audience. So when we were talking about engineers sharing excitedly what they've been doing, that all comes down to storytelling for me, and I think as somebody in radio, you'll know all about that. You know, we you know, how do you tell stories? How do you keep an audience script? How do you create that tension? Find beautiful, historical things that are relevant to people's lives today. And so my first book, which is called built, is about how we've built our world. You know, what are the stories that hide behind the structures that we can see all around us. So I've talked about how the ancient Chinese mixed sticky rice into their mortar to create a slightly more flexible mix, or how the ancient Romans created those watertight areas to create their foundations. And you know, we did that on a huge scale, on The Shard, and engineers love it, because we haven't studied history during our degrees, and what I've done is to give them an opportunity to dig into that, why things are the way they are now, and what are the social impacts of things. And non engineers just go, Wow, I love the history and all that stuff, but this science stuff's really fun as well. So built, then came out as how was that built for children? And then I started my most recent adult book, which is called nuts and bolts, just as the pandemic hit. And that's about seven small inventions that change the world. So, you know, tiny inventions that turn make our world work. So I really wanted to explore the very, very complex stories of simple things like the nail. So I have seven inventions that I picked, and I've explored them, and it's a very global book. And then, most recently, just a couple of months ago, the children's version of that came out, and that's called seven small inventions that changed the world. And I'm working on my next two as we speak.

Dusty Rhodes  42:40
Wow. And you also have done a podcast as well, which I listened to. And the reason I mentioned that is, well, as a podcaster, I have to compliment you and say that that is one of the highest qualities podcasts I've ever heard very few people tackle documentary and that storytelling thing, and you did it very well. But also the topic of the first episode of the podcast with Roma is The Shard, and she goes into a lot more detail about the building and how it was built. So we'll put more details on that in the show notes for you. Of course, if you'd like to find out more about Roma Agrawal and some of the topics that we spoke about today, you'll find notes, and we've got link details and LinkedIn and all that kind of stuff in the description area of the podcast as well for you. But for now, Roma, thank you so much for sharing so much with us today.

Roma Agrawal  43:24
Oh, it's been a total joy. Thank you for having me.

Dusty Rhodes  43:26
If you enjoyed our podcast today, please do share with a friend in the business. Just tell them to search for Engineers Ireland in their podcast player. The podcast is produced by dustpod.io for Engineers Ireland, for advanced episodes, more information on engineering or career development opportunities that there are libraries of information on the website engineersisland.ie. Until next time from myself, Dusty Rhodes. Thank you for listening.
 

Louise on Linkedin - https://www.linkedin.com/in/louise-o-flanagan-3a12ba3a/
EirGrid Website - https://www.eirgrid.ie/ 

MORE INFORMATION
Looking for ways to explore or advance a career in the field of engineering? Visit Engineers Ireland to learn more about the many programs and resources on offer. https://www.engineersireland.ie/  

Engineers Journal AMPLIFIED is produced by DustPod.io for Engineers Ireland.

QUOTES
"Leadership is one part of project management. Leadership is about getting people to buy into what you want to deliver and to want to help and assist you in that."

"There is definitely a shortage of female engineers in Ireland. 23% of engineers coming out of university are female and that drops to about 12% actually entering into the workforce. EirGrid have a very active graduate program where you'd see 50% of our graduates are female."

"As an engineer, you can have the most perfect plan on paper. But unless you actually meaningfully engage with your stakeholders, that may be where that plan will stay. On paper."

"It's what a lot of engineers’ face when they're delivering infrastructure projects. First, you need to explain what the need of the project is, but then also listen and take on board that feedback. You must engage with the community."

KEYWORDS

#engineering #renewable #grid #womeninengineering #eirgrid

TRANSCRIPTION

For your convenience, we include an automated AI transcription

Dusty Rhodes  0:00 
Right now on Amplified, lessons learned from an engineer leading the charge for renewable energy in Ireland.

Louise O'Flanagan  0:05 
You know, as an engineer, you can have the most perfect plan on paper, but unless you actually meaningfully engage with your stakeholders, that's maybe where that plan will stay. On paper. It's one lesson that I took away and I've learnt a lot from that experience.

Dusty Rhodes  0:21 
Hi there. My name is Dusty Rhodes, and welcome to Amplified, the Engineers Journal podcast.
Energy demands are skyrocketing and the system needs upgrading. But how are we ensuring a reliable electricity supply and embracing renewable resources today, we're joined by a principal engineer who will share EirGrids ambitious plans to transform the power system and accommodate 80% renewable energy by 2030. She'll also fill us in on the vital role of engineers in this transformation, the complexities of integrating renewable energy and overcoming regulatory hurdles. It’s a pleasure to welcome a Fellow of Engineers Ireland and a leader with two decades of experience in this field, where today she is Head of Engineering at EirGrid, Louis O’Flanagan. You're very welcome.

Louise O'Flanagan  1:09 
Hi, Dusty. How are you really nice to talk to you.

Dusty Rhodes  1:15 
Let me start off with asking about the role of Head of Engineering, for those who may not be familiar with it, what is the Head of Engineering in EirGrid? What does it entail?

Louise O'Flanagan  1:27 
So my role is, I'm within our infrastructure department, and my main focus is providing engineering teams to oversee the delivery of grid infrastructure. And that kind of encompasses setting the standards, the specifications that infrastructure needs to be built to so it can be part, become part of the grid. We've teams of engineers that go out to site or review designs to make sure they're adhering to those standards. And I also have a team that look after asset management. And so that's the grid that's already built. How are we maintaining that is the coming to end of life? Do we need to replace it and refurbish it? So really take care of the grid that we already have, and the teams that we have look after both the grid that's onshore and what will be the new grid that's going to be built offshore to facilitate offshore wind.

Dusty Rhodes  2:10 
One of the things I hear about the grid is problems with getting new renewable energy sources onto the grid in the first place, and because you literally have to make Hey, while the sun shines, what do you do when you have a surplus? How do you how do you store that electricity? What's the thinking on that problem?

Louise O'Flanagan  2:27 
So there's a few things that we can do to support that. So one is, we want to make sure that we have a balance of what's called thermal or conventional generation on the grid. That's kind of the base that we have there, and then we'll have renewables that will be supplying at other times. But you're right, sometimes we are going to have surplus renewables on the grid, and what we want to do there is we want to interconnect to other countries, to other grids, and be able to export that energy when we have a surplus in Ireland. And obviously, the converse of that is when we don't have sufficient renewables being generated on our grid here, we can import we also are looking at, you know, other technologies, such as batteries that can store some of that energy now that still has to go to such a large scale that we would that we can depend on it solely for that purpose. So we'll still remain to be a mix. And there's also other things that need to be brought in as well. So it's not just a case that we can say, once we do all those things, that's it, when we walk away, we need to be able to support the grid as well and make it stable. So there's technologies such as synchronous condensers that need to be built onto the grid as well. And so it's air grid's job to make sure that we have a balance of generation to meet demand. We don't actually generate anything ourselves, but just to make sure that we're planning and developing that grid to accommodate it and then to operate it so that it does remain secure.

Dusty Rhodes  3:41 
So with your engineers hat on and your genius problem solving, when you look at the storage of electricity, what is it that are you actually working on anything at the moment? What are the ideas being floated around?

Louise O'Flanagan  3:55 
In 2021 we launched our roadmap called shaping our electricity future, and that set out how we were going to achieve a grid that was capable at that point, 70% renewables, and now we're looking at 80% renewables, and that's bringing on about 17 gigawatts of renewables in the next 10 years onto the grid that's going to be a mix of wind, of solar, of offshore wind, of battery storage to be able to support that and and it's not just about building new grid to do that, it's about using the existing grid that we have already. And you mentioned some of that grid is quite old, and it is so it's going to be a combination of where we can use our existing grid, make it work harder, make it work smarter. Is it capable of carrying more and deploying new technology to try and do that? Make it work differently, to try and also then incorporate technology to make the grid operate in different ways. So we have a number of initiatives such as dynamic line ratings. So that's looking how, say an overhead line is operating in real time, as opposed to assuming a certain value of what the capacity is of the line. We have other technologies, such as power flow controllers that will actually make the. Power flow through different circuits, through different routes on the grid, to try and reduce some of the, you know, the constraints that we have, or the congestion that we have on the grid. So it's not just one single thing that will make us achieve that. It's a series of different steps that, in combination, will help us to get to those targets that have been set. We'll also need to build new grid that is also there. That's a need that we have. So we need to build more transmission lines, more substations, as we realize that growth over the next 10 years as well. So it's not just a combination bringing on renewables. We're also seeing growth in demand on the island, and we have new interconnectors that are going to be built over to France. EirGrid is progressing, which should be energized in 2026 that's the Celtic interconnector project, and we'll have another one to the UK. That's a green link project. So there's a lot happening on the grid right now. And in fact, if I look at just even Dublin, which is where I live, we have a initiative called the pairing up Dublin scheme, and that is essentially replacing older cables on our grid. They're about 40 to 50 or 60 years old, those cables, so they've come to end of life, and they need to be replaced. But there's an added benefit that the cables that we now replace them with, well, they're going to be newer technology. They're going to be higher capacity, and it means that we can have that added benefit of not just replacing the old cables, but the new cables that come in are going to help us reach that demand growth in Dublin and also help us move renewable energy around the grid. So the renewable energy that's going to come, say from the west of Ireland, and indeed, the offshore wind that's off the east coast of Ireland as well. So it's a really great way of trying to make the grid work in different ways and make most of it, and that's where our network planners come into that picture and try and set out how that roadmap will be developed.

Dusty Rhodes  6:39 
And because, I mean, what I hear is that, you know, the air grid, the whole grid needs, it's been there for 100 years, and we need to put a new one in, all right, that now, that's my uneducated view of what I'm hearing. And you mentioned about certain parts of the grid reaching end of life, which, of course, it does, yeah, roughly, if you were to throw a percentage on it, all right? And I'll say that. I'm not going to quote you on this, because I can ask for statistics. But do you think like we're at a stage where half of the grid needs to be replaced, or a quarter of it needs to or all of it needs to be replaced? No,

Louise O'Flanagan  7:13 
It's nothing like that. I mean, what we have is we've had different stages of building the grid depending on what was needed. You know, we would have had large generation plans, say, built in the 80s or the 90s. And then, you know, when we had 2020 targets, we had a significant amount of grid built again to accommodate that, to get to 40% renewables. There's been a huge amount of investment on the grid. This is just an increased step change, and we're going to be investing billions of euros in developing new grid. I mean, at the moment, we probably have in the region of 200 substations, and there's about 7500 kilometers of circuit. And we estimate that within the next 10 years, we're probably going to see an increase of that number by about 30% of new assets onto the grid. So it's quite a considerable increase. And as I said, where we have, maybe some of the circuits that are older and that we want to replace them, we're going to replace that with newer technology so we can make the most of the grid that we already have.

Dusty Rhodes  8:09 
How do you approach that problem, then, of asset management and innovation? Because firstly, you're you're looking at what's there, what you might need, and then you're looking at what you have now. And I mean, it's terrific looking at new technology, but not all of it is going to be here in 10 years time. Do you know what I mean? Something else would have come along to replace it. So when you're when you're thinking about asset management and innovation, what is the little checklist of things that you do off in your head?

Louise O'Flanagan  8:36 
Well, for me, it goes right back to the start of what is our obligation? It's a license obligation, statutory application, safe, secure, reliable transmission system. And when you're making that investment decision, and when you're making decisions about replacing existing assets, that's what I would have in the back of my mind. Is what we're doing like, are we achieving those objectives right now, or do we need something new to do that? And will it do that in 10 years time? Will it be able to do it in 20 or 30 or 40 years time? And that's the horizon that you're looking at. Like we need to build grid to last, because it takes quite a long time to deliver like by the time we go through planning, what's needed then actually engaging with our stakeholders, with communities, with landowners, and delivering that infrastructure, going into planning process, and then we work very closely with ESB networks for the delivery side of it. It can take quite a number of years to deliver on that infrastructure. So we want to make sure that what we're deciding on is built to last for decades, and it is that kind of future generations that we're thinking of and when we have that purpose in mind.

Dusty Rhodes  9:40 
So then, when you were thinking about what you have to do, say 2025, next year. Okay, what's your own biggest personal challenges you're thinking about for next year? You go, Oh, God, I have to sort this.

Louise O'Flanagan  9:54 
What is immediately ahead of me in the short term is about some of the newer projects that we. Want to deliver over, say, in the West of Ireland, so the North conic projects and we have deployment of new technology onto the grid. But also we'll be looking at what are those, say, circuits or substations that now need to be revisited and see if they're operating correctly or if they come to end of life. So it'll start to look at what that portfolio for the future brings, and also the accommodation of offshore wind. Because, you know, the target is to get five gigawatts of offshore wind connected by 2030 and so that is a very short timeframe in which we need to get all of these projects moving. The first round of them are going to be delivered by developers with their grid delivering a second round on the south coast. So there's a huge focus on offshore wind, it really offers up a step change for us, for Ireland in achieving those renewable targets of 80% so that's probably what the next year will look like for me anyway, and for my colleagues, keeping in mind

Dusty Rhodes  10:52 
that Ireland is aiming to have 80% of the electricity generated by 2030 there's one point that I always here where it's a clog point in any major project or infrastructure or whatever it is, and it's always the planning system. It's a bottleneck, and it's a bottleneck for renewable energy projects as well as anything else. Is this causing any concern for future proofing the grid?

Louise O'Flanagan  11:18 
I think what the planning system is seeing is there's quite a lot of infrastructure being built at the moment and being going through the planning system. So not just for grid, but, you know, there's lots of other projects that are also being submitted at the moment, as well as housing and growth. So it's quite a considerable amount of economic growth in Ireland at the moment, we're seeing lots of projects being progressed. So I think what EirGrid can try and do to support that is when we bring projects to the consenting stage, is that we've, you know, we've done a lot of our done a lot of work before we even get to that stage, in terms of looking at what the options are in front of us, seeing what is the best option that we have, engaging, as I said, with stakeholders and landowners and communities, so that we have really engaged them, told them about the project, taken on board, their feedback, so that when we do get into the planning system, that we have done a huge amount of work of understanding what is the best project that we can bring forward.

Dusty Rhodes  12:15 
The reason I ask that is because when you feel like you're an ordinary engineer and you're going through this planning system, then you're looking, well, air grid wouldn't have that problem because they're enormous, so it's just kind of nice to hear they use the same problems as the rest of us.

Louise O'Flanagan  12:29 
We would factor it in, I suppose it's factoring in that timeline in. When I'm talking about those delivery timelines, we'd have already considered that it might take about 12 months for us to come through the planning system,

Dusty Rhodes  12:41 
You were telling me before we came on the podcast, and I thought it was a great story, and it was a case study that we were chatting about, and it's all to do with the planning system and talking to people, and this whole thing about a substation in Ireland where where you were going to locate it, and, and you kind of thought, yeah, substation. Who cares? But that wasn't the case. What happened?

Louise O'Flanagan  13:04 
Yeah, it's, it was one, when we were chatting about it, I was, you know, I thought about, it's one of the first projects I took on when I joined air grid. So it's going back maybe about 12 years. This project had quite a remote area of Ireland, the West of Ireland, in terms of infrastructure be built. It was quite modest, you know, a substation. It's all enclosed within a building. You can't actually see much of the electrical infrastructure. And was going to connect into an existing overhead line. So I suppose, from my perspective, I thought it was going to be quite a short project, and quite maybe quickly into delivery. And as always, we engage with our communities when we're going to deliver infrastructure. And it was really interesting actually. Then when we went out and we started talking to kind of local community, we realised actually they had quite a lot of interest in the project. Some of it was concerns, some of it was positive, and some of us actually just wondering about what this meant, and trying to make people bring them on this journey of this is to connect renewable energy. This is what our targets are and what that would mean for their area. And I suppose initially there was, as I said, there was some concerns about this, and it's probably what a lot of engineers might face when they're delivering infrastructure projects. And you engage with the community. First is you need to explain what the need of the project is, but then also listen and take on board that feedback, and what the community asked us was, could we look at some of the other options? And some of the options we had ruled out because they were maybe more technically challenging or had maybe more environmental management for us to contend with. We did get that commitment. We said, we'll go back and look at it. So through, I suppose, a period of maybe 12 months, we looked at other options that were available. Some of them, we still realised, but there was one that we said, look, actually, we might be able to take this further. And we had a look at that. And bearing in mind, there's, you know, wind farms that are waiting to connect into it. So there's still a need to progress the project and keep momentum going. But ultimately, what we were able to do as a project team through engaging with our oncologists. With geotechnical engineers, with electrical engineers, we did come up with another option, and we were able to move the substation further away. And I think overall, when it went into the planning system itself, what I found really interesting was there wasn't a single objection to the project. In fact, I actually, you know, actually got a letter of support from that community for the engagement that we'd had on the project. And what it really taught me was, you know, as an engineer, you can have the most perfect plan on paper, but unless you actually meaningfully engage with your stakeholders and communities, that's maybe where that plan will stay, possibly is on paper. And actually, you know, it's one that I took away, and I've learned a lot from that experience.

Dusty Rhodes  15:40 
Louise, let me ask you a little bit about yourself. How did you get into engineering in the first place? You've got a great passion for it.

Louise O'Flanagan  15:48 
I think that, I think that passion has developed over the last 20 years of being an engineer. It was certainly not something that I had ever considered when I was in secondary school, it was a teacher of mine, and she recommended it to me. She said, You know, you're good at maths. You really like science. I know you'd like a profession and you want to help people. Would you consider engineering? And I said to her, No, I've never considered it. I'll go find out more. And it probably wasn't that I constantly said, I you know, I wouldn't be an engineer, but I just didn't know anybody. I didn't know any previous, past pupils that I'd gone on to study engineering. I didn't know anybody's sister that had gone on the engineering I definitely knew some of my friends' brothers had gone on. And so maybe just on some level, I just hadn't considered it as a career path. And then when I got it, I applied to to a number of different colleges, and I got offered a place in UCD. And even when I got there, I wouldn't say it was a passion for it. You know, it's quite overwhelming when you start in engineering, because there's so many different subjects, it's a really broad area to study. But what I found was, in particular, there was this one project that really stood out for me. It was called biosystems for engineering, and it's quite different. And I know it just clicked it when I said I really like this, and I'd like to study more subjects like this. So I looked at what were my options you have to in second year, pick where you might go next. And I realized that the lecturers for those particular subjects were mostly in civil engineering in RSF, terrorists. So that's how I decided to pursue a career in civil engineering in particular. And even as I went through my studies in civil engineering, I kept going towards those subjects that are in the environment were around water hydrology, water treatment, around infrastructure, and that's what ignited that passion in me. So I really just kind of made sure that I kind of followed my own path through to come out with something that I was really interested in,

Dusty Rhodes  17:39 
And you were just exposing yourself to or you were being exposed to lots of different things, and you just followed what interested you. So what was it then that drew you into the energy space?

Louise O'Flanagan  17:49 
Well, initially I started in the water sector, and I spent nine years working as an engineering consultancy in the UK. In Ireland, I worked in with different local authorities around Ireland. I spent a year in Mayo, and me working on different projects of Wicklow and Waterford. And in about 2011 in 2010 I could see that there was really with the economic downturn, going to be a delay in a lot of those projects moving forward. And I was looking around what next is Ireland's biggest challenge? And that's when I happened to cross what Ireland, what ergrid were doing, and it just, once again, just resonated with me, this idea that engineers could bring about solutions and to be part of that solution that need for new infrastructure, and I had a lot of experience in delivering for the water sector, that I could bring their transferable skills over to the energy sector. And that's where I've stayed now for the last 13 years, and that's where my passion is, that idea that you can leave a very sustainable legacy, a very positive legacy, in what you're doing as an engineer.

Dusty Rhodes  18:50 
You mentioned that when engineering was suggested to you, you didn't know any of your own cohort who had gone for it, but you knew some people's brothers and whatever had gone for it, something that you're very passionate about is women in engineering, in your role at the moment, what is the important thing about the shortage of female engineers in Ireland?

Louise O'Flanagan  19:09 
I think firstly, there is a shortage of engineers in Ireland, and then there is definitely a shortage of female engineers in Ireland. I think this is just six hour that about 23% of engineers coming out of university are female, and that drops significantly to about 12% actually entering into the workforce. So but there's huge programs to try and encourage young girls and women into STEM subjects such as engineering. You know, employers such as EirGrid Take a very positive view of trying to encourage engineers to take to encourage women to take up engineering as a profession. In fact, we have a very active graduate program where you'd see, maybe, you know, 50% of our graduates are female, and to try and support that, but it is certainly a stark figure I'd like to. Think that you know other people might follow maybe a similar path that I have, or see that it can be done. I actually heard someone at a conference recently saying you can't be what you can't see. So if you don't see someone that has gone on to take up a more senior role in an organization or as an engineer, if you're maybe earlier in your career, it might not be such a clear path for you.

Dusty Rhodes  20:23 
Now, a lot of people might be looking at you because you're the first female as the Head of Engineering in EirGrid. What does that mean to you?

Louise O'Flanagan  20:30 
I'd like to think once again, there's a there's an opportunity to be a role model and to show that you can take up a senior level position, a senior leadership position within an organisation that is technical. I don't need to have all the technical experience. I need to make sure that I have technical experts in their field as part of that team, and that will be made up, you know, of people that have different disciplines, and diversity is key to it. It's not like you just want to say it's just gender. It's about really supporting diversity on a team, and that's where that collaboration and that different perspectives is really born out. But certainly, I think being female Head of Engineering and asset management does show that you know, this is something that is achievable. If you want to go down this route and go into a leadership role or go into a management role, but still have a technical aspect to to your to your career. And what

Dusty Rhodes  21:26 
Do you think holds women back from careers in engineering in general?

Louise O'Flanagan  21:29 
I think for maybe, maybe for some girls and women, it's like what I went back to at the start, if there isn't a significant number maybe going forward from your class, or that you don't know a lot of your peers that are going forward, you might not, maybe consider it as an obvious choice. So that's why I think the Steps program is really good. And then you know, when you go then through university, as to where do I go next? And I think that's really good if you're coming out of university, is go which employers are the ones that are actually promoting diversity, that are actually genuine and incredible about offering up diversity in the workplace, and the numbers speak for themselves. And as I said, it is challenging, with only 23% of graduates actually being female to make sure that then that organisation encourages female participation in the workplace. Then there's other stages of life that might become more difficult, with families, et cetera, or people having caring roles, and that can disproportionately affect women. But certainly, I'd like to think that if you've, you know you've if that's something that you want to achieve and you want to go on, then you will find the right balance, and there are good employers out there that will support you in that.

Dusty Rhodes  22:34 
I love how you use the word diversity, because you need people of different backgrounds, different skills, different education, different nationalities, different genders, is just another thing on that list. Like, you know, if you were speaking to a female engineer, and I'm sure you probably do, who's feeling a little stuck in her career, and it's kind of, what advice do you give them?

Louise O'Flanagan  22:58 
I think it's for me, it's by finding that passion, what do you enjoy doing, and then finding a balance to make it work for you, if you have a clearer idea where you want to go, and you can see a path, or maybe there's someone just that little bit ahead of you on that path, and then you can get they turn to them and ask them for advice, ask them for feedback. And also, it's not that men don't have a role to play. I think men are very supportive of encouraging diversity and current aging, encouraging gender diversity, and supporting women to going on further in their careers. And it's about normalizing the fact that in those caring roles, it might also be, you know, a man that has to take on his caring roles. And it's just normalizing it for everyone. I think that's a really positive part of it. But certainly, if, if there was a woman joining my team, and I do have a few, I would certainly say, go for what ignites the past in you. Go follow that. You might have to take a little break here and there as other commitments come up in your life, but just try and find a way back in if that's something that you want to do.

Dusty Rhodes  23:58 
And that's just brilliant advice in in general to anybody, I think is something that I've definitely found to be true in my own life, my own career. I want to get back to EirGrid, because I'm thinking about what you said earlier, about many of the projects that you're working on at the moment, or, sorry, many of the projects which are being worked on at the moment, because you don't generate the electricity. You just get it from A to B. There's a lot of wind, solar sites that are being located. And you've mentioned the west of Ireland a number of times. What plans does air grid have to improve how we're getting power from the west of Ireland to the east coast, where the majority of the population are, or to anywhere else in the country, you know what I mean?

Louise O'Flanagan  24:41 
Yeah, no. So, as I mentioned before, when we looked at what the government targets were initially of 70% and onto the 80% we knew that we needed to create a plan of how we were going to achieve that. And there was a roadmap put in place, which is called shaping our electricity future. As I mentioned previous. And we had a huge amount of engagement with industry, with stakeholders, with communities, with local authorities, to explain what the need was and how, what did they think we could do to achieve that? And part of that is what's called a plan led approach so that synergy between where do we have capacity on the grid and where could we place renewables? Or where do we where should we consider demand? So it's really, once again, using that grid in a smarter way than just saying, Okay, we'll just keep building in the one place and try and build more grid to get it from A to B. Is say, well, actually in location C, we have capacity there. And so why? You know that would be a really clear thing. Let's say, What about considering locating wind farms or solar farms or offshore wind in that location, because that's currently where we have capacity on our grid, and then also signaling that this area actually does need reinforcement. We will need to build grid here to support that. And that will take some time, and this is our timeline to do it. It's also about looking at the technologies that I mentioned previously and deploying them throughout different parts of the grid to try and make it work differently. So it's looking at the grid is one thing. It's not separate grids. It's one grid for the whole island, so to see how that operates all together. And so a huge amount of growth on the East Coast, and as you mentioned, we have renewables on the west coast, but what I see as a major step change is offshore wind, because that's now located on the east coast. And you know, there's, you know, maybe three to four gigawatts of offshore wind being planned at the moment for the east coast of Ireland, and that's right off the coast of Dublin. So I think that really is a big change of where we can see generation, renewable generation right on our doorstep. For those that live in Dublin, it's not going to mean that we don't need the other onshore wind that's going to be built in other locations, or the solar energy that's going to be built maybe in the south or other areas, such as the South Coast, for offshore which we need it all. But it's around that. How do we plan it out better in that systematic way?

Dusty Rhodes  27:01 
And it's a very doable thing, because you only have to go on your holidays and realize how big other countries are. And then you come back to our little rock just on the precipice of the Atlantic, and you kind of go, if I drive for more than three hours, I'm going to drown. So it's going to be, it sounds like a huge project. Go West Coast to East Coast, but when you think about it anyways, that's that's a whole other thing. Listen. Louise, I wanted to ask you about, like a lot of engineers, listen to the podcast, who are working in very various engineering firms around the country. You have their ear at the moment. What would you like to say to them in relation to their work and air grid and connecting with air grid, or planning to work with air grid, and what's coming in the next few years?

Louise O'Flanagan  27:50 
Well, I think probably what I've outlined to you just, you could probably imagine there's, there's quite a considerable amount of work in transforming air grids, power system, you know, for generations to come. And this isn't going to be something that's delivered tomorrow or the year after, so we need a huge number of professionals to join us in that challenge. So it could be engineers, ecologists, planners. So, you know, I think if anybody was listening and they wanted to be part of that story, that they're interested in that journey that we're going on look, that are interested in the like sustainability and leaving a very positive legacy. And actually, you know, I talk to people from around the world, and it's really interesting, the number of people that I talk to, of engineers, are saying, I want to make a positive difference, particularly around climate change, and they see this as one of the biggest global threats that we have. And they look at Ireland, they look at air grid, and they tell me, what you're doing there is so transformational that it's so different, that they want to come and join us and be part of that. So maybe that's what I would say. If anybody is listening and they think that's something that they'd like to contribute to or be part of that, I'd maybe suggest even check out our website. We've lots of lots of roles there that might be of interest. But even just to find out more about what we're doing and reach out, even if you're in a community that maybe sees one of our projects coming nearby, are there any particular qualities of skills that you're looking for. At the moment, we're certainly looking for lots of different skills, and it's not even just engineering, but certainly electrical engineering, mechanical, civil process, environmental. You know, I think engineers certainly have a way of thinking and problem solving that lends itself to what we're trying to do. So it's not just one type of engineering, one discipline, but also, as I mentioned, there's other professionals that we need, and then obviously there's other supporting professions that we have. You know, we've solicitors working for us. We have people that work in finance. Our IT sector is massive, and even when you look at where the grid of the future might go, you know, technology plays a massive part of that, of it and AI, so there's, there's plenty of opportunity there. It's not one profession that's ever going to deliver this on its own. You know, it's, it's going to be a whole diverse range of skills that we need.

Dusty Rhodes  29:50 
Looking back on your career, was there any particular incident or story where you learned, like, a big life lesson and just kind of. Wow, and it's stood to your benefit since,

Louise O'Flanagan  30:03 
That's a really good question. Dusty, I think, look, I think in my experience, over the last, you know, as I said, the last 30 years, particularly in project management, what I've learned is about planning for, you know, risks that are unplannable. It's, it's like, you can have a really good schedule, you know, you're going to deliver a project by x date, and then suddenly something comes out of the blue and it throws those plans into disarray. And I think what I've learned over time is just, you know, it's, it's planning for those maybe foreseeable risks, and then having that contingency for the unforeseeable, the unknown. And I think, you know, engineers and project managers tend to be more optimistic and are outlook. If we were pessimistic, we probably wouldn't try and do anything. So you tend to probably err on the side of optimism, and you need to get and that's part of the leadership, although project management is one part. But leadership is getting people to buy into what you want to deliver, and to want to help you and assist you in that. And you know, it's not that you're lying, is that you actually want to drive that on yourself and bring people along. So I think it's about what I've learned is probably having a certain amount of contingency and a plan B if you don't end up doing what Plan A was and being able to keep that momentum going without mentioning any names or places or years.

Dusty Rhodes  31:24 
What happened with that?

Louise O'Flanagan  31:30 

You learned that lesson, and I think it probably even goes back to that, that previous example that I gave you, because I would have thought that I would have gone in maybe with the with the exact plan that I had on paper in a very short period of time and come out with the decision from onboard canola in next many months. I probably would have, even at that stage, probably factored in even a more prolonged planning decision. You know, maybe would have gone to oral hearing. But actually, by doing it the other way around, by spending the time in that development phase prior to going for planning that took a lot longer, that took a year extra onto that project. Was just quite a long time. But actually, on the other side, it saved a huge amount of time because it gave certainty, and that was the point. We came out the other side with a decision that had no conditions, and it was able to go forward. So I think for me, it's about putting a lot of effort into the planning stage and leaving room for that contingency. So that's a project that I was thinking of in particular where, you know, it may set you back in one way, but you actually end up making the time up and giving that greater certainty for things to move forward.

Dusty Rhodes  32:39 
It's been absolutely fascinating and inspiring chatting with you Louise. If you'd like to find out more about Louise and some of the topics that we did speak about today, you'll find notes and link details in the description area of this podcast. But for now, Louise O'Flanagan, Head of Engineering and Asset management at EirGrid, thank you so much for joining us.

Louise O'Flanagan  32:55 
Thank you very much. Dusty.

Dusty Rhodes  32:58 
If you enjoyed our podcast today, please do share it with a friend in the business. Just tell them to search for Engineers Ireland in their podcast player. The podcast is produced by dustpod.io for Engineers Ireland. For advance episodes, more information on engineering across Ireland or career development opportunities, there are libraries of information on the website at engineersireland.ie.

Until next time for myself Dusty Rhodes, thank you so much for listening. Take care.

Connect with Sinéad on LinkedIn

MORE INFORMATION
Come meet the Engineers Ireland Team at the National Ploughing Championships from September 17th to 19th and have a blast at our Space Station.

We will have three incredible experiences at the Engineers Ireland 'Space Store', ran by former NASA Engineer Steve Ringler - who will be down at the Ploughing Championships with our team.

You can immerse yourself in the cosmos with virtual reality adventures using state-of-the-art headsets, try on a replica spacesuit, or get a hands-on experience with real space rocks, including pieces of the moon.

Join us at Block 2, Row 11, Stand 169 for an unforgettable journey through space and engineering.

Looking for ways to explore or advance a career in the field of engineering? Visit Engineers Ireland to learn more about the many programs and resources on offer.

Sinead's book “Good Ideas and Power Moves” is due to be published in September 2025.

Engineers Journal AMPLIFIED is produced by DustPod.io for Engineers Ireland.

QUOTES
"I got to spend time with the engineers at NASA, and it just put this very kind of human, normal person face on this career that seemed totally inaccessible." - Sinéad O’Sullivan.

"There are a ton of really smart engineers that are solving these problems at any given time. But the problem really, I think, lies with the bureaucracy of how we fund science, how we create policy around that." - Sinéad O’Sullivan

"I feel like to be creative, you have to let that child part grow up with you, like if you really want to be good at doing these types of jobs, don't let people tell you they're dumb ideas." - Sinéad O’Sullivan

"To be a great engineer, you need to be around great engineers." - Sinéad O’Sullivan

"My entire career has been curiosity-driven for the simple reason that if I'm really interested in it, I'm going to work hard enough at it to be successful in it." - Sinéad O’Sullivan

"Engineering is really about learning a way of thinking, and it's one that allows you to understand nuance, complexity, and difficult challenges that you can apply to literally any other career." - Sinéad O’Sullivan

KEYWORDS
#engineering #nasa #career #space #mission #taylorswift #robots

TRANSCRIPTION
For your convenience, we include an automated AI transcription:

Dusty Rhodes  0:00 
Right now on Amplified, how ordinary engineers achieve extraordinary things.

Sinead O'Sullivan  0:06 
If you're an engineer, you can do anything else, and it nearly makes you a better thing. So for example, maybe I want to do law, but I really am excited about engineering. I would say, do engineering, because guess what, engineers ultimately make better lawyers. Learning engineering is really about learning a way of thinking, and it's one that allows you to understand nuance, complexity, difficult challenges that you can apply to literally any other career. I can do anything with my engineering degree.

Dusty Rhodes  0:37 
Hello there. My name is Dusty Rhodes. Welcome to Amplified, the Engineers Journal podcast. A lot of engineering is thinking about what is possible and then setting out to make it a reality. Our guest today is an expert at doing this because she has pushed the envelope of engineering literally to its limits. As a teenager in Armagh, she decided that she wanted to work with NASA and spent many years there working on models to understand which mission design from a possible million would be the one best one today. As well as working on AI and how some tech platforms are more powerful than countries, she's also found time to set up a record company, work in a two-star Michelin restaurant and study for a diploma and wine. So if you're thinking, ‘how do I make my career dreams come true’ I think our guest today is going to have a few answers and a little inspiration for you. It's a pleasure to welcome Sinead O'Sullivan. Sinead, how are you?

Sinead O'Sullivan  1:28 
I'm great. Thank you so much for having me

Dusty Rhodes  1:33 
Let me start off with I mean, your career is just a dazzling array of accomplishments. Can you just kind of bring me back to the start and tell me the story of how your journey began into aerospace engineering? 

Sinead O'Sullivan  1:46 
Yeah, I mean, I was really, really lucky when I was younger that I got to go to space camp in Houston. They have an international camp. And so it's, it's kind of, it's something like 4045, students from 3036 different countries attend every year, and I was lucky enough to go and represent Northern Ireland, and I got to spend time with the engineers at NASA. And it just put this very kind of human, normal person face on this career that seemed totally inaccessible. And I remember coming back and telling people that, yeah, I want to be a neuroscience engineer, and so I'm going to work at NASA. And they would look at me as if I had three heads, but I had met very normal people who had done it, and it was no big deal for them. So I kind of thought, Well, why can't I do that too?

Dusty Rhodes  2:40 
The following, with NASA. You get the gig with NASA. I mean, there's very, from my limited knowledge of NASA, they're either talking about going to the ISS the International Space Station, going to the moon or going to Mars. Which one of these were you involved in? 

Sinead O'Sullivan  2:54 
So I actually did human spaceflight mission design. So anything that involves, I mean, very simply, there's human and then non-human, you're kind of robotic mission design. I was involved in the planning of anything that was that involves humans in the loop. So if there was an astronaut involved in some capacity, that would have fallen into my my bracket. And, yeah, there were a couple. I mean, you know, any given time we were designing, you know, maybe upwards of 10 different missions. Now, not all of those missions would make it through to being fully funded and something that we would actually work on, but we would look at lots of, you know, kind of like, you know, ideate, lots of different types of missions, and then some would get further along. So for example, the mission to Mars is one that you know, is quite famous and has made it very far along in its trajectory. There were a couple that I worked on that unfortunately did not make it as far along. One of them is, is what was known as the Asteroid Redirect Mission, which is where a close fly by asteroid would be captured by this kind of robotic arm type thing as it went past the Earth's atmosphere, and it would be brought then into lunar lunar orbit, a retrograde orbit, so just an orbit around the moon, and we would then send humans back and forth to that asteroid for mining purposes. Now the reason for that being that we would get to test a lot of the mining equipment that we wanted to send to Mars in a much closer and safer way than sending it to Mars and hoping for the best, and because we also wanted to test some other human-related mission components that were safer done closer to Earth, on the moon rather than Mars. Yeah. I mean, very interesting set of projects. And NASA is doing a lot of very interesting work at any given time. And sorry, you mentioned earlier that I chose the best mission out of a million statistically. And so a lot of the work that I did. Was kind of looking at the statistics and the number of combinations of different types of missions, and trying to optimise for the overall mission design. And you're looking at hundreds of trillions, not a million. And so it becomes this, you know, we would use supercomputers to try and optimise one small part of this that and the code on that supercomputer might take five days to run, and then you realise you're a bug on day four, and you restart it. But yeah, very exciting types of work that NASA's doing, I got to play a very small role in.

Dusty Rhodes  5:35 
You mentioned mining on an asteroid a great distance away from us, and it kind of almost brings that back to engineering here on Earth, because, you know, you're thinking about Greenfield sites and brownfield sites, and nothing is more Greenfield than an asteroid. It's completely barren. I mean, do you have the same kind of problems, if you like, from a different perspective? But are they at the core of them? Are they the same problems that regular engineers have?

Sinead O'Sullivan  6:07 
Well, I mean, NASA engineers are regular engineers. We kind of put these people on pedestals and make it seem like it's impossible to do what they're doing. I mean, they're just regular people that went to university and got a job and have families and go to work nine to five. You know, now, the problems that they work on are a little more abstract, because they're not testing it every day. You know, they might test it once or twice in their career, if they're lucky. I mean, if you look at the Mars Rover, for example, curiosity and endeavour. I mean, you know, I got to spend time with those engineers as they were testing it live. I was in mission control as that landed. I mean, you know, seeing the face of engineers after they've worked on something 24/7, for eight years straight, and then it works. I mean, that's amazing. But these, I mean, they're still, these are very normal people doing normal engineering jobs. Um, one of the closest analogies I would have with, and I did a lot of kind of underwater robotics work for the US Navy. A lot of anyone that's working with water is essentially working with a very similar environment to space. You've got very high-pressure, temperature differentials. Stuff moves like just, it sounds simple but like, stuff just moves in ways that you kind of is hard to control. It's hard to see. Like, sensors don't work that well. So like, if you're you know, if you have this underwater robotic and you're trying to find something to shear, there's glean. Sensors just don't work that well. Everything gets wet, everything gets hot or really cold. So like the closest analogy to kind of an on-Earth environment would definitely be underwater, which is why so many of the astronauts that you see graduating from NASA's astronaut programs have come from institutions like Woods Hole, which is kind of ocean oceanographic research centre. But, yeah, no, these engineers are, are regular engineers. They're, they're building, they're building very normal stuff. And there's a reason that JCB is one of the larger lunar mining research kind of institutions, you know, these, these are not totally abstract. Some of it feels very abstract.

Dusty Rhodes  8:22 
Sure, but yeah, so engineers at NASA are like engineers all over the world. Okay, very intelligent, very curious. People always looking for a solution. The problems that get thrown at you are, as you say, abstract or unusual, but the problem processing, solving problems, your thought process, the method is the same. So can you give me an example, then, of a problem that you were given where you would have used the same method to figure it out?

Sinead O'Sullivan  8:49 
I can give you dozens. I mean, what, you know, what my specialisation was actually in. I came from a kind of world-renowned centre, Academic Centre which created engineering methodologies. And so the methodologies that we would use at NASA were exactly the same engineering methodologies that were used for Boeing, creating, designing aircraft. You know, I have classmates I went to Queen's University in Belfast, and I have classmates that went on to work for spirit of shorts in Belfast. They worked for Airbus. They would use the same methodologies, except the difference is that we would get to test ours slightly less often, and it would be a lot more kind of hypothetical, which is why, and sorry, the budgets for ours were extremely different. You know, the budget for a spaceflight program is infinitely larger than, I shouldn't say infinitely larger, but it's significantly larger than most kind of Earth-constrained problems. So you know, I'd say the big difference is that you have to get really, really creative in how you think about testing some of the. Stuff. You spend a lot of time modelling how you think things are going to react, the behaviour, the interaction between, you know, different levels of gravity, or, you know, you spend a lot of time modelling components and how they might interact. And then you hope to God that those models work because you've, you've just built a whole thing around that there's less of a feedback loop. So that's probably the big difference with a lot of the stuff.

Dusty Rhodes  10:26 
But what about that? You say you need to get creative. How do you get creative with these problems?

Sinead O'Sullivan  10:30 
Going back to this, the Space Camp thing, I went to mentor, and to be one of the kind of, yeah, the mentors at space camp, and you have these 16-year-olds, and they're kind of throwing out ideas like, why don't we just do some Hyperloop, kind of magnetic, you know, launch system? And you're thinking, or, I don't know if that's, you know, okay, sure. Why not? Or a space elevator or something like that, and you kind of think that doesn't seem very realistic or practical. But then several years later, you hear in the news that there is now a company that's being funded with hundreds of millions of dollars to do these things. And so one of the most amazing things about the space and the aerospace industry, I find, is that it actually really helps you to not lose that sense of anything is possible that you have at a young age, because it is literally and, you know, I spend so much time with people at NASA and the GERD propulsion lab and other really cool places and they spitball ideas as if they're five years Old. Like, why don't we just do this? And the adult in you says, well, budget, Paul, you know, there's a there's 10 million different reasons why that's not going to work. But you have to really, really restrain yourself and say, Actually that forget about all of those kind of other reasons the technology and that could actually work. So then you realise is the problem with a lot of our science R and D, actually, the inability to get the politicians on board, the financing on board, and that's kind of the direction that I moved in with my career because I realised that there are a ton of really smart engineers that are solving these problems at any given time that we have. But the problem, really, I think, lies with the bureaucracy of how we fund science, how we create policy around that. And it's like, if we could just give money to these people that are like, Let's build a space elevator without thinking about the technological or the other kind of constraints we would probably have 16-year-olds building really sophisticated solutions to problems that we've been trying to solve for a really long time. So I kind of feel like to be creative, you have to like as you get older, right? And you're gonna know this, everyone feels it the child, in you get smaller and smaller and smaller. The child that would have said, just do this or that, but you have to kind of let that child grow up with you, like if you really want to be good at doing these types of jobs, don't let people tell you they're dumb ideas.

Dusty Rhodes  13:18 
Another part of that is going to make a bigger impression, I think, in the future. And you must have had experience of this is robots and automation, because obviously you can't send humans to asteroids or to Mars or, you know, hopefully we're going back to the moon. But robot, and I've seen a lot of stuff where they're talking about building a base on the moon, but it will be built by automated robots before a single man or woman lands there. And I find that's amazing. Have you gotten involved in this? Have you?

Sinead O'Sullivan  13:47 
I haven't done anything specifically on lunar construction, but I did a lot of work on autonomous systems.

Dusty Rhodes  13:54 
Yeah, that's what I was talking about robots and automation. Yeah, tell me more.

Sinead O'Sullivan  13:58 
I mean, it's just, it's really incredible. I, you know, we live in an interesting period at the minute, because I spent many years working on kind of robotics and autonomous systems, um, and now we're at the stage where the difference between an autonomous system, the work that it can do, the constraints that there are in, in how we should expect these systems to work, and kind of societal expectations of an understanding of these systems are not that well understood. So, so. So, for example, there are two types of people generally, and people will kind of fall into one of these two categories. You're either somebody who thinks never gonna happen, how could, how could a robot do something that humans do? And even AI. But let's stick with robots and automation, autonomous systems for a minute, and then there are people who think these things are gonna do everything, and they're gonna kill us, and they're gonna kill everyone. And people typically fall very quickly into one of these two categories. You know, having built some of the most sophisticated autonomous systems for the Department of Defense, particularly as I mentioned underwater - I spent quite a bit of time working underwater, which is the hardest environment you could build a system in because it doesn't ever really know where it is because things move constantly under water. GPS, oh my god GPS does not work underwater. How do you locate yourself if you have a system of three different robots and they're trying to do something together, how do they know where each other is? Because of the refraction of water itself, it's actually very hard to do this quickly. One of the hardest things to do is to get underwater systems to communicate with each other. And there's a lot we can learn from underwater autonomous systems that can help us understand how autonomous cars communicate with each other when there's high traffic. There's a lot of really exciting stuff happening there. I want to ask people, whatever bucket they fall into, either 'Oh it's going to fix everything' or  'it's going to kill us all', to kind of have some restraint there and look at where they're really good at what they're doing and where they're just not as good. I kind of like to think of autonomous systems as a tool that humans use, never in a full replacement capacity, but that we can use to make our lives better and easier. That helps us in some capacity, but not in a full replacement mode and certainly not in a robot that has super-intelligence of itself that is going to kill us all. 

Dusty Rhodes  17:07 
I definitely want to dig into more about that because robots, automation, AI and all in that bucket is something I want to dig in with you about. But first, just a quick mention that if you're listening to the podcast and you're kind of thinking that this whole space exploration and everything just sounds amazing, and you're thinking to yourself what it would feel like to get into a rocket ship and go off to space, well, here's an invitation to come to the Engineers Ireland Team, at the National Ploughing Championships, September 17th-19th, because we have got our very own Engineers Ireland Space Station on-site! There's going to be three incredible experiences there for you in the Space Store, which is run by former NASA Engineer Steve Ringler, who will be down at the Ploughing Championships with out Team. Immerse yourself in the cosmos with virtual reality adventures using state-of-the-art VR headsets, you can try on a replica space suit - that's top of my list, or you can get a hands-on experience of real space rocks, including actual pieces of the moon. To do that, just join us at Block 2, Row 11, Stand 169 for an unforgettable journey through space and engineering. Find out more here!

Dusty Rhodes  18:19
Sinéad I can see you making a note, is it about the Ploughing Championships? 

Sinead O'Sullivan  18:23
It absolutely is. It's very exciting, it's very, very cool, the space suit in particular, I spent a long time working with Space Suit designers and material engineers, oh my god they're just unbelievably complicated. I remember trying on my first space suit when I was younger and that had probably the biggest impression on me because you forget how hard it is of an environment on humans and you've got this one thing that protects you and they're just so unbelievably cool, but complicated things. So definitely go and look at the space suit.

Dusty Rhodes  19:09
Sinéad I want to move on and just ask you about how you think about life, because working for NASA is a lofty ambition, and you were talking about the kid inside you and the kid goes 'yeah of course you can!' A lot of us lose that as we get older. But you've gone and done that and worked at NASA, and I'm sure a lot of us would be like 'we'll I'd love to be a wine expert', you've done all these things I mean you're writing books, let me know how is it that when your brain works when you get a creative idea in your head you go from crazy idea to actually doing it and achieving it?

Sinead O'Sullivan  19:48
Yeah, that's an interesting question, I mean, I think you've kind of answered it in your question. And I've kind of discussed it before but like I'd say if there was something I've learned when I was younger, maybe 16 / 17, when I feel like I was making career decisions that stayed with me, is that I met people who did extraordinary things and they were just ordinary people and I think there's something about that that made me internalise the idea that there's literally nothing that you cannot do. My friends have just done amazing stuff and I see them on their journey and they're not easy things to do like you have to have grit, determination and resiliency, but nothing feels like it's impossible for me. It's not necessarily an ego thing, I am never the smartest person in a room and I didn't get the best grades in school, and people probably laughed at me when I said I was going to NASA, because I was never the top of my class. And you know, normal people can do extraordinary things. At a young age if you develop agency like 'I can go and do those things', sure it might take you a while to figure out how to do them, but nothing feels impossible. One you realise that the hard part is actually figuring out what thing you want to do if you could do anything, because there are so many things to do. And so the hard part is waking up every day and thinking 'what do I really want to dedicate the next month, six months, year, five years, to doing what is the goal?' And once you've decided on the goal, I mean, it really is just a matter of going and doing it and sticking at it.

Dusty Rhodes  22:13 
A lot of a lot of engineers will have dreams, as we all do, and they say, I want to buy, build the first, you know, 50-story skyscraper in Ireland or I want to run my own firm, or I want to do something, you know, you know, crazy at the in the middle of the Atlantic, or whatever, and they have the you kind of just get stuck in a rut, and you don't move on. I've heard two things that I have found to be true, and I just want to ask you if you found them be true. Number one is, you have those crazy ideas and you think, okay, great, I'm going to do it. All right, you should try and hang out with the people that you want to be like. So if you want to be a millionaire, hang out with millionaires. All right? And the other thing is, is that when you start hanging out with the people that you want to be like they're more giving because they're ahead of you. And it's just a natural thing in life where kind of, you know, somebody who's climbing up the ladder doesn't want somebody in their way, but somebody who's behind is not important. So you're quite happy to go, oh yeah. Well, listen, if you want to do NASA, here's the thing. You go through the whole, whole steps of them, and you get all that. Have you found that also to be true in your career?

Sinead O'Sullivan  23:23 
Yeah, you've nailed it. I mean, so many people don't understand that 90% of trying to do something hard isn't about the sure you need the technical skills, right? So, like, for engineering is a great example. I can't be an engineer at NASA. If I don't understand maths, like there is a basic requirement, yeah, technically. But I think once you have that, like, how many engineers are there in the world? So many, but not everyone gets to work at NASA. You know, I say that these are ordinary people, but, you know, there are few of them, and it's a very prestigious job. But I think what people don't quite understand, and it took me a really, really long time to understand this, is that most of the stuff that you learn about how to actually get these jobs and do them, is like implicit learning. It's not in a textbook. It's not written down anywhere. It's the kind of stuff that you only pick up. It's a mentality, it's how to go about things, it's how you communicate that you only really learn when you spend time with the people that are doing it. And so there's this kind of insider, outsider perspective, which is hard like it is unbelievably hard to break through, but if you spend time with the people that are doing those things, you don't even realise that you're learning how to be one of those people, and then you wake up one day and you are one of them. And there's so much of the world is about implicit learning, which is why, during COVID, when people stopped going to offices, I felt really bad for younger people, because they're not implicitly learning these things. They might be sitting doing a spreadsheet or using CAD or something, but to be a great engineer, you need to be around great engineers. When you surround yourself with people that you want to be like and you find interesting and, you know it really it's not in a weird or superficial way. I mean, just people that you like, and you find interesting, and you aspire to be, you become one of them over time. I fully believe that we are, you know, we are the sum of the people that we spend the closest amount of time or the most amount of time with. And I'm lucky that I got to travel a lot and meet really cool people all over the world. And I would like to think that I'm a sum of these very cool, interesting people. That's not to say I am cool and interesting, but it's more likely that I will be if I spend time with people like that.

Dusty Rhodes  25:50 
Very, very true. I'm going to hit you now with the strangest twist in an interview that I've ever had in my entire career because we've been talking about career moves. We've been talking about NASA. We've been talking about building crazy things underwater and on remote asteroids and stuff like that. And now we're going to talk about Taylor Swift, oh my gosh. And it's all related to everything that we have been talking about. Okay, because you've written a book called 'Good Ideas and Power Moves'. Link is in the description of the podcast for you. But Taylor Swift almost embodies everything you've been talking about. Tell me about this.

Sinead O'Sullivan  26:29 
I just, I listened to a lot of Taylor Swift music, and I followed her quite closely. You know her kind of personal, unprofessional trials and tribulations. I've seen her as somebody who just does exactly the stuff that I've talked about, and I've always felt really amazed by by somebody like her.

Dusty Rhodes  26:49 
So give me, give me an example of something Taylor did that relates to what we were talking about.

Sinead O'Sullivan  26:53 
I mean, more recently, she re-recorded all of her albums, and literally every executive under the sun. Told her not to do that. She went against a private equity firm with more than a trillion dollars behind it, which told her not to do that, and she still did it. And she there was, I mean, statistically, it was much more likely than not that what she was doing was career suicide, but she just very strongly believed in it, and she had a gut instinct about it, and it worked in her favour for lots of various different reasons. It could easily not have been done, but I just feel like, you know, that is one example of somebody who she still has that child inside of her that says, actually, this is what I want to do, and this is what I'm going to do, and this is what I believe in. And I don't care if the spreadsheets or Wall Street or whoever these, these kind of childless, soulless people tell me that I'm wrong, I'm just gonna go and do it and see what happens. And this is a path that I'm gonna take. I just think she's just incredibly young, fun, courageous, and I just think she's done a lot of really, really interesting stuff. I mean, again, she is someone who against whom the odds have been completely stacked. And she, you know, she wasn't always as successful as she is today. And a lot of people probably don't remember the years when everyone hated her, and a lot of people would have given up and been like, Okay, well, I had a good career so far, I should be thankful for that. And you know, now I'm going to retire because I've made a ton of money, and the time, you know, the time in the limelight is over for me. She didn't do that. She kind of forged her own very, very atypical path. Any executive in the music industry would not have told any of their musicians to do what she did at any given stage of that.

Dusty Rhodes  28:45 
So, would it be true then that Taylor Swift's problem-solving in Taylor Swift, the brain of Taylor Swift, the way it solves problems and the way it makes decisions is something we should learn from.

Sinead O'Sullivan  28:56 
I definitely think so. I, you know, it kind of frustrates me. We were talking earlier about, you know, staying and being creative. And I think that, like not a lot of people for a very long time, took her seriously. I first started to write about Taylor Swift in a more business kind of professional finance capacity several years before, you know, kind of the mainstream, oh, she's amazing and oh, she's making so much money, started to happen. And I remember because I write for the Financial Times, having an argument with my editor there trying to get a piece published about her several years ago. And they said, No, I mean, she's just, you know, she's just a musician, you know, she's just so and so. But the reality is that, and we now know she was never just so and so. She was never just a musician. But getting back to my point, which is that you kind of have to look outside of the box in terms of who's doing something that's really interesting or unique. And don't you know there's in the same way that that adults, part of you will be like, oh, never gonna work bureaucracy, politics, finance, whatever? You have to have that same remove, that same mask when you look at who is inspiring you, or where you find your creativity, a lot of people would for for most of her career, did not take her, did not view her as a serious person, in the same way that most engineers don't go to art museums to try and find you know something that's going to inspire the next NASA mission. But if you want to be creative, you have to look at people just doing weird stuff that is not on this kind of escalator of a career and learn something from that.

Dusty Rhodes  30:42 
One of the things you said at the start of our conversation was it's ordinary people doing extraordinary things, and Taylor Swift is a great example of that because she's just a girl. Where was it Philadelphia, or the state of where she was from? Pennsylvania? Oh, Pennsylvania, that's it. Sorry. So she's from the state of Pennsylvania, small town, Pennsylvania, and, you know, she'd no major, like, you know, her dad wasn't a pop star and like that, but she just came from that, and she had the determination. And many people have seen the video of her sitting as a 14-year-old singing beside some river or whatever, and there was, like, nobody there, all right? And I think the same thing about Ed Sheeran, because he, again, was, he was, I mean, he was a red-headed kid, all right, not blessed with the looks blessing, all right. But he said, I want to be a pop star. And he was a terrible singer when he was a kid.

Sinead O'Sullivan  31:34 
So I love this, yes, I this is my favorite example, and I actually wrote about him in the book. And this is exactly what I refer to, and Taylor Swift writes about it in her lyrics frequently. Yeah, she was never born like this, she had to work so damn hard Yes, to get to where she is today. And I fully believe that, Oh, my God, I was never if you, if you would have asked my maths teacher when I was 15 if I was going to go to NASA, they would have laughed.

Dusty Rhodes  32:03 
Yes, honestly, but if you have that dream and you have that crazy idea, you will then do the work that takes to get there.

Sinead O'Sullivan  32:09 
I believe that, and that's why I, you know, I saw a professor of Aerospace Engineering, and I teach a lot of undergrad engineering, and they kind of all ask me for career advice at certain stages, even after they've kind of long graduated. It's, it's always really nice to hear from from previous students. And they're always kind of, there's, there's a choice that they have to make. Should I do this thing and it's stable, and I know what it and it's a great career, and, yeah, or this other thing. And I was going to say, like, you're asking me this question because you're interested in this other thing. Otherwise, you would have said, No, you would have taken the like, and it's this isn't great advice for everybody, and I acknowledge that you know this. This works for me and it works for a small number of people, but, like, my entire career has been curiosity driven for the simple reason that if I'm really interested in it, I'm going to work hard enough at it to be successful in it. If I'm not interested in it, like there's just no way I'm ever going to be good at it, because I just every there's nothing, nobody is born with a single talent that they're good enough at to get them to the top without trying. And so it's like, what are the things I'm excited about? Because those are the things that I'm going to get off at eight o'clock in the morning and be like, Oh, I can't wait to pick up where I left off yesterday. And so it's like, do the thing that you really love. And when I was younger, I remember, and in Ireland, you know, I think so many people might have experienced this, but if you get good grades, they try to, especially in science, they try to tell you, you should be a doctor, and that's a that's a great job for a lot of people. I just never it. Just never even entered like I just didn't even think about it because I knew I just very specifically. I decided I was going to go wherever NASA and I remember at the time of school being like, okay, cool, but just go and do medicine and I just had no interest. I would have failed. I just would have failed medical school. I just wouldn't have been able to pass it. It would have been too boring for me. Yeah, that it's boring. But for me, I just didn't find it interesting.

Dusty Rhodes  34:24 
But I think it's one of those things where you find the thing, or whatever you go, that's what I want to do. And very, very few people have that. A lot of people, as you say, they go to school and they go to numbers and they get the grades and they go, I'll go be a lawyer, be a doctor, you know, whatever. Be an accountant, you know, whatever. And they make great money, but our their hearts aren't in it. I find most of the engineers that I speak to are not like that, because there was always something about engineering where they kind of went. I love a really good problem. That's why they got into engineering.

Sinead O'Sullivan  34:56 
Yeah, and I worked with a lot of people in finance at the minute and have done for the last few years. And I remember when I went to Harvard Business School, I had gone from working at NASA, where people, I mean, it would be midnight on a Friday night, and I'd be running code, and people would grab a few beers and watch like, you know, it was like a hobby and a job all in one and everyone was super excited about what everyone else was doing. And then I remember going to Harvard Business School and being with a ton of kind of hedge fund, private equity, investment banking type people, and they hated their jobs, and there was no part of them that wanted to ever be in the office. And I remember thinking at the time like, wow, this is the difference between, I mean, an engineer has, like I said, has the ability to make a ton of money in so many different ways that are not engineering. So you can be you can go into accounting, you can go into banking, you can be a doctor, and a lot of the time you'll be pushed into those areas. But you kind of, the engineers are the people who kind of said, I actually don't want to do that. I want to do this other thing. And they're very specific about that thing being engineering. They've chosen engineering, which is why I love working with engineers, because they choose to be there every day when they have alternatives, people that work in finance. And I mean, this is not to say that they're bad or horrible or boring. A lot of people in finance, and they're very cool, but nobody wakes up in the morning as a 15-year-old, and I cannot wait to be an accountant with engineering. You have to, you have to choose that. And there's something so amazing with working with people who are passionate about what they're doing. You can't replace, like there's no there is nothing. There's no amount of money in the world, salary wise, that you can replace working with cool, interested people with.

Dusty Rhodes  36:52 
Describe to me the feeling you get when you're working with cool, interesting people, and you have this enormous problem, and then you come up with an idea. And then you fix it. What's that feeling like when you go it worked?

Sinead O'Sullivan  37:04 
It's priceless to see something that you've built. Work is priceless. And people feel this at a really young age, and this is the thing that they lose, I think, when they get older, this kind of problem solving, because problems get more complex and they get more kind of ethereal, and so many more people are involved in fixing it that no one really takes ownership over it. But when you're a kid, right? And you're building Lego, and the thing works, you know, like, Huh? You know, I've been working with chefs recently, like top chefs at a two-star mission restaurant, I see the same thing. It's engineering. They see it every they build something, and there's a reason that they work 18 hour days, every day, is because they get so much satisfaction from the thing that they made than going and working. There's something about that that just, it's just money. It's like, it's, it's like doing a hobby and getting paid for it. That just doesn't get replicated in finance when your spreadsheet tells you you're gonna make money. You know, there's, there's something so satisfying about building or designing, and even if it doesn't work, because 99% of the time it doesn't work, right? And no one talks about that.

Dusty Rhodes  38:16 
Yeah, but that's what I'm saying. Even if it doesn't work, you've always learned something so you know, it's not a failed exercise, by by any accounts. Listen, let me wrap up our conversation just kind of looking to the future, because I think you might have a better idea than most of us. AI and big tech is what everybody is talking about. I'm wondering where what you know of AI is going to help engineers with problem-solving and decision-making. What do you see coming down the line?

Sinead O'Sullivan  38:45 
I will give you a good example in biotech, which is where we kind of seen some of the impacts of AI, actually, even in terms of the type of work that I did at NASA, which is very statistically driven types of work. So let's say you have a needle and a haystack. A lot of the work at NASA that I did was trying to find the needle, which is a mission that was like the optimal mission in amongst the haystack. And we wrote a lot of code, and a lot of the stuff that I did was writing optimisation, and it's kind of a what would kind of now be considered like AI algorithms to try and find that that needle faster and faster and faster, in the same way, that in biotech, you're trying to find chemical solutions to health problems. So let's say that there, you know, there are a trillion different ways that enzymes can work together in a vaccine to do something. Well, it used to be that scientists would have to go through one by one, testing each of these to realise that it worked or didn't work. Now we have AI that can nearly do this in the blink of an eye, where we used to need supercomputers at NASA. I mean, one of my friends at the Jet Propulsion Lab has a side curiosity in in biology and run the code for the COVID vaccine the week that it was released, the week that the paper on that was released, he was able to do that on his home computer and validated that it worked. So we have this kind of shift in the computational ability to do some of the grunt work that people would have done. And I think right now that's where we are, that this has just become such an amazing tool that should, and I think will allow us to say, Okay, I used to spend 18 hours a day for four years trying to get to this point that I was able to get at in three and a half seconds using AI. Now that I'm there, the really hard stuff can start. The hard work really begins, of trying to figure out, how does this vaccine interact with complex systems? Um, how does this mission? How do we get this mission through Congress? How? I mean, the New Yorker just wrote an amazing piece on writing because people are convinced that it's going to kill the work of writers and journalists. And it's like writing is also this kind of combinatorial problem. There are 8 trillion different ways that you can write a sentence. A writer has to specifically choose one, and it's like, what are the constraints? Who is it writing for writing doesn't happen in a vacuum. You have to think about your readers and what emotions you're trying to convey. So there's this higher level of thinking that an engineer, a writer, a biotechnologist, has to make where they look at the complex world around them, the markets, financing, policy, and that's the part that I think a human is uniquely good at doing, and humans will uniquely do, but they'll just be doing it so much faster and better with the use of tools like AI.

Dusty Rhodes  42:00 
Yeah, so, AI is a good thing in a short sentence.

Sinead O'Sullivan  42:04 
Yes, I, you know, I there are, again, like, like, autonomous systems. People think it's either gonna kill us or make us redundant, or, no, it's a really great tool. And actually, I was giving a talk with the editor of The Economist recently, and he had a really good line, which I'm going to steal here, which is that, you know, chat GPT, for example, people, everyone's talking about chat GPT. Chat GPT is like having an intern. They do a lot of work for you, but you still have to go through to make sure that they didn't screw it off anywhere. Make sure to correct, but that intern is never going to replace the writer or the editor, but it certainly helps them so they're a tool. All of these things that we build are tools. We can decide what we want to do with them. Even, oh, my God, even if there was a runaway rogue AI that tried to kill us all, we can decide to do something about that, because we have agency, right? Like we're not stuck in a vacuum with this stuff happening to us. That's why we have policy and law and regulation. So I I'm not worried about it. I'm excited about it.

Dusty Rhodes  43:12 
I'm excited about it as well. I'm a little bit tin hat about it as well. And another third of me it just keeps thinking about the animal Schwarzenegger movie, The Terminator, where Skynet eventually, yeah, there you go. So, but it's the future, and nobody knows. Listen to wrap-up today. Sinead, it's been absolutely fascinating. Is there anything else, or any final thoughts that you would like to share on engineering and stuff like that with our audience?

Sinead O'Sullivan  43:37 
Yeah. I mean, here's the thing that, you know, I get a lot of younger people asking me if they should do engineering or something, or how to think about, like a career in engineering at that stage. And I guess my guiding principle, because I still make career decisions every day, like even adults have to think about them all the time. And I always think about a couple of things. One is like, am I going to have fun doing this? And I kind of optimise nearly all of my career decisions for fun, because I don't. I don't think jobs have to be boring. That's so dumb. You can having a boring job as a choice, but one that I've never made. The other thing is that I always try to choose something that gives me more optionality. So for example, medicine, my sister's a doctor. There are very few things that she can do that is not being a doctor. Now that she's done her 12 years of training, if you're an engineer, you can do anything else, and it only makes you a better thing. So for example, if you think down the line, maybe, maybe I want to do law like something totally different, right? Maybe I want to do law, but I really am excited about engineering. I would say do engineering because guess what? Engineers, it has been, literally make better lawyers. And I'll tell you one other thing, I'm a friend who was an engineer who went into law. They make way more money if they understand technology, way more money. So there's nearly, you know, I've worked with engineers that have become traders. I can tell you one thing, they're better traders. Engineering, learning. Engineering is really about learning a way of thinking, and it's one that allows you to understand nuance, complexity, and difficult challenges that you can apply to literally any other career. And so it's fun. You can be an engineer, or you can be literally anything else once you have it, but there's no way that you're not going to enjoy the process of becoming it. And I think, at the stage where you don't really know much about what you like and don't like, and careers and jobs and what I had no idea what engineers did like, none, none when I chose to do engineering. But I love the people and everyone fun that I met was always an engineer, and so baby steps, just do what you think is fun and the engineering you can use to double your success in any other career. Should you decide at a later stage that's not what you wanted to do? But yes, I there's, you know, people always ask me, if you could go back and do it again, what would you change? And like, absolutely nothing. I can do anything with my engineering degree.

Dusty Rhodes  46:30 
And on that note, I'm going to say it's been hugely inspirational chatting with you if you'd like to find out more about Sinead O'Sullivan and some of the topics that we spoke about today. You find notes and link details in the description area of this podcast, but for now, Sinead O'Sullivan, thank you so so much for being so giving.

Sinead O'Sullivan  46:47 
Thank you so much for having me. It's been a ton of fun.

Dusty Rhodes  46:51 
If you enjoyed our podcast today, do share with a friend in the business, just on the search for Engineers Ireland on their podcast player. The podcast is produced by dustpod.io for Engineers Ireland. For pre-release episodes, more information on engineering across Ireland or career development opportunities, there are libraries of information on our website at www.engineersireland.ie 

Until next time for myself, Dusty Rhodes, thank you so much for listening.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/debra-f-laefer-09510a11/

MORE INFORMATION
Looking for ways to explore or advance a career in the field of engineering? Visit Engineers Ireland to learn more about the many programs and resources on offer. https://www.engineersireland.ie/  

Engineers Journal AMPLIFIED is produced by DustPod.io for Engineers Ireland.

QUOTES
"We didn't devise a sensor, we didn't even improve the sensor, but we took a fundamentally engineering approach to it. We took this more systematic approach of; let's reverse engineer the process, figure out what we want to get and figure out how to use the sensor to obtain that data."  - Dr. Debra Laefer

"This technique has been used in fields as far from civil engineering as breast cancer research. So that not only has it been transferred to other LIDAR applications, but people have used it for other remote sensing and medical imaging datasets." - Dr. Debra Laefer

"It's good to make mistakes, and it's good to have senior engineers check them." - Dr. Debra Laefer

"As crazy as your idea may seem, a lot of the time the best ideas are initially too far ahead of the curve, so don't give up on them." - Dr. Debra Laefer

KEYWORDS
#buildings #data #dublin #engineers #civilengineering #lidar #computationalmodel

TRANSCRIPTION
For your convenience, we include an automated AI transcription

Dusty Rhodes  00:00
Right now on AMPLIFIED, we're about to find out how to make a 3D scan of Dublin.

Debra Laefer  00:05
If people think they have a good idea, they shouldn't give up, that if you push on it hard enough long enough, it will happen. As crazy as your idea may seem, and a lot of times the best ideas are initially too far ahead of the curve. But don't give up on it.

Dusty Rhodes  00:24
Hi there. My name is Dusty Rhodes and welcome to AMPLIFIED the Engineers Journal podcast. We're very familiar with the BIM and LiDAR in civil engineering but how far can you go with those technologies? Could you apply them to a full city and still get millimetre level accuracy. Our guest today is behind the world's densest urban aerial laser scanning dataset, which was conducted using a large slice of the centre of Dublin City. She is a pioneering force in urban data science, addressing the challenge of handling massive amounts of information collected by drones, satellites and laser measurements, and then using smart ways to store search and turn that data into useful visuals. She is a qualified civil engineer, has authored over 160 peer reviewed publications, been awarded four patents, worked as a professor in UCD Dublin, and is currently serving as a professor at New York University's Centre for Urban science and Progress. I am thrilled to welcome Dr. Debra Laefer to the podcast. How are you, Debra?

Debra Laefer  01:24
Great, thanks so much for having me.

Dusty Rhodes  01:26
It's a delight to have you with us. Before we get into the world's densest LiDAR data set, which you generated here in Ireland, you had a very interesting route into engineering, you had a kind of an art history degree and then got into civil engineering. What, tell me the story behind that.

Debra Laefer  01:43
So I fell in love with painting and old buildings and decided I wanted to become an art historian. So I applied to the best program in the United States and got admitted to Columbia University. And as part of this, I gotten involved with creating a student art gallery. So this was supposed to be a place for students and faculty and alumni could show their own artworks. And then we were informed that we had to temporarily move out of space, because they were going to do construction through it to put in some new telecom lines. So this was back in the mid late to late 80s. And I was concerned because it was a historic building. So I started asking around, started doing some investigation, and found out that not only was the district building, but it had been damaged. In fact, it had been damaged the last time they did construction near it, so called the Landmarks Preservation people to confirm that yes, the building was protected. We reached out to a people at the historic preservation program at Columbia University. And they put me in touch with one of their students who is a civil engineer. And I was so impressed with this, this young woman, her name is Marie Ennis, she's actually still a practising engineer here in New York City. And that she could combine this large toolbox of thoughts and knowledge and conveyed in a way that was meaningful to people in practice. And I was very, I think, influenced by that. And over the next few months, I started thinking, well, if I really love old buildings, maybe this is what I want to do, maybe I need to be come a civil engineer. So there I was finishing my last year in my Bachelors of Arts degree in art history. And starting my first year in my Bachelors of Engineering and civil engineering. And ultimately, I persevered with this, I been worked in the construction industry, at a time where it was it was pretty rough, a lot of organised crime, a lot of violence on the sides. It was a pretty exciting time in New York construction. But I really was happy doing that. And I thought, Oh, well, you know, I feel like I still don't know enough. So we're going to start a master's program at night part time. And as part of that, I met some amazing people in the geotechnical engineering realm. So that's a division of civil engineering. And a lot of them surprisingly, had PhDs. And they were in the midst of really important a lot of amazing technologies from Europe, into the United States, things that were very well suited to protect existing structures when you did excavation or drilling or blasting or de watering, or tunnelling near them. So I finished my master's degree I applied and got a Fulbright to Italy, I spent a year at the Polytechnic of Milan, really studying brick masonry and its vulnerabilities and then I came back to the US, and I took my PhD and Geotechnics. But I had also the opportunity to do some travelling as part of that research. And we went to Korea, and I got a chance to come over to the UK, and to spend some time, particularly some people from McDonald, looking at the Jubilee line. So at the time, this was the most expensive tunnelling project that had ever happened, it was about, I think, 2 billion pounds. And about 25% of this was being spent either on predicting which buildings were going to move, monitoring them, or, you know, kind of free tunnelling intervention where they were pumping grout under the ground, in particular, under Big Bend. And despite this huge investment, a lot of buildings did get damaged. So when we spoke to the engineers, who simply what kind of great computational Shanell models are you using to predict which buildings are going to get damaged, and they said, Oh, we don't use the computational models at home, what's wrong with them? And they said, No, because there's nothing wrong with the model. But we do not have documentation of all of the above ground buildings. Many of these buildings date back hundreds and hundreds of years, and to go out and to survey each building, and then convert to generate drawings. And then to convert that into a computational model would be impossible for the hundreds and hundreds of buildings that are along this tunnel route. So instead, we're using a fairly simplistic set of numerical equations that date back mostly to the 50s, but then kind of improved in the early 70s. So here we are, we're pushing the turn of the millennium. And we're using stuff that's at least 30, if not 40 years old.

Dusty Rhodes  06:53
So that I understand it, you find yourself in London, and you have all of this tunnelling going on, they can't correctly tunnel because they can't do the computations for all of the buildings because it's just too big an area.

Debra Laefer  07:07
It's not that they can't tunnel if they can tunnel but it at greater risk to the structures than need be.

Dusty Rhodes  07:14
So, you said to yourself, aha, here's a problem. I'm gonna come up with a solution for this.

Debra Laefer  07:20
Not quite, I just went home and thought, Wow, I'm surprised this is a problem. Yeah. So I went, I bet back, I finished my degree. And about two, three years later, I had just finished, I had moved to North Carolina to become a young faculty member. And 911 happened. And having spent many years in New York studying and working, having Mitch family there. My parents were born there. My grandparents were born there, many people from our families still live there. It was a very disturbing and moving kind of time. And I was very interested in what they were doing, how they were trying to do the rescuing, because I'd been involved with some kind of post disaster earthquake work while I was also at the university. So it was kind of a little tied into the emergency management community at that point. And I started to learn about a fellow named Dave Bloomquist, who is a faculty member down at the University of Florida in Gainesville. And his work with NOAA, and the work that they did to basically put up a small plane, and to do heat detection and LIDAR over the World Trade Centre disaster zone, so that it could help them both figure out where there might be fires happening underground still, and how to start to remove debris at that point, they already realised that there are no survivors. So but it started looking at these 3d models, or 3d representations using this LIDAR data. And I thought, wow, that's really interesting. And about four months later, I was up in New York, and I had an opportunity to work to get to know an engineer who was really helping coordinate a lot of that removal, and had the opportunity to actually go down into the site. So this is like January 2 2002. And the site is still on fire. Even with a gas mask, it was very hard to go through. But I'm looking around and I'm seeing you know, these buildings on the damage and thinking about the work that Bloomquist did, and I said, No, no, maybe we could use LIDAR to document all these structures. So I called him up and he was very generous and he helped share some of experience and help get my group started and we started doing some work in this area. And we started doing some work for the owner Emergency Management Agency. Looking at prediction have trees falling across roadways, where we would go and MIT from the LIDAR they already had, we could measure the height of the tree and the distance to the road and make estimates to what extent if the tree fell over, it would either partially, completely or not at all block the road. So that was kind of our first foray into that. And once I started, I was completely locked.

Dusty Rhodes  10:25
Okay, so now, it sounds like you are looking for data over huge areas of land and very highly populated land, with a lot of buildings in it. That's a huge amount of information that you need LIDAR piqued your attention. For engineers who are not working in this space. Can you explain how that technology works? How do you 3d scan an area?

Debra Laefer  10:48
Yeah, so it's a technology that can be used from multiple platforms from even right now through your iPhone, or from some type of stationary unit, the unit can be mounted on a car, it could be a small lens mounted on drones, on helicopters on airplanes, the technology is fundamentally the same, you're sending out a laser signal, kind of a beam of light, you know, what time it left your piece of equipment.

Dusty Rhodes  11:27
And you know, where kind of in the world your equipment is, is it on the ground? Is it above is it at the bottom of the broad of a craft.

Debra Laefer  11:29
So, that beam part of it will come back, it will hit something and it will come back. And you will know and the equipment will record the time that it comes back. So based on the change in time, we have a certain distance that can be calculated because we know what the speed of light is. And we use that to determine what they call the range.

Dusty Rhodes  11:52
And you were doing this millions and millions. And it's I imagine millions and millions of times a second.

Debra Laefer  11:58
Yeah, I mean, ultimately, obviously some of its limited by your equipment, but it's actually more limited by the how much data the equipment can take back. And how long your battery is good for.

Dusty Rhodes  12:15
Let's put a picture on it. Okay, you somehow found yourself in Dublin and you decided Grafton Street. Okay, we're going to 3d scan that we're gonna measure that down to what kind of measurement Did you get it down to what scale?

Debra Laefer  12:28
The first scan we did was about four centimetres. Wow. Okay. And the second I think was down to about two and a half centimetres. Wow. So tell me maybe a actually even less than that. So made that a centimetre.

Dusty Rhodes  12:47
Tell me about this story about how you use helicopters, drones, whatever centre of Dublin Grafton Street, the whole block and you measured it and 3d scanner to within a centimetre.

Debra Laefer  12:57
So what we really wanted to do was to provide these representations of these buildings to the engineering community. So you have to set your mind back to 2004. Celtic Tiger, Ireland's booming, and a lot of discussion about putting in Dublin's first metro to go from the bottom of Grafton Street, or more specifically, in the northwest corner of St. Stephen's Green, yeah, up to the airport. So Dublin, and Ireland, in general, at that point had had almost no tunnelling. And obviously, here we are in a country that has limited experience with this technology, you have a very complicated geology with a lot of small, granular material mixed in with kind of big boulders and stuff. So it's a tough thing to tunnel through without a lot of disturbance of the ground. And here you have this amazing architectural resource in terms of the centre of Dublin, that at that moment was actually under consideration as a World Heritage Site. So you have this kind of conflict happening about preserving and the future and at risk. So I was fortunate put together a proposal to science foundation Ireland, with a colleague at UC Dublin, Hamish Carr and a colleague up at our collaborator up at Trinity, we were able to come up with kind of a plan of not only how to acquire this data, but how to process it and make it usable.

Dusty Rhodes  14:39
Okay, tell me about acquiring it.

Debra Laefer  14:40
So, when most people even today, put this kind of unit under a plane or a drone or helicopter, it faces down so the unit swings, and depending on the equipment, it might swing thing, just left to right. Or it may have kind of an arc to it. But it's kind of, you know, it's not just capturing exactly what's below it, but kind of a swath, but it's pretty much focused on what's directly underneath. And as the LIDAR unit swings to the side, the quality and quantity of data that you get, when it intersects a building facade is pretty limited. So most of the good data that you're getting is roads, and roofs. But if the thing that you're interested in knowing about and protecting is the building's facade and its structure, knowing about its roof and knowing about the street next to it's not going to help very much. So we kind of took a big step back, and Hamish and I really like, Well, how do we capture these building facades? And we said, well, let's let's think about the equipment, how does the equipment work? And how do they traditionally fly? Even though old kind of medieval city, like Dublin has a kind of pattern to it. And much of it's a grid. So typically, what they do is they say, Okay, we're gonna fly from x to y, and from A to B, this is our kind of area, and they will fly along the grid line, they'll go down, turn around, back down, back. And then when they're finished with that, they'll come around 90 degrees and do it the other way. It's great for the pilots, they really get lost, it's not so great for the data acquisition for the con, we watched you. So we show through geometry that if you flew diagonal, to the street grid, that you could pick up significant like basically double the information, just because the angle, just because the angle, the other thing we realised is that the amount of overlap that they fly was only enough to basically sew together, you know, one group of data from the next. So when you're flying down one street, they would go over, they wouldn't necessarily do the next street, that they would position themselves so that there was only about a 10% overlap. So if you're from the geomatics community, and you're interested in mapping, and you're interested in floodplain, or using this for floodplain risk analysis, this is great. But if you're interested in looking at these facades, it's not so great. And it basically really limits what you can pick up, because it's in that swing at the edge of the scan, that we're picking up the facades, right, because we're looking down, we're looking at the street, and now we're swinging to the left. And only at the end of that swing, do we start picking up the data. So again, we went back to basic geometry, and established that we needed about a 60% overlap, to achieve a complete scan so that we didn't have these is good blank spots, because you have with this line of sight technology, if you can't see it, you can't capture it, like the camera. So you have a situation if you're in front of one, if you're standing in front of a building, you obviously can't see what's on the back. But also, sometimes buildings preclude you seeing a building behind them. So if you're up in the air, and you've got a tallest building, and maybe there's a small one across the street, maybe you can't see that. So again, we had to kind of compensate for a lot of these things. When we originally did this, people thought we were insane. They're like, why do you want to do this, you know, like, trust us trust us. And it was very hard to even find a contractor to do it. And when we got the data, they were astonished. They're like, Wow, we had no idea we could get this kind of data.

Dusty Rhodes  19:08
Let me just say that there is a YouTube video of the data that you got. And when you watch the video, your jaw will drop and go, Oh, my God. And I have put a link directly to that video in the show notes in the description area of this podcast that we're listening to right now. So you can just click on it. And you can see it. Apologies, Deborah go on.

Debra Laefer  19:28
No, thank you. I think that's one of the best demonstrations of it. Because we're taking we didn't devise a sensor. We didn't even improve the sensor. But we took a fundamentally engineering approach to it. So I think that the way the technology had been used this idea was like more data is better and you just get we can you smash it together and you kind of muddle through the best you can. And we took this more systematic approach of let's reverse engineer the process. fear what we want to get and figure out how to use the sensor to obtain that data.

Dusty Rhodes  20:06
So now you have the data, what the problem is, is that you have an enormous amount of data. And that's the next problem. The next challenge, what do you do with it? I mean, how do you sort? Those many ones and zeros? Yeah.

Debra Laefer  20:22
So the basic storage of it, the I would call the static store, it's just, you know, putting it somewhere is not so much a problem. My brother used to work for Google, and he would joke, you know, what's a petabyte between friends? So it's not the storage, it's, as you said, it's the sorting. It's the what they call the queering. It's the retrieving of the data. And so we really, with my help, my long term colleague and collaborator Michela Berta loto, at UCD, really sat down and looked at a lot of the work that she had done in database and database structures, and talked about, well, what were our needs? How is the community currently doing at least some of this work? And what was that opportunity. And so in about 2006, we really started in earnest, taking on that problem. And I would say that that work really culminated about nine years later, when we graduated, jointly drew graduated a PhD student who demonstrated that you could very effectively use the data structure as the fundamental building block for post processing algorithms. So that you already have stored the data in a way that is highly usable. The paper that on jeuveau are joins graduate student who is still in Ireland is the lead author on is in the top point, zero 1% of all papers cited. For the years published, this technique has been used in fields as far from civil engineering as breast cancer research, so that not only has it been transferred to other LIDAR applications, but people have used it for other remote sensing and medical imaging datasets. So which is really amazing.

Dusty Rhodes  22:24
So you put some banners on the data, then how do you integrate it with other technologies? So a lot of people talk about GIS and bi M and stuff like that? How do you get that data then interacting with them? So engineers can actually use it? 

Debra Laefer  22:37
Yeah, I'd say actually, most of the ways that us engineers use it reaction, computational models. So certainly, there are ways to tie it to GIS systems, the time we were working, there wasn't even a full 3d solution, which meant that it was what they call two and a half d solution, which means that every Z point, every elevation point, there could only be one unique one for every xy point. So if you had a building that was truly straight, there was no way at that x, y point, you know, at that corner of your street, or the corner of your building, to represent both the bottom and the top. So you had this kind of slightly wedding cake effect, where the points were actually slightly offset. Obviously, the technology has moved on from now, these GIS systems can both produce and host 3d models. But to just to give you a sense of kind of where we were, you know, with us BIM kind of really wasn't even really a thing by then. And the challenge is, is that unlike a photograph, when you have a photograph, and you look at it, every pixel, every little space is filled, right? There's no blank spots. With the LIDAR data. It's not that way. Maybe the beam went through a window, and it didn't come back or you know, maybe it went through a tree and you it came back in like six different pieces. So you get this data set that's very non homogeneous. These often refer to a sparse, it's an ordered. So there's not no, there's no natural order, when you get it back from the vendor. mean, it's been geo referenced. But there's, it doesn't like say, Oh, this point belongs to a building. And this other point belongs to a building.

Dusty Rhodes  24:30
It's a bit scattered.

Debra Laefer  24:31
It's a bit scattered. It's a bit chaotic. So So we continue to pioneer really groundbreaking work in how to fundamentally store that data. Because very early on, it became clear that the sheer size of the data, it was a major impediment to people using it. And it's still content used to be so some of my most recent work that we've not published yet, really looks at how do you take a billion points and process them actually Just on a regular PC, you know, can you do that? So, for us, the bigger question was, how do you get these points into a computational model? We don't care, we're labelling them necessarily, may eventually want to label them to a certain extent, because you want to know if your material model for each piece is correct. But the bigger thing is, how do you generate what they call a watertight model. And this is where the 3d printing starts to sneak in. So to do a computational model, you have to do create what they call a watertight mesh, which means that every point has to be connected to other points through a set of lines, but these lines must connect at nodes, they can't overlap, they can't be a little short of them, right. And when you use the traditional transfer transformation processes that were available for ticket in the late 2000s, you ended up having to do a huge amount of manual correction. And if you're looking at a terabyte of data, that's not gonna work, right. Yeah. So we really had to kind of think about how do you overcome those problems. And through this wonderful kind of collaboration between computer science and through civil engineering that we had going on at UCD, between myself and Hamish Carr and our students, Tommy Hanks, and Lynch ronghong, we had this kind of Eureka moment that the way the computational models were set up, many of them used would look like almost a little bricks, that they were these eight noted elements, and that these eight nodes had no elements, which didn't have to be squares, that could be rectangles looked an awful like, the elements that we were using to do the storage axis that this is acting like a key is that, yeah,

Debra Laefer  27:02
in this, so we divided the data in something called an octree. So we're you chop it up into basically eight quadrants. And if there's no data in the quadrant, you forget about that part. And then you keep kind of digging down either until you only have a certain amount of points in a box. Maybe that's the amount of points that can be stored in the computer's cache and dealt with comfortably. Or maybe you do it more generically. And say you're just going to do you know, five divisions of these things. We realise that the octree and the computation model in the finite element, they looked a lot like so then we came up with two really pioneering algorithms to do that transformation. So as we were thinking about watertight, so what is starting to happen, the patents for the original 3d printers are expiring, and we're starting to see this boom of three. So actually, this is about 2012 2013. Starting to see this boom of home 3d printers, or the you know, low low in 3d printers. There's 3d printers this 3d printed that people are even talking about maybe can you 3d print a house, you know, all these things that people are now really excited the same way? Everybody's talking about AI now. So if you cast yourself back to 2013, everybody started with 3d printing through their predict 3d printed clothing and hats, and, and, and, and everything. How do we start saying, Well, if we're creating this watertight model, couldn't we use that same watertight model approach for 3d printing, because that's what you need. The input files for 3d printing have to be these watertight models. So there was an opportunity to apply for a competitive commercialisation type grant through the EU. At that point, I had received the European Research Council Award, which was the single largest single PI award that you could obtain at that time. And they had a program they wanted to really try to commercialise work. So you could then say, Okay, this piece of work came from his project. And we'd now like to try to commercialise it. So went through that competitive program, and we got a good amount of money. And we said, Okay, we have this wonderful used 3d printer, commercial grade metal 3d printer that we were able to acquire. And it quickly became apparent that this is a very expensive thing to run. It requires a huge amount of knowledge that you have to keep in the group. And we said, how are we going to sustain this? So we said, well, there's no 3d printing centres in Ireland. What if we just opened one, and that's that so that was our next big adventure. And we started to acquire other funding and other equipment and we really, you know, kind of graduated a whole class of people who then went on many of them to really lead the introduction of what are called Advanced Manufacturing in Ireland, including a guy named Brian Marin, who came to us off the dole through a, you know, train to work program. And it was so successful, that Brian became the main initial technician for the first National Advanced Manufacturing Centre. So I think, a real success.

Dusty Rhodes  30:31
Let me put this into some kind of a context, then on the engineering and design side of things because of our use of BIM. And we're used to digital twins, and you're able to play around the buildings and change things and see how it looks. How can you do that? Like, can you use this technology that you are working on to do that on a city wide level? 

Debra Laefer  30:50
Yeah. So obviously, acquiring the data takes a while processing the data. So it's not something that you just go out and do every day. But we do see that communities, municipalities, even states are doing this now on a pretty regular basis, if not once a year, once every two years, in fact, the United States, we are having the completion of our first national scam, which is pretty exceptional. The difficulty of processing and storing that data is in part related to the quantity of the data. If you want really good sub centimetre data, it's gonna be a lot. So that always has to be part of it. But we have certainly taken that data when we've, you know, generated middle little 3d models of parts of Dublin.

Dusty Rhodes  31:41
And where would an engineer be able to use that if he is looking as as a city planner? What kind of things would he be able to do with it?

Debra Laefer  31:48
So I think one of our very early visions when particularly we got our first data set back in 2008, we said status, so good, but it's not quite good enough. That the I think the aspiration was to have a data set that was so good, you could pick out the curb height. Wow. And I think that is what we really achieved in 2015, that the data was so good that we could determine bather, basically whether the edge of the sidewalk was handicapped accessible. So I think that's a very easy, accessible use case. We've now most recently moved, we just completed a project called Urban Ark, with UCD. And with work off under her up at Queen's University, Belfast, looking at urban flooding. And one of the key components to that was the detection of subsurface spaces, basements, parking garages, things like that. And although Lidar is a line of sight technology, we can get a pretty good understanding of some things, that there are the spaces and some extent the size of them. Based on if you're you know, the angle, you're collecting the data, you might see kind of the stairwell that many of our Georgian town-houses have, or even be able to capture some of the data through the windows, or the entrances to parking garages. And by incorporating that into a larger flooding model, we can determine more effectively where the risks really are, where's the water going? Are we over predicting, or these people are particularly at risk. And we've generated flood models that show that the subsurface spaces really have an impact of where the water's going, and how fast it's building up. So if you're trying to evacuate parts of the city, or deploy emergency services, you want to know where to do that you don't want to send people to the wrong places.

Dusty Rhodes  33:45
So listen, you've done Dublin City, I believe you're going for something slightly bigger for your next project.

Debra Laefer  33:51
We don't so much bigger, but maybe more technically advanced. So we've recently completed a one square kilometre area in south-west Brooklyn. And what's really special about that dataset is not only do you have this great LIDAR data, pretty much the equivalent but we didn't delve in a little bit denser. But we've coupled it with something called hyperspectral data, and hyperspectral data, ours is in the bottom of the shortwave range downward. So if you have materials that are known, and you can get the what they call the spectral signal from them, we can match that spectral signal with things in the built environment. So a computational model has two important components. One is the geometry. And that project through our lab work and those of others has largely been solved. But the assigning of those materials and those material properties has not and hyperspectral gives us that opportunity to start doing that.

Dusty Rhodes  35:02
So some exciting stuff happening, a lot going on. I love talking to you, because you're talking about things you did 20 years ago, that are almost like cutting edge. Now you have a type of brain that just thinks 2030 4050 years in advance. So I have to ask you, what do you consider now the main challenges that engineers today need to start thinking about?

Debra Laefer  35:25
I would say one of the main challenges is coupling these major weather systems or storm systems with that kind of urban level weather system, we have huge investments of, you know, trying to predict where hurricanes are going, and how much rain and how much storm surge. But what's really happening from the street level, say, up to the first 100 or two feet, there are not a lot of models. And yet all of that's controlling all these urban heat problems that we're having. And we just don't have those couple of models. So it's that multi-scale physics, that we're kind of missing right now, where people like me very much on the crowd at the bottom, could work with somebody like one of my collaborators, Olivia police here in our Chaos Group, which is our weather group in our maths department. Between Olivia and myself, there's a big space. And there's not too many people in that space. So I think that that's really where we need to start going.

Dusty Rhodes  36:32
I also wanted to ask you, because I was watching an interview with you, you were talking about the advice you give to your students, which I mean, it just rang true with me. It's when you're a student, make mistakes, because you learn more from mistakes. And when things go right. Now, that's great to say to students, we're all engineers listening to this podcast. Can you apply that to engineering in a real life professional situation? Or should you just have made audio mistakes in college?

Debra Laefer  37:02
One of the highlights of my educational career was getting to meet a geotechnical engineer named Ralph back. And Ralph peck at the time was the most important living geotechnical engineer in the world. And he had been a student of Karl Terzaghi, who is the founder of geotechnical engineering. And he would come at the age of, you know, 79. And he would give these talks about when he was a young engineer, working under Karl Terzaghi, and all the mistakes that he made. So it's good to make mistakes. And it's good to have senior engineers check them.

Dusty Rhodes  37:42
Keep trying new things, regardless. Yeah, kind of wrap up then by just ask, is there anything else that you'd like to add to our chat today that I haven't thought of? Or haven't brought up?

Debra Laefer  37:53
Yeah, I mean, I think that if people think they have a good idea, they shouldn't give up. That if you push on it hard enough, long enough, it will happen. As crazy as your idea may seem that a lot of times the best ideas are initially too far ahead of the curve. But don't give up on them.

Dusty Rhodes  38:15
If you'd like to find out more about Debra and some of the topics that we spoke about today, you'll find notes and link details in the description area of this podcast. But for now, Professor Debra Laefer from NYU Centre for Urban Science and Progress, thank you so much for an absolutely fascinating chat.

Debra Laefer  38:31
Lovely to be here. Thanks for the invitation.

Dusty Rhodes  38:35
And if you enjoyed our podcast today do share with a friend in the business just tell them to search for Engineers Ireland in their podcast player. The podcast is produced by dustpod.io for Engineers Ireland. For pre-released episodes, more information on engineering across Ireland or career development opportunities, there are libraries of information on our website at engineersireland.ie. But for now, until next time, from myself, Dusty Rhodes, thank you for listening.