Tsu-Jae King Liu, president of the National Academy of Engineering, is optimistic that engineers who are collaborative and adaptable will shape a brighter future.
But as technology advances more rapidly than ever before, ensuring future engineers have the skills they need to work together to solve global challenges requires transforming engineering education.
On June 30, Liu gave a talk on this topic titled “Engineering Leadership in a World of Accelerating Change,” followed by a fireside chat moderated by Interim Dean Veena Misra. The event drew a full auditorium in the James B. Hunt Jr. Library at NC State University.
“We as engineers should always be optimistic because we know the future can be brighter than today,” she said. “We just have to work together because the problems that we have to solve are of course more and more complex. That’s why it’s even more and more important to collaborate across institutions [and] across work sectors around the world.”
Liu is the previous dean of the UC Berkeley College of Engineering. She earned her B.S., M.S. and Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Stanford University. She holds over 94 patents in the area of semiconductor devices and fabrication methods.
Her leading scientific contributions include the development of polycrystalline silicon-germanium thin film technology for integrated circuits and microsystems as well as the three-dimensional FinFET transistor, the design used today in microprocessor chips. When Liu was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2017, the board cited the FinFET as one of her major engineering achievements.
“I was co-inventor, and it took a huge team of faculty visiting industrial researchers and students and postdocs to really demonstrate the world’s first FinFETs even before the turn of the century,” she said when Misra asked about her experiences developing the FinFET transistor. “The students at the time or the visiting industrial researchers, they all became leaders at various leading companies in the industry.”
Collaboration is key. For Liu, working effectively across disciplines and universities boils down to three main priorities: empathy, adaptability and communication.
“Those are the things we have to keep in mind as educators,” she said. “We are cultivating future leaders for our society … Ultimately, I think the biggest impact that we make is through the talent we develop.”
