Elisabeth Paté-Cornell specializes in understanding risk—going behind the scenes to perceive threats and trying to prevent them from materializing. "If we're doing our job well, nobody hears about it," says Paté-Cornell. It's a kind of analysis that has applications far from engineering itself, from detecting terrorists' plans to fighting infectious diseases to predicting human error in a variety of situations.

Tagged: multidisciplinary, NASA, risk, terrorism, International Issues, Engineering