For the scientific community and other experts trying to make sense of a rapidly warming world, climate change is the stuff of nightmares: floods, heat waves, hurricanes, wildfires, and other natural disasters—all occurring with more intensity, frequency, and cost.

Engineering humanity away from the challenges of climate change might require a reset in how engineers think by becoming well-versed in the social issues and policies that drive decisions.
Working as a "satcom" engineer at the Amundsen–Scott South Pole Station—the United States’ scientific research station at the South Pole— aerospace engineering student Thomas Leps not only completed his University of Maryland doctorate remotely, but did so while ensuring that the station’s satellite connections run smoothly during their operational windows, regardless of the time. Leps and the station crew think his is the first Ph.D. ever defended from the South Pole.
Assistant Professor You Zhou received a National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award, joining six other Maryland Engineering faculty members who received CAREER awards earlier this year. His proposal aims to study how electrons in a semiconductor can self-arrange into a periodic pattern, a crystal, and how such a crystal melts as a result of both thermal and quantum effects.
Engineers—both applied and academic—will no doubt drive the ideas and innovations needed for a revitalization of the national infrastructure. But in order to deconstruct the structural inequity built into the human environment, many say that the discipline needs a better understanding of the blisteringly complex ways in which engineering solutions continue to hold people back.
A new paper by Maryland Engineering's Dean Samuel Graham, Jr. and collaborators at multiple institutions was named Best Paper this fall at InterPACK 2021—the flagship conference of the ASME Electronic and Photonic Packaging Division, and the leading international conference in the field of electronics packaging and heterogeneous integration. Graham also was selected as Keynote Speaker at the event.
In a lab or classroom or at 3,000 feet underwater, Maryland graduate students innovate to serve our society. Supported by mentors, surrounded by scholars with multidisciplinary expertise, and armed with creativity and ambition, they equip our nation with solutions to combat a changing climate, socio-economic and racial disparities, and the human body’s vulnerabilities. They embark on this journey at Maryland Engineering—and then they change the world.