The United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs) have summed up the required solutions for the objectives of peace, health, safety, and joy for life on Earth. All of the UN SDGs are arguably multi-disciplinary and engineering problems. The role of international collaborative networks of engineering leaders, therefore, is emerging as more and more crucial, in the face of the need for urgent solutions and imminent dangers. However, a closer look at the individual scale reveals engineering is in crisis from the point of view of professional identity, inclusiveness, and consequently attractiveness. Enrollment and retention rates are not in keeping with the human resource (Society 5.0) that we need. It is clear that education, public, and private sectors need to get together and establish not only common goals but also roadmaps with methods and tools. We will demonstrate some promising strategies to connect all stakeholders towards the common goals. These include responsibilities of the academe such as inclusiveness education for tomorrow’s engineers to open innovation platforms for collaborative design in faster prototyping.
Speaker // Şirin Tekinay
Sabancı Unıversıty
Professor Sirin Tekinay is faculty of Electronics Engineering at Sabancı University. She has previously served as a Rector, Vice Rector, and Dean of Engineering and Natural Sciences. She was tenured faculty of Electrical and Computer Engineering at New Jersey Institute of Technology. She served the United States National Science Foundation as Program Director. She has held senior positions in telecom industry, such as technical prime for wireless geolocation at the Bell Labs. Prof. Tekinay holds nine patents and has authored numerous publications. Her areas of interest include engineering education, complexity, network science, mobile networks, sensor networks, and applications. She founded the first digital local fabrication laboratory in Turkey; “FabLab Istanbul,” and she is one of the pioneers of the five-dimensional STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, Mathematics) approach to education and research, in addition to new multidisciplinary lines of study, innovation and entrepreneurship, and the Maker Movement through FabLabs. She is a consultant and expert reviewer for the European Commission (EC) on Science and Technology. She sits as elected member on the Board of Directors of the European Society for Engineering Education (Societe Europeenne pour la Formation des Ingenieurs – SEFI). She is also appointed member of several boards of Turkish Council of Higher Education and the Technological and Scientific Research Council. She’s recently been elected as the new chair of the Global Engineering Deans Council – GEDC.
