Pandemic challenges highlight needed shift in engineering research
As communities across the United States struggle to manage a wave of COVID-19 infections, a multidisciplinary team of researchers argue that the pandemic has revealed the ways in which engineered structures and services have contributed to society’s challenges. They subsequently insist that the built environment – including both engineered structures and services – cannot be ignored when developing long-term pandemic mitigation.
In an article recently published in The Journal of Critical Infrastructure Policy, a team led by David Mendonca, a professor of industrial and systems engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, implores engineers and social scientists to re-examine the models, data collection methods, and assumptions that their research is currently built upon.