Bethany Gordon, above
In August 2017, Bethany Gordon took the top prize in the How to Change the World podcast competition held at the Global Grand Challenges Summit in Washington, DC.
Gordon, from Richmond, Virginia, is a PhD student in Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Virginia (UVA) School of Engineering and Applied Science. She bested over 150 other domestic, and international, students all of whom created their podcasts at the event.
Gordon also earned her BS in Civil Engineering and Linguistics at UVA. She is the treasurer of UVA student chapter of the National Society of Black Engineers, and a member of the student chapters of the American Concrete Institute and the Engineering Students Without Borders.
Bethany Gordon, and second-place How to Change the World podcast competition winners Yun Gu and Katie Brown will receive fully-funded attendance at the 2019 Global Grand Challenges Summit in London, organized by the Royal Academy of Engineering.
Hear Gordon speak about Virtual expertise: crowdsourcing engineering solutions.
The podcast, Virtual expertise: crowdsourcing engineering solutions, was praised in a Royal Academy of Engineering (RAE) press release. It said that listeners can learn how engineers might “use virtual reality to experience life in a temporary home in a shipping container” in Armenia, the site of a devastating earthquake in 1988. Thirty years later, some Armenians still live in cold, unstable temporary structures.
Gordon, a member of UVA’s Tuff Armenia Project, has traveled to the country to “find and test local Armenian materials that may be integrated into construction and reduce the overall cost of building a home.” Read Gordon’s update on UVA’s Tuff Armenia Project.
More about the Grand Challenges Summit 2017
Global Grand Challenges Summit
The 2017 Global Grand Challenges Summit (GGCS), was jointly organized by the U.S. National Academy of Engineering, the U.K. Royal Academy of Engineering, and the Chinese Academy of Engineering, and held July 18-20, 2017, on the campus of George Washington University.
The 2017 GGCS was held in conjunction with the premier K–12 FIRST Global Challenge.
Watch a video about the 2017 Global Grand Challenges Summit
The GGCS says its aim is “to spark global collaborations that lead to innovative ways of addressing critically important engineering challenges and opportunities and inspiring the next generation of change makers.”
Learn more about the National Academy of Engineering and the Grand Challenges Summits.
