• Question: What do you do being an engineer is it anything like being like a scientist?

    Asked by 365arth23 to Zach, Todd, Sophie, Daniel, Ana on 8 Mar 2017.
    • Photo: Zach Welshman

      Zach Welshman answered on 8 Mar 2017:

      Each discipline will be equally as important in the future of medical engineering.

      Medical engineering is a bit of a mix in my opinion and in the future it will require people with skills in both science, for tissue engineering/bioengineering and engineering skills for scaling and manufacturing. It should be said that you can be both an engineer and a scientist. My first degree is a BSc in Biomedical Engineering and my Masters degree is an MSc in Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine so technically i’m a scientist, but I would identify as an engineer having worked in industry too.

      It really depends on the problem, sometimes i will approach it with my scientist hat on and other times i will approach it from an engineering perspective.

    • Photo: Ana Gallego

      Ana Gallego answered on 8 Mar 2017:

      I kind of think I am a little bit of both, as I studied both things.
      I put the ‘engineer cap’ on when I have to design a process or think about how a component is going to work.
      Then, when I have to think what material to use for each application, I put the ‘science cap on’ to think about the chemistry of the material and its properties.
      For me, they both go together and it is great to have both backgrounds. They complement each other very well.

    • Photo: Todd Burton

      Todd Burton answered on 8 Mar 2017:

      I’m sort of a hybrid scientist / engineer sitting somewhere in the middle. Engineering in my eyes is about design an innovation and problem solving, many of these skills lap over with science where you need a fundamental understanding of concepts.

    • Photo: Sophie Cox

      Sophie Cox answered on 8 Mar 2017:

      I think engineers and scientists complement each other really well. There are definitely a lot of overlapping skills but there are some small differences. Engineers are usually more focused on finding solutions to problems and quite often scientists may think more about how/why the problem has occurred.

      When a new person joins our lab, and we all come from different training backgrounds, we all have to guess what degree the new person did. I’m pretty good at it but sometimes you can’t always tell if someone is a scientist or an engineer because both professions need very similar skills.

    • Photo: Daniel Morse

      Daniel Morse answered on 8 Mar 2017:

      I am both!

      But I’m a biomedical engineer, so a mix of the two.. they are similar in the sense of problem solving, experimental approaches and thinking, but also different in the same sense, they are unique disciplines.

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