By Jackey Locke

Dr. Doug Smith graduated from Memorial’s bachelor of engineering degree in ocean and naval architectural engineering in 2011. Originally from Sunnyside, on the Avalon Peninsula, he is currently living and working in St. John’s at Memorial University as an engineering professor with a research focus on complex system modelling and safety, which he has applied to maritime transport and healthcare applications.

 

 

In this Q&A, Dr. Smith shares some of his inspiration on finding the right career path.

Jackey Locke: What inspired you to become an engineering professor?

Doug Smith: It was not a career path I envisioned for myself. After I completed a bachelor’s degree, my decision to pursue a master’s degree was made from a curiosity in research and an opportunity that was provided to me by a professor. It was a similar process which prompted me to pursue PhD studies.

It was towards the end of my PhD studies when I was able to start shaping my own research projects and gained some exposure to teaching at the university level that I began to consider the prospect of becoming a professor more seriously. I found the combination of researching and teaching to be both interesting and meaningful in their own ways.

This combination of personal interest and meaning is still what motivates me today.

JL: What is your research about?

DS: One of the great things about being an independent researcher is the autonomy to pursue research topics that you find interesting and meaningful. Most of my recent research has been applied to maritime safety and healthcare. In a broader sense, my research is on system modelling, organizational management and organizational resilience. Applying a system perspective to operations, whether it is in shipping or healthcare, is a “new” perspective to view organizational management and safety and often reveals some interesting insights. Organizations are typically departmentalized and as they become larger and more complex it can be difficult to appreciate the ways in which departments interact with each other (on the managerial and worker level), and also to understand the effects that these interactions have on the performance of the system. My research attempts to understand this better, or differently.

JL: How is your research impactful?

DS: There are a couple of ways my research has impact on society, but both are rooted in industry engagement.

When you work with a research partner and use a system approach to assess their operation it is often a new way of looking at the operation for the partner organization. When you look at things differently, you have an opportunity to build new understandings which can be used to help manage operations.

The other way that my research impacts society is through knowledge mobilization.

Typically, working with research partners for this type of research requires a high level of engagement in forming a detailed system model of their operations. By including them in this new type of study, the underlying knowledge (method/technique) can be transferred to the organization. This helps move the approach from the academic domain to industry.

I have also arranged workshops/tutorials with research partners to more directly help mobilize research knowledge.

JL: How many graduate students and/or postdocs do you supervise/co-supervise and how important are graduate students and postdocs to your research goals?

DS: The number of graduate students I have at any given time varies. I have supervised as many as 10 at a time. Currently, I am supervising two PhD students, one master’s student and one postdoctoral student.

Graduate students are extremely important to research done at universities. They have important roles in research projects and actually deliver most of the research results.

After beginning my career as a professor, I began to appreciate the educational aspect of university research on a new level. As I said above, while it’s important for research to have a direct impact on society, an equally important impact is through the education of graduate students. It is by having them heavily engaged in research that they learn how to apply innovative techniques, tackle research problems and even develop new ways of approaching these problems.

This educational element of university research helps empower them to pursue their career goals – and even their personal goals – and that is another way I derive meaning from my job.