Fall 2002
Faculty Profile
Q & A with Don Giddens Dean of the Georgia Tech College of Engineering

photo by Gary Meek Don Giddens is dean of Georgia Tech's College of Engineering. The college consistently ranks among the elite top five engineering schools in national rankings. (300-dpi JPEG version - 829k)

DON GIDDENS, one of the nation's pioneers in biomedical engineering, became dean of the College of Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology on July 1, 2002. The college consistently ranks among the elite top five engineering schools in national rankings.

Giddens, who has been associated with Georgia Tech for more than 30 years, worked with Atlanta-based Emory University to develop a joint biomedical engineering program, and he enhanced Tech's research, commercialization, and faculty and student recruitment efforts. Under his direction, the biomedical engineering program continued its rise in national stature. Last year, it was ranked sixth in the nation by U.S. News and World Report.

Giddens joined Georgia Tech in 1968 and served as a faculty member and administrator for almost 25 years, including four years as chair of the School of Aerospace Engineering. Then he served as dean of the Whiting School of Engineering at Johns Hopkins University from 1992 to 1997.

Giddens returned to Georgia Tech in 1997 to help build its partnership with Emory University, and that work led to the creation of what is now the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University. This unique partnership between a public university with a top engineering program and a private university with a highly regarded medical school is the first of its kind in the nation. Giddens was named chair of the joint department in 1997 and holds the Lawrence L. Gellerstedt Jr. Chair in Bioengineering.

1. What are the most critical challenges ahead for engineering?

For one thing, there is this "pipeline" issue. In a number of engineering fields, you have a relatively older age distribution. For example, in the defense industry, a lot of people will be retiring in the next few years, and there aren't enough students going into science and engineering to replace them.

So how do we get young people excited about engineering? Engineering education is a challenge. It is becoming more interdisciplinary, and knowledge is growing so fast. How do we handle that in our curricula? Education is not synonymous with training, though. Things change too rapidly to "train" students effectively. We have to deal with fundamentals that will be useful to students for a long time, while at the same time their education must be interesting to keep them motivated and to attract students into the field. So we need to provide a good basis for lifelong learning. This is becoming more and more of a challenge as things get more complex.

The public perception of engineering is another challenge. A lot of young people think of engineers as nerdy and not very social. This is not really true, but the image is somewhat problematic. How can we convey the excitement and creativity, and the professional and financial potential, of engineering to them? How can we ensure that our students have a liberal education that enables them to be effective in their careers?

2. In a world that has changed significantly in the past year, how do you expect the engineering disciplines to contribute to hopes for a brighter future?

From the economic side, engineering can contribute by continuing to improve productivity, a factor that contributes to a robust economy. Whether it's in manufacturing, development of new technologies, computing improvements, nanotechnology, etc., engineering can create more productivity per worker.

photo by Stanley Leary Giddens is a biomedical engineer and still conducts research in the Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University. He helped found the joint department between the two institutions. (300-dpi JPEG version - 523k)

Engineers play a vital role in national defense. A topic on everyone's mind today is bioterrorism. Attempts to thwart it depend on engineering technologies, at least in part. For example, issues of detection depend on engineered devices such as sensors. Another example.....if you look at contributions from industrial and systems engineering, we might be able to do a better job of handling the logistics of confining a contaminant more efficiently.

Sustainable energy is another area in which engineering has a large role to play. There are political and economic aspects, of course, but technology has to be one of the important elements in determining how we live on this planet without making it a lot worse. We need to develop alternative energy sources and recycling capabilities much more than we have done to date, and we must understand the economic impact of "life cycle costs" of products.....what may be cheap to produce may cost a fortune to remediate. While much of this issue is driven by economics and politics, a lot is science- and technology-based.

In health, there are a host of things that involve engineering. There are devices, prosthetics, continuing research and development into how we see, how we touch, hear, breathe, how we protect ourselves from injury, how we distribute health care, how can we perform surgery better or even remotely.

Then at the molecular level, the genomics explosion involves numerous engineering issues, such as techniques for molecular imaging, reliable testing with small samples, how to analyze a huge amount of data from molecular biology. The data are overwhelming to analyze in traditional "bench-science" ways.

Tissue engineering holds promise, both in hybrids and engineered tissues, such as artificial skin or a tissue-engineered liver. The tissue engineering center here at Georgia Tech is very involved in those matters.

I also have to mention the importance of engineering in our civil infrastructure. We take a great deal for granted, but what would our lives be like without modern water treatment, transportation and communication systems, and construction techniques? Someone once said that some of the greatest technological impacts are from things we don't think about when we use them.

So there are many opportunities in engineering to help toward a brighter future. We just need to communicate this excitement better.

3. What are your expectations for your field of bioengineering in terms of its potential for improving the world? Specifically, what do you predict to become possible in therapeutic applications of bioengineering technologies?

We need engineers who understand a lot of biology, and we need engineers who can work with medical people to implement engineering solutions to medical problems. These two types of engineers are educated a little differently. The first requires a thorough integration of engineering and the life sciences, while the second needs less biology – but enough to provide sufficient working knowledge to allow effective collaboration.

In therapies, to take just one example, neurodegenerative diseases require an understanding of how neurological systems function down to the cellular level. There are a lot of engineering opportunities here. Whether you are dealing with existing tissue or integrating an engineered device into the body to replace a function, engineering is essential.

We have faculty working to develop therapies, improving diagnoses and even conducting basic research that can lead to methods for prevention of disease. We can expect to see continued progress in the cardiovascular, orthopedic and rehabilitation areas,

photo by Stanley Leary Georgia Tech's new Environmental Science and Technology building will house state-of-the-art laboratories, classrooms and an incubator for early-stage companies. (300-dpi JPEG version - 972k)

while also noting an increased emphasis on neurological problems, cancer and tissue engineering to replace or repair diseased organs. I hope the day is not too far off where we can learn to help the body regenerate its own parts and to adapt, without rejection, to organs grown in other species.

4. As a pioneer in the field of bioengineering, describe what it takes to make an important contribution to science and technology.

For one thing, it takes a bit of luck to pick an important problem or area to work on. I urge my students to focus on identifying important problems and not just work on things that are incremental. It's easy for researchers to slip into this trap: Add a little bit of knowledge, get some publications and give some presentations. After 10 years, maybe you look back and what you've done has not had a big impact at all. It's just a little more of the same. I see a lot of this in presentations at meetings and, very often, in publications.

So, you have to be willing to bite off an important piece of a significant problem and then see it through. It's persistence. If you can do this successfully, you will have an impact. As you become more senior, one of the advantages is that you don't have to worry as much about how many publications you have. In my lab, it's more important to get a really good publication that has an impact.

You also have to be willing to take risks. I was in aerospace engineering, and it was a big change to move into bioengineering. At the time, I did not think of the risk. I just did it.

5. If experience is one of the best teachers, what has it taught you that you pass on to others in your charge?

Experience has taught me to be open to continual learning. I don't assume that because I have a lot of experience, because I have a Ph.D., or because I'm a professor, that I know everything. You'd be surprised how many people just close their minds. They think they have nothing to learn from someone else....and so they stop learning.

We should value people and the different insights they bring. They might think of something you never thought about. This includes valuing student insight into educational issues. We can learn a lot from students – how they learn and what's important to them.

So for me, being open to learning new things is very important. I advise my students to do this. It has ethical dimensions, as well, such as having respect for others and their views.

Another thing that experience has taught me is that you really have to like what you're doing. If you do, you will work hard at it and spend time and be successful.

I liked aerospace engineering. There were and are exciting things going on in the field. But I had a latent interest in medicine going way back.... Working in the defense industry, I researched how to get more hydrogen warheads delivered in an attack. It was an important thing, but thank goodness we never had to use it. I just found it more interesting to do something related to people. I value the defense industry. Defense research often delivers useful technology to people.

But I wanted to make contributions that affect people's everyday lives. Some research we did made it clear that a certain type of measurement would be useful in diagnosing cardiovascular disease. We didn't development the instruments, but now duplex ultrasound can show blood flow in carotid arteries, and it's useful diagnostic information that can lead to prevention of stroke.

6. Given your experience with interdisciplinary research and inter-university collaboration, what are the long-term benefits of those interactions? How do you keep those professional relationships strong?

One way to gain new knowledge is through the various disciplines. Assimilating this knowledge is a characteristic of engineering. Engineers integrate things into creating or understanding a system, whether it is manufacturing an airplane, an automobile or a medical device.

photo by Stanley Leary Researchers Danny Puckett, Professor Ben Zinn and Matt Christopher conduct studies in the Aerospace Combustion Lab at Georgia Tech. (300-dpi JPEG version -678k)

By nature, when you practice engineering, it must be multi-disciplinary to get to the solution. You interact with people in mechanics, chemistry, whatever. It's necessary to do that to solve the systems problem.

A great benefit of interdisciplinary research is learning from other people. There's a lot of cross-fertilization that occurs. You gain knowledge and perspective from interdisciplinary experiences. You get a lot of energy from interacting with other people. In kinetic theory, there's a little experiment. You have a box with a partition dividing it. On one side, there's a vacuum with no energy, and on the other a gas under pressure and a lot of energy. If you punch a hole in the partition, the energy goes over and invigorates the other side. Some of this happens in interdisciplinary research. The disciplines can excite and invigorate each other.

And another benefit is the leverage you can get from doing interdisciplinary research. For example, in the School of Biomedical Engineering, we have taken advantage of the strengths of Georgia Tech's engineering school and Emory University's medical school. We can often tackle bigger and more important problems by using an interdisciplinary approach.

Nurturing interdisciplinary relationships takes a good bit of effort, however. Respect for the views of others, valuing their knowledge and being willing to be a team player are all important. If you look for the "win-win" opportunities, this is the best strategy.

Also, interdisciplinary research motivates students. We can keep them in engineering because they get excited about it. All the big issues in society are multi-disciplinary, so that makes interdisciplinary research important to Georgia Tech.

7. What are your expectations for change in the College of Engineering for the next five years or so?

Many things are going well, so change for the sake of change is not appropriate. We're on a good trajectory. We need to look at what we do well and continue to emphasize it and then we need to determine the areas where we don't do so well and stress those.

photo by Stanley Leary The Tech Tower is a symbol of Georgia Tech. (300-dpi JPEG version - 795k)

There are two types of change – change in what we can actually see around campus and change in what we don't actually see, or change in more abstract ways. In what we can see, what is visible to the campus visitor, I want to continue to push the need for space and infrastructure. We've done well with this, but we can't let up. Technology moves so quickly. We need more space, labs and equipment for faculty and for students.

Another thing we can see as we walk about the campus is the diversity of students and faculty here. Georgia Tech has done well by comparison, but I'd like to see the makeup of the student body change even more in the next five years to increase diversity. The field of engineering has done so poorly in recruiting women and minorities. By comparison, medicine has increased the number of women MDs entering the field to about 50 percent. In engineering, the level is in the 20 percent range, and it's not changed much in the past several years. Why is that? A lot of universities are interested in addressing that issue, and Georgia Tech should help lead the way.

We have to start earlier, in the K-12 grades. Georgia Tech can't really control it at that level, but we certainly have a vested interest in it. We can influence students who are here to keep them in engineering if it's appropriate for them or to attract them into engineering if they are undecided on a major. We have a lot of control over things like the environment in which they learn.

Students are also influenced by the number of women and minorities on the faculty.... In the School of Biomedical Engineering (BME), we have been fortunate to have women make up about 50 percent of our undergraduates and graduate students. We also have a reasonable percentage of women on the faculty in BME.

An area that is not so "visible" is Tech's entrepreneurial spirit. We need to take even more advantage of it in the College of Engineering than we have to date – and we are already pretty good at this. I want to see more horizontal interactions among schools and vertical interactions within disciplines in the schools. How can we get synergy out of the elements in the engineering college to do more than we could do as individual schools or as individual faculty members? And we need to extend that interaction to include other colleges at Georgia Tech. Deans can help set the environment to make such interactions natural and more frequent for faculty and students. As the largest college at Georgia Tech, the College of Engineering has a responsibility for making this kind of qualitative change. I think we would be better served as a college if we look outwardly more than we presently do.

Another area of change is in engineering education. We have made many improvements, but I'd like to see us, as a faculty, thinking more about learning issues as opposed to teaching issues. Students today are accustomed to interactions. Lectures can be appealing, but they are not the only way students learn. We can borrow from our learning science friends who study how people learn from each other, and how they learn in self-motivated ways. We should take more of a "real world" problem-solving approach to learning.

In BME, we are experimenting with problem-based learning. Students in teams of eight to 12 people, even as freshmen, are given a very open-ended problem. For example, how do you protect the nation's blood supply from mad cow disease? They go out as a team and find solutions, some sophisticated and some unsophisticated. Students learn from each other.... So we need to do more of this team approach.

8. What measures of success will you use to evaluate the College of Engineering's accomplishments?

Engineers like to quantify things, so we often present data to measure whether we're meeting a goal.

photo by Stanley Leary Bala Ganeshand, left, Priya Gopalakrijhnan, center, both graduate students from India, and Takashi Saijo, a graduate student who is in the Japanese Air Force, test an airfoil in the School of Aerospace Engineering Wind Tunnel. (300-dpi JPEG version - 918k)

You can count diversity – the number of women students, the number of African-American students – for example. You can quantify things like the number of research dollars per faculty member. A softer, but perhaps better measure is publications or, more importantly, citations. Citations are a method to measure whether your publication has had an impact. Then there are honors and awards, such as society fellows, national academy membership, and so on. Each of these measures, as well as others not mentioned, can tell us if we are continuing to make progress.

We also need to look at the student/faculty ratio. It has quantitative and qualitative implications. If you have too many students per faculty member, you are not likely to do as good a job because you can be overwhelmed by the workload. If we can manage it, I want to get a ratio closer to those of some of our competitors. We have close to a 20:1 ratio in the College of Engineering. We would be more productive if we had a ratio approaching 15:1.

Image is a very important qualitative measure. Do people perceive Georgia Tech as a top research institution in the nation? The quantitative data say we are one of the top institutions. But do people perceive that in Nebraska, for example? Things like coverage in the news media and our own publications, and our awards and honors improve the perception of our profession. That translates down to helping with recruitment of students and faculty. We don't track the data, but it would be great to know how often we win when we go head to head with our competition in recruiting students and faculty.

But one measure to know when we're really successful is when we stop feeling compelled to compare ourselves to others. It's like the old TV commercials for Avis. They said, "We're number two and we're trying harder." Immediately, you thought of Hertz! It was an amusing thing.

9. What are you most proud of from your tenure at Georgia Tech? And what do you most want to accomplish as dean of the College of Engineering?

One thing I am proud of is my role in helping to start the joint Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering between Georgia Tech and Emory. This was a bold move by the two institutions, and I was lucky to be a part of it.

Another thing high on my list would be the postdocs and graduate students who came through my lab. I have a sense of pride in their success and in the success of their students.

As dean of the College of Engineering, I have some things in mind that, if we can do them, would give me a sense of satisfaction.... Georgia Tech could and should be a stronger player in the "bio-X" arena. And I'm not just talking about biomedical engineering. We also have a role in the bio-environmental area and in sustainable energy, to give just a couple of examples. Integration of engineering and the life sciences is so important to our future. We've only touched the tip of the iceberg in this area. As dean, I hope I can push this issue forward. I would look back and feel good about helping do this.

At the educational level, I want us to give more attention to learning versus teaching.... I want us to get at how students learn and how to convey needed fundamentals so this issue of taking four prerequisites before being able to take a certain course becomes less significant, and it opens flexibility in education.... I question the bean-counting approach to the curriculum. It all gets back to the issue of training versus educating. So we need more emphasis on learning issues and on multidisciplinary education.

Also, I want to continue to encourage the entrepreneurial character of Georgia Tech. It is incredibly valuable. ... I hope to open up more degrees of freedom for this activity to take place than currently exists.

I've never felt thwarted at Georgia Tech. There are always ways to get things done. But some barriers still exist. In some areas, we are very creative as a college. In other ways, we are very resistant to change. Tech's entrepreneurial energy can help us create beneficial change if we just give it free rein.

– Interviewed by Jane M. Sanders

For more information, contact Don Giddens, College of Engineering, Georgia Tech, Atlanta, GA 30332-0360. (Telephone: 404-385-0125) (E-mail: don.giddens@coe.gatech.edu)

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