[Nate]: What I am putting my effort towards currently
as an engineer is a powered rope-climbing device
that's useful for search and rescue operations.
It allows a person to much more quickly and easily
execute high angle rescue scenarios such as what
fire fighters might perform.
[High energy music]
My name is Nate Ball and I'm a mechanical engineer.
My job as an engineer is to use what I know about
the world and what I know about how things work to
solve problems to help people.
[Narrator]: As a mechanical engineer,
Nate pushes technology to its limits by using his
knowledge of motion and energy to develop all
sorts of mechanical devices,
including a new vaccine delivery system called the VacPac.
[Nate]: There are about 4.3 million deaths that are
caused every year by vaccine preventable
diseases, and a major challenge in getting
vaccines to the appropriate places in
third world countries is being able to keep them at
the right temperature.
Vaccines have to stay in general at about four
degrees Celsius in order to stay usable.
And to get vaccines at that temperature into
really rural areas with spotty electrical power is
a big challenge.
This device here is a portable vaccine
refrigeration backpack.
It's like a refrigerator you wear on your back that
allows you to take up to 1200 vaccine doses into a
rural area that doesn't have normal power.
So in a situation where you've got major
infrastructure devastation like in a huge earthquake
in a third world country, a device like this has
great potential to make a big difference because you
can take massive doses of antibiotics and needed
medicines into rural areas that have no power,
in order to be able to deliver the needed medical help.
[Narrator]: Nate spends much of his time refining his
designs, and building models and prototypes to
get products ready for manufacturing.
[Nate]: What we're looking at here is a 3-D model of an
early version of the VacPac that's actually
created inside the computer.
So in engineering if you're building a
complicated system it's very useful to build a
model like this in order to visualize how all the
parts will actually attach together.
[Narrator]: Nate shares his passion for engineering by
mentoring others. He even hosts a TV show for PBS
called Design Squad.
[Nate]: So on the show I get to mentor a couple of teams
of young engineers and introduce challenges to
them as week to week they split into teams and hear
from a client kind of like real engineers do.
And the client says hey design squads I need you
to build this for me, I need you to solve this problem.
I want you to build me the fastest dragster possible.
And the kids on the show actually go out and do it.
All right, so we've got our forks up front.
We're going to have a six foot coil of rebar,
like a tornado.
[Narrator]: When he's not inspiring future
engineers, Nate can often be found helping athletes
reach new heights.
[Nate]: I actually coach some of the
MIT pole vaulters here and I'm also a pole vaulter
myself, and I have been since about sixth grade.
Let's go Emily!
It's kind of cool because coming to pole
vaulting from an engineering perspective as
a coach, I get to describe physically what's going
on in a different way than any other pole vaulting coaches might do.
This is where the box is.
You want the bar to be back away from it so that
when you peak you're not going to fall back down
into that steel encased in concrete.
A neat thing about engineering is that it
allows you to solve all kinds of problems ranging
from building cool things like dragsters,
bridges and skyscrapers.
To solving interesting complicated problems like
how do you get a drug directly into your skin
without the use of a needle.
[Narrator]: When a natural disaster or a fast moving
epidemic strikes, a needle-free injection
device could save countless lives.
[Nate]: So a project I've been working on is a
controllable version of that needle-free drug transport.
This device instead of using a gas-powered piston
to fire in, actually uses a controllable actuator so
you can dial down the power in real time to
inject an elderly person or a child and then dial
the power back up for a person with tough skin.
The advantage of that is huge because you can
imagine having a delivery gun that's got a very
large vial of vaccine.
You can line up a whole bunch of people and just
put it up to each person's arm and shoot right down
the line and inoculate a huge amount of people in a
very short amount of time.
[Narrator]: Nate's a busy guy, even during his down time.
[Nate]: I guess the physicality of getting out and doing
stuff with your body is nice break from your brain
and being in some kind of shape physically helps us
work harder mentally during the on hours.
We really enjoy getting out there and working hard and
flipping upside down and sort of applying some kind
of physics understanding to what's actually
happening in the air as we run and flip through the
air off of obstacles and what have you.
Engineering by no means is all fun and games either.
It's never going to be a straight through process
where you come in, see the problem,
and think oh I know how to solve it right away.
You might not even have consensus in your group as
to how to solve the problem in the first
place, and you're working with limited
resources and limited time.
So persistence is a very important aspect of being an engineer.
I love solving problems and I love that
engineering is a creative job.
There's a whole world of things to invent and
create and work with people on.
And so you're never bored as an engineer.
A couple colleagues of mine who are also
engineers are working on a pretty cool project
that's called the Tourbot and what that is,
is a robot that's designed to rove around
the halls of MIT giving tours.
[Robot]: Welcome to MIT.
[Student]: While we're building a system that is giving
tours of the MIT campus we're not necessarily
only trying to figure out how to build systems to give tours.
We're trying to see how you can get robots to
interact with people and really be able to serve
people and interact and change people's lives.
[Nate]: Additionally the navigation systems they
put on the robot are pretty state of the art.
[Student]: We use a variety of sensors.
We have laser rangefinders that we use to find
obstacles around us.
We have a camera that looks at the ceiling to
read markers that we placed there that kind of
tell the robot where it is.
[Nate]: Those sensors could have implications for robots in
other scenarios like hospitals,
or work sites, or museums, libraries, who knows.
[Robot]: Hi Patrick. I will be your friend today.
[Nate]: What I'm working on right here is a
preliminary design for a robot arm that you can add
to a robot similar to a the Tourbot in order to
make it do something like pick up an object off the
ground or even to open a door if you want it to.
So it's a multi degree of freedom system,
which means similar to the human arm it's got a lot
of different joints that can function in several
different ways.
[Narrator]: Nate also manages to find time to engineer
some jazz improvisations.
[Nate]: It incorporates a lot of stuff I like about
engineering in that it's kind of a free flow
process of coming up with new ideas but it's in
real time on the keyboard.
And it's also a really relaxing outlet for me as well.
Engineers can make a very good living and the reason
is the world always has important problems to
solve and the world will always need engineers.
Things I love about engineering are that I get
to work with other engineers that are
passionate about solving problems and helping people.
I get to see my work directly benefit people.
And I always have a reason to keep learning and to
keep applying my new knowledge to new
interesting problems to solve.
In ten years or twenty years or at the end of my
life I would love to able to look back and say
I've spent that time making people's lives better.
That's what I wanna do.