Transcript 0:01 [upbeat music] Welcome back to The Peggy Smedley Show, the voice of MDM and Connected Devices. Hello, listeners, and welcome back to The Peggy Smedley Show. 0:13 My guest today is an assistant professor that teaches courses related to advanced soil testing, foundations, and the introduction to geotechnical engineering. 0:24 She is committed to outreach to K through 12 students and the general public. 0:29 Her research interest includes hazard mitigation, the characterization of soil subjected to dynamic loading, and the design of offshore foundations for renewable energy application. 0:41 Please join me in welcoming Cassandra Rutherford, assistant professor at Iowa State University, Civil, Construction, and Environmental Engineering. Cassie, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. 0:55 So Cassie, it's great to have you on the show because I'd love for you to kinda start off by telling our listeners a little bit about some of the research that you've been doing as it relates, I think, which would be good to soil testing, foundations, and I think geotechnical engineering, because that actually relates to, I think, the bigger picture of what we're talking about when we talk about infrastructure, and I think kind of the failing, you know, the ACS, the, uh, the engineering, uh, the society of engineering kind of giving the bad grade, the D plus, you know, the failing that we have of our infrastructure. 1:34 You know, the-- I think it just represents everything. You gotta start with the ground first. That's right. 1:40 Every project, of course, starts with, uh, geotechnical engineering because right now, you know, everything we have touches the soil. 1:46 So a lot of the research I do looks at how soil responds to different types of loads like earthquakes, flooding, or landslides. And I'm also really interested in renewable energy. 1:57 Although I live in the Midwest, I do a lot of offshore research and I collaborate with people all over the world, including Australia, n- um, Norway, and England. 2:07 So, uh, a lot of the things I'm doing are looking-- trying to look at the future, what we can do to encourage a, a different diversity of energy as well as, um, infrastructure. 2:17 Um, I've been doing a lot of research as well, uh, on critical infrastructure such as levees. 2:22 Talk about that because levees, I think, are really important when you think about critical infrastructure, and I think a lot of us as citizens don't think of enough about that, and that really, I think, is important to what we think about today, but going into the future. 2:37 Right. I know that in your recent shows you had ASCE President Christina Swallow on to talk about the ASCE Infrastructure Report Card. 2:45 And you know, levees were also given a grade of D, which is not good because there's over thirty thousand levees pr-protecting communities all across the United States, and they estimate the properties protected by levees is one point three trillion dollars. 2:59 So a lot of levee work needs to be done because they are a very critical infrastructure when we have all these major flooding events or we have hurricanes coming through. 3:08 There's a lot of people living behind them who n-depends upon those levees standing and protecting their property. 3:16 Well, if you talk about one point three trillion dollars in looking at levees, and, and we had a gentleman on who's actually talked about the problem that we have when we look at all of these kind of things with roads and investments and aesthetics, and when we look at all of these kind of things that we're talking about, when we have our guests that talk about these things, what's the bigger picture when we don't understand that these kind of things destroy not only just what we have in, in, in society, but our environment? 3:46 I mean, when we're not investing in that, the damage behind not protecting a levee just is astronomical. That is right. 3:53 You know, a lot of the work that needs to be done, a lot of these levees were initially built, um, you know, fifty years ago, and some of them were built just as agricultural levees where they dumped soil in a pile and called it a levee. 4:04 So a lot of, um, research and funds need to go into-- need to be put into those levees to make sure that they're stable and that they're not deteriorating over time, and what can we do to monitor them. 4:17 And some of the things that, you know, the ASCE has recommended is coming up with a hazard ma-- uh, classification system to determine which levees are safer and which ones need focus on, uh, maintenance. 4:29 One of the, um, interesting things is they've also estimated we need eighty billion dollars over the next ten years to maintain and improve the levee system. 4:38 So there's a lot of things that, um, you know, we are not doing that we should be doing that can really help with protecting those, um, precious properties, resources, agricultural land as well. 4:50 So Cassie, I gotta ask this. You, you said that you do a lot of things looking globally. How do we stack up globally when you talk about eighty billion dollars in investment? 5:00 How are we compared to some of the other countries in kind of investments that they make in their type of infrastructures? I think that we are right now not focused on, um, supporting our infrastructure needs. 5:13 A lot of countries have had major disasters, so they've had to go back and reevaluate how they're building those, what type of, uh, materials they're using, how they're monitoring them. 5:24 And I feel like, um, you know, in two thousand and fourteen, Congress did pass a Water Resource Reform and Development Act, which was supposed to expand the Levee Safety Program, but to date, that program has not been funded. 5:37 And so some of our, um, national priorities have not gone to looking at, um, funding already passed acts that we could fund that would help maintain these, um, you know, critical infrastructure. 5:49 Do we have enough students who are really interested? 5:52 I know that that's a big deal for you, looking at the K through twelve students and looking at, you know, encouraging students to think innovative, looking at technology. 6:00 Do we have the next generation who really are excited about coming up with ideas to help us rebuild or to look at our infrastructure and what we have to do going forward?Um, I do think there's going to be a large gap in the coming years as a lot of the baby boomers retire, especially in my specialty, geotechnical engineering. 6:20 Um, there's not a lot of students, um, studying that because they're not exposed to that topic until typically their junior year in college. By then, most of them have pretty much decided what their interests lie. 6:31 But I've been doing a lot of resea-research at the elementary level, and the reason I'm so excited about doing research at second and fourth grade is because students at that age are open to all different concepts. 6:42 They're excited about doing hands-on experiments, and they've never even heard of a geotechnical engineer. They think engineers drive trains. 6:49 [laughs] So to explain to them all the awesome and cool things I'm doing at that... 6:54 such a young age, I'm hoping will make a large impact, and we'll see those students in ten or 15 years come up through school, go to college, and say, "I've heard of a geotechnical engineer. 7:03 They do exciting things, and we sh- I, I want to do those things." So basically what you're describing is we need to show the mentoring. We need to have a mentor at a very young age. 7:14 Is there someone that really inspired you and was a mentor to you? Because I think that's the key to this. 7:20 It's not only just saying, "Go to the schools," but actually inspire, mentor, and, and, and nurture them through the years to say, "This is actually fun." 7:29 Those STEM programs are really what we have to do to get girls and boys involved in these geotechnical kind of engineering, sciences, math, the things that we talk about that really are gonna bring us to the next innovative level that we're talking about. 7:44 For myself, I've had a number of different mentors. I really think of mentoring more as a network. 7:49 So what I've tried to do is there's different aspects of my career, such as, um, writing proposals or publishing work or working out that work/life balance of having a family and being a professor, and I have different people of different stages, both male and female, of all different types, who I go to for different types of issues. 8:07 So when I think about mentoring, I don't think as one super mentor, that there's this amazing person out there. 8:13 I think of I have a good handful of 10 people or so who I could just call on a daily basis or every couple days on different topics and say, "I have a question on this. What do you recommend?" 8:23 So my experience with mentoring has been phenomenal. 8:26 Um, I also had a wonderful PhD advisor who was a female academic, and she really pushed me and encouraged me to become a professor to really represent females in our field. 8:36 And so I'd say those type of experiences really have, um, changed and shaped the way I view mentoring. Well, you just described something very important that we talk a lot about the awards that we give women here. 8:48 It's the about of that, uh, that key to networking, that ability to know to tap into women who have other experiences and advice to give you when you need them. 8:58 Because there's different times in your career when you need to tap into that network pool, that sometimes women don't do it, and, and men do it, though I think they're better sometimes at it. 9:08 But it's good at a young age to know to tap into someone who's in a different career or something that says, "Give me advice. What should I do?" 9:14 Because sometimes we don't think we can go for that, but yet it's a perfect career advancement. That's what you're kind of talking about, right? To give you that- Right... 9:23 extra advice and, and seeking to say, "Go for that. That really is gonna be a great career move, even though you might not think it's gonna be interesting." 9:31 And what we're saying in infrastructure, a lot of this young generation, both men and women, might not think doing what you just described, geotechnical, is the right thing to do, but look at all that you could do to rebuild our infrastructure that we need to put trillions of dollars into doing. 9:48 Right. And I think that the big, um, you know, motivation is that students need to find things that they find interesting and passionate, and they see a direct need for society. 9:57 I think, um, what I try to focus on when I talk to students about my career is how the things that I do really affect people, and I think that that's the tie to engineering, especially science and technology fields need to bring back is that you may be sitting behind a computer, but the things you're doing truly affect people's lives on a day-to-day basis. 10:17 And I think when students find that out and see that, they're really excited about thinking they're going to help, you know, in their minds, save the world, and that's what we need students to do. 10:26 We need students to think, "I can help save this world," and that's what... they want to make it a better place. And so that's the key now. 10:31 I mean, so that would be the advice that you say, what do you believe needs to happen next in order to rebuild our infrastructure? What, what's that key thing that you think we've got to do? 10:41 I think we need to get a lot of our, um, you know, outreach to the public, outreach to students, our general population, to really understand how important it is for us to do these things now and start building our infrastructure, start monitoring the infrastructure, investing in infrastructure. 10:57 Because, you know, in 10, 15, 20 years, major issues are going to occur, and we don't want to wait till that point to have problems. 11:06 So we want to do investments now, invest novel, innovative technologies to study these techno- uh, these, um, critical infrastructure. We want to fund the acts that are already existing. 11:18 We want to encourage more people to research and think about these things. So those are the main areas I really see that we need to do to, to rebuild our infrastructure. 11:26 Well, I have to tell you, Cassandra Rutherford, assistant professor at Iowa State University. You're studying civil, construction, and environmental engineering. Thank you so much for your time today. 11:35 It really is important to have folks like you come on our show and really help us encourage this next generation. Thank you so much. Thanks, Peggy. All right. 11:44 Well, listeners, that's all the time we have for our show today. Please check out our website at connectedworld.com or any of the past archives of our show at thepeggysmedley show.com. 11:54 As you can see, you can always share your thoughts with us on Twitter, and please do that at ConnectedWMag. It's really important for you to do that. And you know what's really important? 12:04 I want you to join us for Technology Day on August23rd in Arlington Heights, and you can do that by going up to the website at constructek.com/tech-day. Join us. 12:14 That's where we're talking about infrastructure, and it's so important. Remember, we broadcast live every Tuesday at 12 PM Central. Thanks for listening. 12:21 And always, this is The Peggy Smedley Show, the podcasting voice of IoT and relevant technology. And remember, with great technology comes great responsibility. Have a great week. 12:32 Education industry experts, back to the basics. Is your company using the Internet of Things to its fullest potential? 12:39 Enlist the Peggy Smedley Institute and its team of experts to create a customized plan for how to apply the IoT to your specific needs. 12:47 Learn everything you need to know to achieve tangible business outcomes in today's digital economy. Contact us at six three zero nine three three zero eight four four. 12:56 That's six three zero nine three three zero eight four four, or visit learnitiot.com.
