Title: From Engineer to Music Executive, Educator, and Author: Howie Singer ’77, '79

[00:00:06,280] CHRISTA DOWNEY: Welcome to the Engineering Career Conversations. I'm Christa Downey, Director of the Engineering Career Center at Cornell University. 

[00:00:14,160] TRACI NATHANS-KELLY: And I'm Traci Nathans-Kelly, Director of the Engineering Communications Program. We are excited to bring you this forum, where we will host lively conversations that we hope will inspire you. We are very excited to welcome to our studios today, Howie Singer, who's an expert on the implications of new technology in the music industry. In 15 years at Warner Music Group, he served as SVP and chief strategic technologist, analyzing services and companies that could enhance or threaten Warner Music Groups businesses. As a strategic consultant to Universal Music Group, MQA Limited, and other startups, he currently advises on products, services, technologies related to high-res music, artificial intelligence, podcasts, and streaming data analysis. We welcome Howie to the studios. Thank you so much, thank you so much for being with us here today. We're so glad to meet you. And we like to start off each of these interviews about, where are you at now? What kind of work are you invested in right now? And then we'll work backwards in time as we go forward through this interview. 

[00:01:29,609] HOWIE SINGER: Well, I guess it's appropriate that we're doing this from the campus of Cornell, because after many years in business, I'm back being an academic. Not that I ever really was, I was a student, certainly, but I am an adjunct faculty member in the NYU Music Business program, teaching data analytics, which is a required class, if you want to get a degree in music business at NYU. Data is part of every role just about in the music business, which is a change from when I joined the industry. In addition, I do consulting work. These days, it's all about AI. No great surprise because I can't even keep up with the Google alerts each day with the stories about AI, and I'm just focusing on the effect on the creative industries - music, books, movies, et cetera. And that's a long list to just keep up with these days. And then the third thing, and it's part of the reason that I'm here is when we locked down for COVID, I guess that still counts for current history, it seems like just yesterday and not four years ago, I started working on a book based on the things I had learned in the music business, and also a bunch of other research going back in time to the start of the recorded music business. So I'm an author as well. 

[00:02:49,379] TRACI NATHANS-KELLY: Well, I like that, trifecta of abilities, where you are. 

[00:02:53,399] HOWIE SINGER: And I like to say I'm semi retired, so that I'm busy, as well as not trying to work full time. 

[00:02:59,864] TRACI NATHANS-KELLY: It's a great It's a great way to organize your days, right? To be partially retired. You don't have to do anything. 

[00:03:05,850] HOWIE SINGER: Other than showing up for the class where my students are at NYU, that is true. 

[00:03:11,420] CHRISTA DOWNEY: So maybe let's talk about your book then. Do you want to tell the audience about it? 

[00:03:16,549] HOWIE SINGER: Sure. Be happy to. The name of the book is Key Changes The Ten Times Technology Transformed the Music Industry. And sort of the conventional wisdom that I lived through was, you know, the music industry was humming along profitably, ever so profitably, because of the compact disc, which was introduced in the 80s and hit peak revenues in 1999. And something else happened in 1999, some students on campus at Northeastern introduced Napster, which caused this enormous shockwave through the industry, and very large declines in revenue. And the story was, you know, that's kind of, this was unique at a point in time, and it really wasn't. The music industry has always lived on the knife's edge of technology and business, and often was disrupted when new technologies came along. And like many businesses, not just music, had trouble adapting to the new things. So that's the book that my co author Bill Rosenblatt and I put together that in a series of chapters about the different formats in the industry, the phonograph, a vinyl, tapes, downloads, streaming and artificial intelligence. There's a chapter on artificial intelligence in the book, how each of those formats came to be. So we give some lessons on how the technologies coalesce to become the new format, and then how that change affected the rest of the business. Just to pick one small example, songs are shorter today, and the chorus comes earlier. And that's because the way payments and streaming works, which is the bulk of the revenue for the music business today, payments happen at the 30 second mark. If you listen to a song for 15 seconds and skip, it doesn't count towards the money. So you want people to listen for at least 30 seconds. At 31 seconds, the meter ticks, and it becomes a play in the calculations of Apple music and Amazon and Spotify. So if you want somebody to listen, you don't put a very long intro with instruments at the start of the song. You put the hook. You put the chorus at the beginning. And many short songs, therefore, each one can count. On an album with many songs, let's look at Beyonce's new record that just came out and it's number one. Shorter songs, many songs on the project or record, if we can call it that, even though she will release a vinyl, of course, but we still call it a record matches that pattern. So there's one small example, but this has happened time and again, whether we're talking about how you record on the initial phonograph cylinders and records or what you did for MTV or what you do today for streaming. 

[00:06:07,130] TRACI NATHANS-KELLY: I'm completely taken in by the 15 second thing that you just told us about Because, you know, I think a lot of people think, oh, songs are shorter, are they getting to the chorus? People talk about songs being shorter now. I would have never made that connection in a million years with the pay structure, right? 

[00:06:27,100] HOWIE SINGER: Right. And, you know, that's the point that we look at all the other factors, whether it's the distribution channels, how the industry makes money, how creators change what they're doing, how fans engage with the music. Often, the new format also comes with new genres because the younger fans move to the new thing faster than people like me who were in the baby boomers, and then how law and regulations change, for example, Napster got sued. And today, we have lawsuits against certain AI companies, whether that's the New York Times or the music publishers suing over their material being used without permission to train AI models. So, all those things, every time there's a new format, there's a story to be told about each one of those elements of the business. 

[00:07:10,139] TRACI NATHANS-KELLY: It's really fascinating to me. We wanted to ask you too about the biggest challenge that you're finding right now in this intersection of work that you have, you know, three big things and your partial retirement. But what are some of the biggest challenges you've faced along the way to get you where you are here today? 

[00:07:30,960] HOWIE SINGER: The I mean, I think the biggest challenge I faced with just making this transition from sort of a traditional engineer to being a music industry executive. That was a big change. If you had told me the day I walked onto this campus to enter the PhD program in the School of Operations Research and Industrial Engineering, as it was known then. Today, it's information engineering, which is a reflection of our times, that I would someday be talking to Robert Plant of Led Zeppelin about file sharing, I would have said, you're crazy. That's not. That's not in my future. That's not happening. And it was a gradual kind of thing. I started out once I had my PhD, working on very conventional operations, research projects, things like routing robots in factories that were semi automated at that point in time. Algorithms to schedule employees at a call center to maximize minimize the length of time waiting for pickup, but maximizing the profitability of the organization and meeting all the union rules for things like breaks and lunch and all those kinds of things that employees were required to have. So it's very traditional, and I had nothing whatsoever to do with music. I was a music fan, but didn't expect to be in the music business. But in the mid 90s, some of those technologies started to come together to enable the distribution of music over networks. I was at Bell Labs and AT&T, a logical place to look at businesses that can be conducted over networks. In fact, AT&T and Bell Labs have a history of inventing things that ended up playing into the music industry, whether that was better microphones or sound movies, sound talkies, sound pictures. So there were lots of times that Bell Labs had technologies that played a role, audio compression, which became the heart of the MP3, which was part of that Napster Revolution. And so we were sorting out what could be a business that we could build using these technologies from AT&T. And we had audio compression. We had security technology from people who had designed the secure telephone on the president's desk, so they really understood security. And we could build a software system that protected the music we were distributing over networks. We were too early in part because those networks were slow. Right? Today, we'd get annoyed if a song took longer than a few fractions of a second to play. We go, what's wrong with this? It's not playing fast enough, right? It was 15 minutes, given the state of networks in the mid 90s. But it was clear this was coming. And we talked to the music companies about this. They were not enamored of the idea. Why? Those CDs were so profitable. They weren't interested in making that change at that point in time. No business wants the change from a really profitable business to one to a nascent one that maybe someday could be, make a lot of money, but doesn't appear right now to be a meaningful revenue stream. So that got me in the music business. That start up eventually went away for lots of reasons. We were too early. 9/11 happened. We were unable to close additional funding, but that background gave me the credentials and experience to apply for a job in the music business. And so when Warner Music went looking for somebody to run their sort of future team of technologists that worried about these new things, I was able to get the job. And, you know, that was the start of that phase of my career. 

[00:11:07,050] TRACI NATHANS-KELLY: I have to say I'm a little jealous. I am absolutely a little jealous. 

[00:11:12,629] CHRISTA DOWNEY: As someone who gets excited about change, what I love about your book is it's a slice. It's one industry, and just how technology is influencing. And I love that you say that in the beginning that this is something that could appeal to and be beneficial to people in any industry. And to put a time stamp on this particular recording, this week is the entrepreneurship celebration at Cornell, where there are entrepreneurs coming back to campus, to celebrate, share ideas, meet with students, hear what they're working on, and we have many students on campus who are entrepreneurs, who are aspiring entrepreneurs. And I'd love to hear what you would say to them, what particular insight you would offer in terms of thinking about technology and what's on the horizon and how they might incorporate that into their business. 

[00:12:05,970] HOWIE SINGER: Change is hard for everybody. My wife's a psychologist, and working with kids change is hard for them, too. Although you might think they'd be more flexible at being young, they're not, but change is always hard. And it's always difficult particularly if you're finding a new way of doing something to convince the people that are benefiting from the current system to make that change. And was what was hard. And you could argue that, you know, it wasn't until the current business model, at whatever point in time, starts to fray. So there's a person I've known for decades in the music business, he was the Chief Technology Officer at Geffen Records. He famously sent a song over the compu serve in 1994, I think it was. He might have been the first one to do that. Jim Griffin, and he talks about Voodo, excuse me, he talks about Tarzan Economics, and I said Voodo, which is a whole different thing. Tarzan Economics. And think about it as Tarzan swinging on the vine. Happy through the jungle, things are fine, but at some point, you got to let go and grab the next vine. And that's a big risk. And remembering that when you're talking to the people that are on that vine, and how do you get them to take that risk often? They don't make the change until they look up and see their current vine is starting to fray a bit. And that's been true, not just for the music business, but for many businesses. It wasn't the movie studios that started Netflix. It was some guys from outside. And then they all started their own streaming services to try and catch up to Netflix. They weren't the first ones, and it often comes from outside. And you know, it was difficult. It was obvious to us that music distribution was coming over networks. It was obvious to us that there were going to be new music players. We had a prototype with no moving parts. Think of it as well, the iPod had a tiny disc drive, so it did have some moving parts, but it didn't skip the way a CD skipped, right? And so, you know, we were telling them this was coming, and it was hard for them to accept. And I think now knowing all that and looking back, you know, trying to find a way to get that message across better, rather than walking out of the room and saying, they just don't get it, and they're never going to get it. You know, we should have thought a little bit more about this is on us, because if they're not getting it, it's something about how we're explaining it, right? And it's still going to be hard for them to accept it because of that change. But you know, could we get them to dip their toe in the water a little bit deeper than they might have otherwise? Because that's what they did. They experimented, and they dipped their toe in the water, but they didn't go all-in, in the phraseology we'd used today. And to make a business a success, as any entrepreneur knows, you have to go all-in. 

[00:14:55,239] TRACI NATHANS-KELLY: Thank you. I'm feeling that we're dancing towards my area of interest, which is helping engineers communicate. And you just brought up a point that maybe we weren't creating the message quite right to get them to dive in and everything. And this is something I talk quite a bit about with the undergraduates that I work with here that you can have the best idea in the world, but if you can't sell it, it's not going to go anywhere. And it doesn't matter if it's solid rocket fuel regression rates or streaming services or whatever it might be, right? That communication piece is so important. So I always say thank you for bringing up these things. 

[00:15:33,520] HOWIE SINGER: You know, I'm often asked because let's face it, operations research, PhD to, you know, working with Spotify and YouTube doesn't seem like a natural career. Although today it would be much more natural because every one of those companies has a data team. They didn't when I started in the music industry, when I went to the head of IT and said, great news, we have data on every Apple download sale, which meant we had billions of records coming. Today, we have trillions of records in streaming. We have billions of records coming, we're going to be able to use this information. He said, can you aggregate it? I don't have a database big enough to hold all of that, right? So that was the nature of the business. And when people ask me, well, how did you end up doing that? Because this is not the typical career path. And I say, really, if I had to focus on, one was the training I got in engineering and in operations research gave me a way to think about problems. And even if I wasn't using specific OR tools like queuing theory or linear programming, that discipline gave me a way to think about things. But the other thing, and, you know, this is something that I was not as good at in graduate school, and people helped me get better at it, particularly when I started at Bell Labs was explaining things. And that the fact that I could explain to the people whose whole background in music was signing artists and in a recording studio how things worked at YouTube or Spotify and make them understand it was the thing that got me where I was. It was being able to take engineering and technical stuff and speak English, right? And so that was a skill, and it was something that I had to work at. I mean, Bell Laboratories had classes. I didn't take business classes when I was here at Cornell, mistake on my part. Probably the only mistake I made at Cornell because you had a minor outside the department, and I chose civil engineering, not a smart move on my part. Should have minored in business, right? Because I ended up having to deal with business people all the time, and that would have been better if I knew their language and their terminology, and how do you put things in a way that they care about? And, you know, that's a skill that I developed, and, you know, I It's one of the things that you know, you wouldn't be able to write a book of 400 pages about the history of the music business and expect anybody to read it if you couldn't explain things clearly how the technology worked, how the business changed. So it is something that I think helped me quite a bit and wasn't the normal thing that people did. 

[00:18:11,279] TRACI NATHANS-KELLY: You brought it up earlier, and I think it's just such a fascinating part of your work, like adding on AI, you know, in the last couple of years to this mix of technologies that you've been working with the whole time. So we just wanted to pick your brain a little bit about where that's at right now. It's a moving target. We understand, it'll be different tomorrow. 

[00:18:33,219] HOWIE SINGER: It was, was one of you know, it's one of the frustrating things writing a book that exists on dead trees is that it gets locked in at some point. And every time our publisher, Oxford Press, gave us back material for editing or we'd add stuff, and they'd yell at us for adding things because you were just supposed to correct the commas and the spelling errors this time, and we'd add stuff because the thing was changing so fast. So it has been difficult to keep up because it is moving so quickly. It is for the creative industries, it is a huge issue. You know, it was at the heart of the Hollywood strikes last year, for the writers and the actors. So it's not just a music thing. The New York Times is suing Open AI over the training material that gets used. And you know, these companies commonly say, well, we're just training on publicly available information. But what does that mean? They don't say exactly what's publicly available. And in particular, if you're a musician or a writer at the Times, that publicly available information may be copyrighted. And they in some cases, don't believe that they need permission or should compensate the creators for in essence, the fuel that is powering this engine. Right? And it is of great concern, which is why we're seeing lawsuits. One of the things that is true, though, again, if history repeats itself, and I wrote a whole book saying that, this is going to take time. We're just at the start of the lawsuits. You know, Napster was shut down quickly, but it's follow on services that followed in their footsteps and avoided the legal minefields that Napster triggered, so they were around longer. It took ten years from the date of Napster's launch until the last of the big file sharing networks was found guilty of copyright infringement and shut down. So the law takes a long time. You know, at the end of the book, we talk about the themes across time. And one of the themes is how slow the legal system works. And so it's hard to say how this is all going to pan out. Somebody asked me recently, what am I worried about most about AI, and I said that the creators lose six lawsuits in a row. And that's because that will prevent the tech companies from believing they need to come to the table and make a deal. And ultimately, this will be decided in conference rooms and not court rooms, and there will be deals made, but deals are always based on who's got the leverage and who doesn't, and how much do I need to pay? And I'm hoping it's even handed. And if the AI companies win several cases that say that they do not have to get permission or pay for training material, that negotiation, some may still but decide to pay just because it's convenient, but it won't be a settlement that the artists and writers and graphic artists find very palatable. 

[00:21:44,030] CHRISTA DOWNEY: I'm sitting here thinking about there's so much ethics tied up in all of this and so much opportunity for people to use data for good, right? And to use data analysis for good and machine learning and AI. And we have so many students that go into OR or similar majors and they're not sure what to do with it. They like the idea, they like the work. You know, they're good at it, and they don't know where they want to go and make an impact in the world. And to some extent, that can be sorted out by just going and trying some things, right? Sort of fall into something like you did. And then I'm thinking about the students that are looking for some ideas, some inspiration. Do you have some suggestions on, you know, places that young people might explore further as they're thinking about where can I use this for good? 

[00:22:45,610] HOWIE SINGER: Well, we tended to focus on the negatives. You know, Was it Debbie Downer of Saturday Night Live? We talk about AI, and I focus on the negatives. We should talk about the positives, and you mentioned some of those. And, you know, one example, you know, and it's already happening. Some estates of deceased artists are working with AI to create new music with that artist's voice. Now, it's done with permission. It's done with compensation, but the example I like to use is, you know, there's going to be a next Adele album, right? And wouldn't a duet with Whitney Houston be wonderful? If the estate approved it. And in the world of streaming and the way the money gets paid, even if it's not a great song, and by the way, Adele writes a pretty good song, so the chances are in her favor. But even if it's not deemed a great song or people find it objectionable, that even if the estate said, it's okay to use Whitney's voice, they don't like it. Okay. But there'll be a whole bunch of people who had never heard any Whitney Houston music. Who will discover Whitney Houston and then go back and listen to, I Will Always Love You, and I Want to Dance With Somebody and, you know, the Greatest Love of All, and every one of those plays, unlike when I was a kid, the old Whitney Houston records would have the sticker of the lower price in the record store, the price would migrate downwards as the records got older, today, those plays are worth the exact same amount of money, and there's lots of complaints about how many fractions of a penny get paid, and is it enough? And I get all of those questions. But it is a statement of fact that that play is worth just as much as the new song. So if when, you know, Olivia Rodrigo's new album comes out and it came out this year, or you don't like Beyonce's country album. But it reminds you how much you loved Lemonade. And you go back and listen. Every play of Lemonade is worth just as much as Texas Holdem is, if you listen today. So the way streaming works, this is a wonderful thing, right, in terms of the positive uses. The thing that I would say, and I think this is true for music, it's true in hospitality. You have the hotel school here. It's true at the airlines. There is no business that operates at scale, that is not using data to make their decisions. So having those skills is really valuable. I had a guest speaker from Spotify, who's the head of Content Analytics for the entire company, speak to my class. And he goes over, what are the skills I look for on my team? Now, this is not the people that are working with the artists or with the labels on ingesting content into their service, but the people building,  they just announced an AI based Beta to build playlists with text prompts. I want to hear songs that are happy about the summer that sound like this, and he needs people to go build those things. That's not necessarily somebody who's a musician. They probably want somebody who's passionate about music, but they need to know SQL they need to know Python. They need to know all the things that you're teaching here to your students. So those jobs exist at Spotify. Those jobs exist at American Airlines. Those jobs exist at you know, a hotel chain. It doesn't matter what we pick, the exhaust of data. And we can have complaints about how much privacy have we sacrificed to create all this data. But, you know, there are conveniences. We all like getting that Amazon box the day after we put in the order, and it shows up on your doorstep. And so they know which products to keep close to you because of what patterns have been purchased in the past. So You know, my sense, and I tell this, not just to my students taking my data class. They don't have a choice. It's a requirement. So I don't really have to defend it. But when you know, people come to me and say, well, you've had a good career, what would you recommend studying? I say, data science, and learning even if you can't be the person who builds the models, being literate, in data is such an essential skill. And it's almost like, well, pick the thing you like working on, whether it's, you know, analyzing movie ticket sales or concert ticket sales or airline ticket sales or shopping patterns on Amazon, that's what's driving all these industries. 

[00:27:02,814] CHRISTA DOWNEY: I love it. 

[00:27:03,899] TRACI NATHANS-KELLY: Absolutely. Now, this one might be hard because it seems like you've done everything, but if you weren't doing this work that you're doing right now, what might it have been? 

[00:27:15,340] HOWIE SINGER: I probably would have just been a professor the whole time and not worked in the industry. Part of the reason I went to work at Bell Labs was that the job offers that I had to be a professor paid far less than Bell Labs was willing to pay at the time. And so after being a poor semi starving graduate student for a long time because we were both going to graduate school together. The idea of making a little bit of money and saving for a house and things like that mattered. And it was clearly, you know, the right choice. Bell Labs is a prestigious place to work because of the kind of people that I mentioned. But, you know, I could have seen myself doing that. I certainly enjoy teaching now, you know, not having to commute into New York City every day from where I live in New Jersey to do that teaching, however, is a real plus. 

[00:28:09,590] TRACI NATHANS-KELLY: Yes, I would not be a good commuter at all. So I'm with you on that point. 

[00:28:14,750] HOWIE SINGER: I did it for 20 years of every day from New Jersey into New York and a lot of other travel too, but my kids were somewhat older by then, so it wasn't as much of a burden. 

[00:28:23,269] CHRISTA DOWNEY: Final question. Feels important. What's your favorite album or project? 

[00:28:33,760] HOWIE SINGER: That is a tough one. I'm trying to think of what turns up, data related problem. Spotify, I use Spotify mainly, although I use many other services. They do produce Spotify Wrapped at the end of the year that tells you what you listen to the most. And I don't think it's so much album anymore because it's more the collection of stuff that I like from an artist and it's stuff from different albums. Probably what I listen to the most myself as Bruce Springsteen. As a favorite artist, Jackson Brown is another. If I had to really pick an album though, I would have to go through and think about it. It might be Let it Be from the Beatles. The unplugged version, the one they redid without all the Spector big orchestrations, very simple orchestration that they redid. So that one I love and I've been to Abbey Road Studios, which is a cool thing to get to go do. So there's that one. I'd have to think about which maybe the Bridge Over Troubled Water album from Simon and Garfunkel, and the Cast, I'm a big Broadway fan. My wife and I have done this since we first started going out, we go see lots of shows. If I had to pick one album, uh it might be Hamilton. 

[00:30:05,190] TRACI NATHANS-KELLY: Yes. I think that one's high on a lot of people's lists.

[00:30:09,409] HOWIE SINGER: So it's interesting. You know, when you work at a music company, everybody thinks, well, you must get to see so many artists, and you know, that's not true, of course. I did, on occasion, get to meet them, but I remember going in our building in New York, Atlantic Records, which is the label that released the Hamilton Cast album two floors down, and I was down there on a Friday and they had set up their space, their performance space differently, and I had all these chairs, and I said, What's going on? to the person that worked there and he says, Oh, the cast of Hamilton is coming in tomorrow to listen for the first time to the entire recording of the album. And I went, Gasp! And he said, You can't come. 

[00:30:48,610] TRACI NATHANS-KELLY: Don't even ask. Don't even ask. Right. Right. Bummer. 

[00:30:52,669] HOWIE SINGER: Bummer. Exactly. Exactly. But, you know, that's the kind of thing. You know, you don't get to necessarily do. But then again, sometimes you do get to meet. I got to work with Neil Young on a project. And so there were times that we'd go to things or go to showcases. One of the best examples you were talking about giving presentations and engaging the audience, we could close, it's a fun story to close with, perhaps. We would have meetings of the senior management of the company in the city, in one year London. We were going to have a big conference, the top people from all the labels, the top people from the strategy group, where I worked. The company at that point in time was run by Edgar Brontman junior. So you got a room of 100 or 120 executives from around the world. They're all sitting there, and Edgar stands up on the front, and he says, I really think it's important for us to dig into the financials of the company. So I'm going to do that now. And, you know, it's 48 slides with a lot of numbers. But, you know, I think it's important for you all to understand this. And they put up the first slide and he looked at it and said, forget that. And they raised the curtain and Bruno Mars sang four songs. 

[00:32:08,840] TRACI NATHANS-KELLY: So Bruno Mars is always better than a slide deck. 

[00:32:15,930] HOWIE SINGER: Exactly. Much better communicator. And so those are the kinds of cool things you get to see when you work for a music company. 

[00:32:22,029] CHRISTA DOWNEY: I love it. Very cool. 

[00:32:23,570] TRACI NATHANS-KELLY: I love that he set it up,  it's 48 slides, it's numbers. And everybody's going for the misery. 

[00:32:29,889] HOWIE SINGER: And it's the head of the company. You've  got to be sitting there going, oh, great! I'm happy to see it! You can't be going, oh, my god, this is gonna be boring, it's gonna be deadly. He's like CEO. You've got to look enthused. 

[00:32:44,500] TRACI NATHANS-KELLY: We're all here for the glory of the company. Bruno Mars is much better. 

[00:32:50,240] HOWIE SINGER: Much. Bruno Mars is much better. 

[00:32:51,680] TRACI NATHANS-KELLY: I'm never gonna have a Bruno Mars moment, I think, but that's okay. You CEO can have that. That was awesome. Thank you so much for joining us today. I hope you're having a good time while you are here. 

[00:33:03,359] HOWIE SINGER: My pleasure, absolutely. 

[00:33:11,840] CHRISTA DOWNEY: Thank you for listening. If you are enjoying these conversations, please follow, rate, and review on your favorite platform. Join us for the next episode, where we will be celebrating excellence and innovation among engineers whose impact contributes to a healthier, more equitable, and more sustainable world.