There often is a disconnect between the problems researchers tackle and those that society most urgently needs to solve.Researchers seek out interesting problems to work on, and the nature of research is such that it is easy for them to be lured into problems that call for complex, mathematical solutions that, while interesting, may have little actual benefit to the world.Three years ago while I was looking to find interesting and socially important problems to address through my own research in civil engineering, I came upon a report published in 2008 by the National Academy of Engineering on the engineering