EngineerGirl Ambassador Rachel (Zhilu) Xie interviewed Catherine Corrigan as part of the Ambassadors program in spring 2022.
Dr. Catherine Corrigan is the President and CEO of Exponent and a member of the National Academy of Engineering.
0:08 – Would you like to introduce yourself a little bit?
My name is Catherine Corrigan, and I am currently the president and chief executive officer of a company called Exponent. Exponent is an engineering and scientific consulting firm with offices around the United States, Asia, and Europe. We consult many different disciplines of engineering on a variety of different issues that our clients face across many different industries, including transportation, chemicals, consumer products, electronics, utilities, and many different sectors of the economy.
0:54 – What causes you to go into engineering and take the job that you have today?
I have had many influences as I was growing up, and I really trace the fact that I am an engineer today back to my very early days. My father is an engineer. He has been retired for many years now, but he had a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Cornell. He worked in labs his entire career, so I grew up in a family of engineers. I was very fortunate to be exposed to a parent who was an engineer. Also, as I reflect back, my mother is also much of an influence. She majored in psychology when she was in college. Like many women in her generation, she stopped working when she had my older sister and me. However, when I was probably in middle school, she decided that she wanted to go back to school. She ended up getting her degree in computer science. … [M]y mother was my first Woman in STEM role model. Both she and my father had a huge influence on me. My sister went into engineering as well, so it seemed very natural for me to do that. I knew that I was interested in engineering, but I was also interested in biology. I was maybe interested in medicine, but I really didn’t want to treat patients. So it turned out that bioengineering was the perfect thing for me because I can think about the human body and the biological systems like an engineer. I thought that was really neat, and that was what drew me into engineering.
3:08 – You mentioned bioengineering, so what was bioengineering like in your school days?
I did bioengineering for my undergraduate degree, and that was at the University of Pennsylvania. It was a combination of courses. We started with the fundamentals, like math and calculus, a lot of physics, a lot of chemistry, and some biology. They wanted us to have a minor emphasis program in one of the more traditional areas of engineering. Back then bioengineering was pretty novel, now it was more well-developed in terms of the program. My emphasis area was mechanics, so I took courses related to mechanical engineering. Ultimately, what I was trying to understand is how injuries occur to people, the human body. We have bones, and bones break. You can think about bones breaking in the ways that engineers analyze how buildings might collapse, or a piece of metal might break.
If you want to understand how to protect against injuries, you need to understand how injuries happen. That was what led me to want to take those courses in the mechanics area, like failure analysis, and how things fail, so I could apply that to the human body and not only understand how injuries happen, but also how to prevent injuries. If you want to invent a helmet that can prevent a brain injury or skull fracture, you have to really understand well how much force the human brain can tolerate when there is a head impact, so you can design an effective protective system. This was an area that really fascinated me and was the thing that I was pursuing when I got into my undergraduate degree, and even further, when I was in graduate school.
5:31 – Have you been involved in any projects related to that? Could you share one of the examples?
I went through my undergraduate in the University of Pennsylvania, then I knew I wanted to go to graduate school. I didn’t realize at the time that I would end up getting a Ph.D. I actually applied to the mechanical department at MIT, but when they saw my personal statement, the kinds of work that I wanted to do related to injury, they said we really think that you will be a good fit for a joint program that MIT had with Harvard Medical school. It was the best of both worlds - training engineers who could work at the interface of engineering and medicine. I went into that program and did end up getting a Ph.D. I did my research in bone mechanics.
When I started my professional career after my graduate school was finished, I started to do consulting work, actually advising my clients such as in the automotive industry when their vehicles had crashed, and people were injured in those crashes, I would be called in to analyze that crash and understand how that person was injured in that crash. I would use physical evidence; I would inspect the vehicle; I would look at the X-Ray films, the MRI scans, and the PET scans of the person’s injuries to reconstruct how that person was injured. I was trying to figure out whether the person is wearing a seatbelt or not, if the airbags worked properly or not, and whether the vehicle’s deformation affected the injuries or not - a lot of different questions that arose in the context of those crashes. I was able to develop a career in how injuries can happen in the real world at Exponent.
7:53 – This is very interesting, and I never thought of a career like that.
This is pretty much what Exponent does. It’s very much about investigating things that have happened like if a bridge has collapsed, a building has collapsed, or if an explosion has occurred. You need an engineer to come in and understand why those things happened and how those happened. Therefore, we can not only understand what happened but also learn from what happened. Failure is a really good teacher. If you tried something and didn’t work, then now you know doing it that way doesn’t work. You probably won’t make that mistake again. ... We think about not only investigating things that have happened in the past so that we can understand them, but we also work with our clients to implement ways of designing and developing safer products, products that perform better, products that are better for the environment, products that are heavily regulated. … Often, you think about engineers and you think about engineers designing things. There are a lot of engineers that design things, and that's a really important aspect of what engineers do, but there's this whole other side of engineering that is about engineering science and engineering analysis of things that happen in the world. So engineering isn't only about designing things, it can be about all of that science and analyzing those systems.
10:18 – We know that engineering careers were off-limits for women not that long ago, and we're even now the environment isn't always friendly. Have you ever experienced any challenges or stereotypes based on your gender?
I am dreaming of a day where we as women engineers can walk into a room and not have people be surprised that we’re engineers at least. We haven't gotten there yet. It's a lot better now than it was when I was going through school or when I was your age. I remember in graduate school in the mechanical engineering department at MIT, we really had to find each other. There were not many of us as graduate students in that department. I don't know what the percentages were, but it was probably less than 10%, especially when you get up to the Ph.D. level. I've had plenty of times when I've walked into the room, and people just think it was so novel. They can't help themselves with that sort of the comment, 'oh, it’s the lady engineer'. I just try not to roll my eyes because it gets old very fast.
There have also been times in my career where I think being a woman actually was an advantage for me. In the consulting business, women again in engineering are fairly rare, and clients oftentimes would appreciate being able to have a woman on the team of experts that were working on a matter when they want to be able to communicate to the jury in a certain way. It's not necessarily a male-female thing, but one thing I think I learned from that is how important it has been for me and my career to not only be a really top-notch engineer from the technical side also really hone my skills around communication, presenting the work that we do, all of the soft skills, and the leadership skills that go along with it. There are going to be lots of technical things that you'll learn as you go to school if you major in engineering, and you'll have to work really hard on all of those. However, there are other life skills around communicating, being able to inspire folks, how to lead, and how to start to use those soft skills in collaborating with people. These can really make a difference in how you are perceived and where you're able to go, you know as an engineer if you aspire to leadership.
13:20 – What are some challenges that you think we should embrace as a society in terms of equity in engineering?
There are so many big challenges that we face as a humanity. There are so many areas that engineers can contribute to. That's one of the things I think that causes a lot of people to go into engineering because you can have a very concrete impact. You're working with the physical world whether you're designing things or you are on the analysis or the science side. You can really have an impact on making the world a safer and more sustainable place. An example of things we do at Exponent that helps clients understand the risk associated with things like extreme weather and wildfires. Wildfires, especially here in California, you live in California, you know how devastating wildfires can be. One of the things that our teams at Exponent are doing is helping our utility clients really understand the risks that are associated with their electrical infrastructure. They don't want their transmission infrastructure to cause wildfires so there are some very sophisticated data analytics techniques and engineering techniques that we’re using to help them understand their risk to help them prioritize which parts of their infrastructure they need to work on or replace first. We are trying to predict when they're going to fail and under what circumstances, like how strong the wind has to be in order to knock down a particular transmission line and have a risk of a fire. ...
Another [example] I think of is looking at human health and the health of the population. This has been particularly relevant in the time of Covid-19 that we've all been dealing with for the last 2+ years. The miracle of the vaccines that we have, the engineering that had to go into developing the manufacturing techniques for that, and developing some of the diagnostic testing protocols that we can use to test for Covid-19 … It comes down to not only engineering. The key is that you have to have the engineers collaborating with the physicians, the policymakers, and the lawmakers - this concept of collaboration and interdisciplinary collaboration. You've got to be able to have diverse perspectives coming in on the problem that you really want to solve. Whatever sort of the big problem we choose I think my message would be that you need to have that collaborative approach to bring those different perspectives to bear if you really want to have new ideas that can create forward progress.
17:04 – Do you have any more thoughts that you think might be helpful to girls like me in the future?
Yeah, I do! There's lots of advice that I could give, but I think the one thing that I would focus on at the last minute is to have confidence in yourself. You need to be ready when the opportunities come. But you also know we can all tend to get in the room and maybe feel like there are so many smart people in this room, and I'm not sure if I should speak up. What if I say something that isn't right? Some of us suffer from a lack of confidence in that setting. This is true for women and men. My advice is that you should really speak up.
You’ll spend more time regretting the times you didn't speak up than you will the times that you did.
I would encourage you to build your confidence and to speak up in those settings and contribute because what you have to say is important.