Excellent post Jessica, and intriguing! On the point about jobs outside the West, I would be curious to learn more if anyone has looked into it: -A lot of outbreaks of disease happens in poorer countries—could there be opportunities to deliver engineered disease management tools in these locations? Might even overlap a bit with AIM/CE work. -What about engineering work on semiconductors and/or chips? I am super naive about this but would guess Taiwan and the Netherlands would also be potential locations to have lots of impact as an engineer?
I also have a question which is more personal: -As a mech eng myself I am curious about the mapping of engineering disciplines to cause areas? I would naively think that mech eng maps onto CC and nuclear, while bio eng maps more onto biosec and alt proteins.
Thanks for your comment Ulrik! Some thoughts on your bullet points:
- I think there probably are opportunities to do biosecurity work in LMICs (e.g. Africa CDC’s Biosafety and Biosecurity initiative, the Southeast Asia Strategic Multilateral Dialogue on Biosecurity) but these seem mostly policy-based rather than focused on technical interventions (likely because there’s just more private and public money for developing technical interventions in high-income countries).
- 80k mentioned that they would be adding more technical governance jobs (i.e., more roles in semiconductors/chips) in the near future, so hopefully the geographical bias might shift somewhat. However, my intuition is that the US will continue to be a hotspot for jobs in this sector because of the sheer size and concentration of semiconductor companies (and maybe because of the higher likelihood of actually affecting governance/regulations/standards?)
- We did some mapping of engineering disciplines to cause areas, which you can see here and on our Resource Portal (it is by no means comprehensive – we even miss out nuclear!) Turns out mechanical engineers are pretty useful in a lot of cause areas. Hope that’s helpful!
Excellent post Jessica, and intriguing! On the point about jobs outside the West, I would be curious to learn more if anyone has looked into it:
-A lot of outbreaks of disease happens in poorer countries—could there be opportunities to deliver engineered disease management tools in these locations? Might even overlap a bit with AIM/CE work.
-What about engineering work on semiconductors and/or chips? I am super naive about this but would guess Taiwan and the Netherlands would also be potential locations to have lots of impact as an engineer?
I also have a question which is more personal:
-As a mech eng myself I am curious about the mapping of engineering disciplines to cause areas? I would naively think that mech eng maps onto CC and nuclear, while bio eng maps more onto biosec and alt proteins.
Thanks for your comment Ulrik! Some thoughts on your bullet points:
- I think there probably are opportunities to do biosecurity work in LMICs (e.g. Africa CDC’s Biosafety and Biosecurity initiative, the Southeast Asia Strategic Multilateral Dialogue on Biosecurity) but these seem mostly policy-based rather than focused on technical interventions (likely because there’s just more private and public money for developing technical interventions in high-income countries).
- 80k mentioned that they would be adding more technical governance jobs (i.e., more roles in semiconductors/chips) in the near future, so hopefully the geographical bias might shift somewhat. However, my intuition is that the US will continue to be a hotspot for jobs in this sector because of the sheer size and concentration of semiconductor companies (and maybe because of the higher likelihood of actually affecting governance/regulations/standards?)
- We did some mapping of engineering disciplines to cause areas, which you can see here and on our Resource Portal (it is by no means comprehensive – we even miss out nuclear!) Turns out mechanical engineers are pretty useful in a lot of cause areas. Hope that’s helpful!