Tomorrow's Engineers Week: Well-rounded graduates can solve the 'knowledge gap'

Professor Jinghai Li is vice president of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and a judge for the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering, a global £1m award for work that has a ‘major impact on humanity’.

A highly experienced multidisciplinary engineer with a specialism in chemical and energy engineering, Professor Li spoke to Professional Engineering about the global perception of the profession and how education should adapt to produce more rounded graduates.  

Lack of recognition

“The importance of engineering is generally not recognised by governments and societies around the world. It is vitally important for the development of new technology that benefits people and society, but unfortunately people don’t recognise this. We must emphasise the importance of science and engineering side-by-side, so the public has a better understanding of what engineering does for them.”

The ‘knowledge gap’

“Engineering has to integrate knowledge from different scientific disciplines. A chemical engineer, for example, must use physics, chemical knowledge, computation and more if they want to scale-up a reactor from the laboratory to industrial use. To produce materials, we need knowledge from chemistry and chemical engineering. Disciplines contain knowledge from other sectors – mechanical engineering includes process engineering, for example.

“There is a big challenge, however. There is a ‘knowledge gap’ where we need engineers who are educated very broadly, who can integrate different knowledge from their research.”

A broader education

“To educate good engineers, courses should involve different disciplines. Our education system is not organised in this way – people are taught in limited ways. “Thinking about the reactor scale-up example, chemists don’t know so much about chemical reactors, while chemical engineers don’t know enough about chemists’ work. It’s a problem of integration.”

Changing the landscape

“I’m president of the National Natural Science Foundation of China, and one of my goals is to optimise and understand the logic of the structure and landscape of the knowledge system. From that, we can have a layout for different disciplines – then we can reorganise how to educate people more broadly and how to train-up engineers in a more comprehensive way.”