CURIOSITY WAS PRACTICALLY A FAMILY SPORT in Sita Syal’s household.
Both her parents are educators: Her father is an engineering professor, and her mother is a music teacher, giving Syal and her siblings what she called “this really lovely balance of both sides of the brain.”
On family vacations, her parents would ask math questions and award points toward an ice cream sundae. “These are classic educator-parent family activities,” Syal said. “Which I have to say worked, because my brother, sister, and I all ended up studying engineering.”
Another early influence came from outside the classroom and outside the U.S. Growing up, Syal often visited family in India, where her father is from. She remembers the visible disparities she saw in Delhi.
“I have these memories of wondering why we had electricity, but we would pass by areas where they didn’t have electricity,” she said. “I didn’t have words for that at the time, but I remember seeing the disparity of socioeconomic status so clearly.”
Looking back, she sees it as part of what pushed her toward the kind of work she does today.
Forged Offshore
Before academia, Syal went in a very different direction. Graduate school was not in her plans, and she thought research “sounded boring.” After college, she entered the oil and gas industry, spending most of her time offshore in the Gulf of Mexico.
“That was such a transformative time for me, and I don’t say that lightly,” Syal said. “It absolutely made me the engineer I am today.”
Her rig was about an hour by helicopter from the southern coast of Louisiana. She was one of probably five women on a rig of about 300 people.
As a 25-year-old engineer working alongside welders, mechanics, and electricians who had been practicing their craft for decades, she learned quickly that technical knowledge alone was not enough.
“There was the humility of realizing that no one cared about my fancy engineering degree,” she said. “They cared about your word, your integrity, how hard you worked, and how you listened.”
As an operations engineer, she never knew what the day would bring. If a pump stopped working, she and the mechanics had to take it apart and figure out what was wrong. And because they were in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico, there was no quick run to Home Depot for a missing part.
She was also on the emergency response team, drilling every week because everyone on the rig understood the stakes. “We had to be a family out there. We had to trust each other because our lives were in each other’s hands,” Syal said.
The work was fulfilling, but it was not the long-term life she wanted. The schedule made it hard to build a life outside the rig, and she had a bigger question pulling at her.
“I’ve always been very interested in sustainability and energy. That felt like the big wicked problem I was interested in,” Syal said. “I found a home to integrate people, energy, and technology in this really cool school of thought within ME, doing design that focuses on how we bring people into the process.”
“The old notion of how we’ve defined engineering is gone. We can no longer see engineering as just technical work and leave it at that. The work we do as engineers, the things we put out into the world, affect people and systems. My advice to the next generation is that you can’t separate them. We can’t keep saying the social scientists will deal with that.”
—Sita Syal, Assistant Professor in Mechanical Engineering, University of Michigan
Syal has completed a half Ironman, run marathons, and even trekked to Everest Base Camp. If the world suddenly went offline tomorrow, she would want her family with her, books her kids helped choose, and music—preferably her violin. Her current reading taste leans heavily toward romantasy, with a little fun murder mystery sprinkled in.
Engineering Equity
At the University of Michigan, Syal is building a research group around that intersection. The group’s vision is to change how engineers approach the design of socio-technical systems, with projects spanning electric vehicles, community solar, and others.
Her group looks at those systems from multiple angles: the front-end stakeholder needs, the models that quantify impact, and the evaluation of whether supposedly sustainable systems are actually producing better outcomes in the real world.
“We’re trying to develop equitable, trusting partnerships with communities,” she said. “We have a big focus on equity and justice.”
Syal continued: “The old notion of how we’ve defined engineering is gone. We can no longer see engineering as just technical work and leave it at that. The work we do as engineers, the things we put out into the world, affect people and systems.”
One example came from a study she worked on around EV adoption in California, chosen as a test case because of its data and longer history. Syal and a colleague wanted to know whether programs and policies supporting EV adoption were actually working equitably.
“One of the things we found was that, unintentionally, the adoption patterns of electric vehicles actually aligned with historical redlining data,” she said.
Redlining, she explained, was the practice many decades ago where certain people, based on racial and socioeconomic discrimination, could not get loans for houses.
“That caused huge generational inequity,” she said. “So when the adoption of EVs follows those same historical patterns, what that tells us is that what we’re doing right now is not working.”
Being unintentional does not erase the impact.
“Similar questions arise in renewable energy development, not to mention data centers and all of that,” she said. “Decision-making doesn’t lie with communities who might be directly affected. It lies with developers and folks who have profits and money in mind.”
The question of how to make technical systems more participatory without pretending everyone has the same technical role is part of what her lab is working to study.
The Case for Optimism
Even with the scale of those challenges, Syal is not discouraged.
“It’s not all doom and gloom. I’m a relentless optimist,” she said. “If you work in engineering broadly, and particularly in sustainability and with people, you have to be hopeful, because otherwise why are we doing this work?”
Part of her optimism comes from renewable energy itself. Solar panels, batteries, and related technologies have advanced enough to now make economic sense regardless of political headwinds.
The other part comes from students. “This generation really cares about cracking open our traditional definitions of engineering and demanding that we re-examine how we teach and learn, and what kind of impact we have,” she said.
What she hopes engineers carry forward is the lesson she learned offshore: humility.
“Engineers have the power to bring together so many different perspectives because of the way we’re taught to think,” Syal said. “That systems perspective is so powerful for making a positive impact.”
Sarah Alburakeh is strategic content editor.
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