Engineering X

By Grant Currin

The Power of Partnership

Engineer Christine Hendon and the physicians she works with see problems differently.

“A physician is trained to make the best possible decision with tools they have,” Hendon says. “When an engineer encounters a problem, we’re trained to ask a different question: ‘Can I make a better tool?’”

An associate professor of electrical engineering at Columbia Engineering, Hendon has dedicated her career to improving health by spanning the gap between engineering and medicine. After taking a course in biomedical optics as an undergraduate engineering student, Hendon took medical school courses while completing a PhD in engineering.

“It was like learning a different language,” she says. “Medicine and engineering have completely different styles of thinking.”

Today, Hendon leads a research group that includes undergraduates, graduate students, and postdoctoral researchers. Working with several collaborators at Columbia University Irving Medical Center and beyond, the group is developing tools that use cutting-edge optics to help cardiac surgeons see the heart while they are delivering therapy to treat cardiac arrhythmias.

“I tell students that we’re working on this because it’s an unsolved problem,” Hendon says. “We’re all going to come up with the solution together.”

Interdisciplinary collaboration is by no means new to engineers, but its role in the field is changing. As the capabilities of engineers continue to increase — and as technological innovation becomes even more fundamental to modern life — crossing disciplinary boundaries is becoming one of the most reliable routes to transformative breakthroughs.

Pushing the boundaries of engineering

“Engineers have always been a curious lot, and we tend to be interested in the world’s problems,” says Garud Iyengar, a professor in the Department of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research and the Avanessians Director of the Columbia Data Science Institute. From the Industrial Revolution until the middle of the 20th century, it was the physical sciences — physics and chemistry — that most strongly influenced the field.

“There were many physicists involved in developing nuclear energy, but it took a whole bunch of engineers to actually make it happen,” Iyengar says. Once physicists determined that splitting an atom would unleash enormous amounts of energy, engineers had to step in and figure out how to use technology to control the reaction, contain the energy, and transform it into useful electricity. By the 1950s, revolutions in genetics and neuroscience had laid the groundwork for engineering disciplines such as biomedical engineering and artificial intelligence. Today, researchers at Columbia Engineering are collaborating with experts in nearly every field, including the arts, humanities, and social sciences.

“Engineers have always had a need to make technology that improves human existence,” Iyengar says. “Along the way, we pick up skills. As those skills develop, our breadth increases.”

Legal scholars, for example, have long had a philosophical perspective on data privacy, called contextual integrity.

“Now, we can combine this concept with differential privacy to build effective safeguards,” Iyengar explains. “Twenty-five or 30 years ago, you never would have imagined that.

For Hendon, the “tight community” at Columbia Engineering is one of the most important factors supporting work that crosses traditional disciplinary boundaries.

“It’s amazing how those collaborations spark so much intellectual curiosity,” she says. “You start your faculty position with a particular research direction. Then you get here, you meet people, and your career and research are enriched through these partnerships.”

Hendon met one of her most frequent collaborators, Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering Kristin Meyers, at an orientation for new faculty members.

“We were doing experiments together the next week,” Hendon says. “It launched our 12-year collaboration.”

While interdisciplinary work is increasingly encouraged and supported by the institutions that fund research, Hendon says that getting such projects off the ground can be more difficult than continuing down a well-worn path. Submitting to a large federal funding mechanism, for example, means presenting preliminary data to a multidisciplinary group of reviewers. Interdisciplinary projects often need to time to generate their own preliminary data due to the newness of the research problem they are tackling.

For students, working on an interdisciplinary collaboration can mean learning and exploring new terrain alongside their professor. Hendon encourages her students to incorporate what they are learning in their courses within their research.

“It takes time for the students to get comfortable, but by the end of a project, they’re always proposing ideas for new designs, analysis, and experiments,” she says. “It becomes a truly collaborative process among everyone who’s on the team.”