Guru Madhavan - Systems consciousness, repairing what is worn, and life-instilling creations
Guru Madhavan reverences the world and all that is in it. Guru is an engineer, but his conception of engineering is more vast than we typically assign to the role. To it he brings a systems consciousness that widens the field in recognition of its entanglement with the social and cultural.
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Dr. Madhavan is a biomedical engineer and senior policy adviser. He is the Norman R. Augustine Senior Scholar and senior director of programs of the National Academy of Engineering in Washington, D.C. where he leads and oversees activities of broad scope and complexity focused on engineering practice, education, research, communication, and policies. Guru embodies better than almost anyone I've met the guiding themes of the National Academy of Engineering's programs: fundamental appreciation of people, systems, and culture.
He is author of _Applied Minds: How Engineers Think_ and Wicked Problems: _How to Engineer a Better World_ as well as co-editor of several books like _Pathological Altruism_ with a former guest of this show, David Sloan Wilson.
Before the National Academies, Dr. Madhavan worked in the biomedical engineering domain, contributing to the development of cardiac surgical catheters for ablation therapy and neuromuscular stimulators. He is a founding member of the 'Global Young Academy', has served as vice-president of the IEEE-USA, among a long list of other accolades.
A systems engineer by background, he obtained his M.S. and Ph.D. in biomedical engineering and an M.B.A. from the State University of New York later receiving the Edward Weisband Distinguished Alumni Award for Public Service or Contribution to Public Affairs.
Guru's work is in many ways an act of reimagining how engineering works, how it serves society, and in a vital sense, how it should.
His abundant curiosity and impossible humility are clear and become invitations to anyone he interacts with to be more and to think differently. It is a balm to be in conversation with him.
I wanted to have this conversation because we exist in a time of strong belief that we will engineer our way out of all problems, yet it is only a small conception of engineering that typically attends to that faith--an engineering that is purely mechanical and material, one unperturbed by the messiness of society and culture and politics; in short, the messiness of humans. Guru's research as his life throws these misconceptions into sharp relief. So I wanted to have him on to explore that shift, from a purely and merely mechanical understanding of engineering to one more nuanced, one requisite for problem-solving in this world.