The why: Tripp Shealy trains engineers to challenge the status quo

A few months after Tripp Shealy arrived at Virginia Tech as a new assistant professor in the Charles E. Via Jr. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, he told his department head that he wanted a $125,000 brain imaging machine.

In certain corners of the university — say, psychology or neuroscience — a brain-imaging machine, like the functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) that Shealy had his eye on, are standard kit. In civil engineering, Shealy would be the only faculty member with one. His department head questioned whether he really wanted to go through with it. “This was not a typical request,” Shealy admitted.

But Shealy, who was recently made a full professor in the department, is as much of a behavioral scientist as he is an engineer. “Broadly, I study design cognition,” he explained. “I’m interested in how engineers think — and how we get them to think differently.”

He got the machine.

The colorful heat maps of the brain that the fNIRS machine produces provide tangible proof of what Shealy deeply believes: that humans are not as rational as they think. That includes engineers.

Case in point: After graduating from Clemson with a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering, Shealy was working for a construction contractor in upstate South Carolina. At a meeting in the job site trailer, he raised his hand and asked, “Why are we doing it this way?” Everyone chuckled and said, “Because we've always done it this way.”

“I didn't think that was a very good answer,” Shealy said.

Status quo bias can be a driving rationale in engineering, but it’s not a reasonable one. Fast-moving environmental and societal changes demand fresh ways of seeing the built environment and new approaches to creating infrastructure that can keep up with the world. 

“What I'm trying to do is help engineers think differently about how we design these things that are supposed to last 50, 75, 100 years, when the world's going to look like a very different place,” he said. “It’s design cognition, but particularly for environmental and social change.”

The fNIRS machine is just one of many technologies — along with computer numerical control (CNC) machines, virtual reality headsets, and more — that Shealy uses to convince engineers that the way they’ve always done things might not be good enough anymore.

The problem with the status quo

Shealy grew up in Charleston, South Carolina, a low-lying coastal city that’s among the nation’s more vulnerable to storm impacts. He vividly remembers sitting in snarled traffic on I-26 as his family tried to evacuate from looming storms. “We never had snow days growing up, but we had many hurricane days,” he said. 

Shealy’s grandfather owned a construction company in the area, and as a kid Shealy swept job sites before graduating to summer jobs building seawalls, docks, and bridges along the Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway. Sometimes they were repairing structures that had been damaged by the last passing storm.

All this instilled a sense in Shealy that things were changing. That 100-year-storms were becoming 20-year storms. That these supersized storms didn’t read the building codes and would happily wallop anything in their path. 

In 2012, as a master’s student in civil engineering at Clemson, Shealy joined a group of structural engineers that went to New York after Hurricane Sandy to examine what actually went wrong in the homes that had been destroyed and make recommendations to storm-proof building codes in the Northeast. 

The damage he observed shocked him. So did learning that it wasn’t flooding that caused the most damage, it was how restoring electricity to a previously flooded home often ignited a fire that burned entire neighborhoods down. Shealy saw how their work could lead to small changes that would prevent other families from losing everything to a storm and its aftermath. 

“Helping with this research project that was providing recommendations to improve building codes for the Northeast, that hooked me for the Ph.D.,” Shealy said. “I saw the power of research.”

Back at Clemson, Shealy approached one of his professors, Leidy Klotz, about pursuing a Ph.D; Klotz immediately offered to advise him. “Tripp really cares about making a positive difference in the world,” said Klotz, now a professor of engineering at the University of Virginia. “That's what drew him to the sustainability and resilience challenges, that's what drew him to behavioral science, and that's what drew him to being a professor. My sense with Tripp is that he's been very deliberate about making these choices throughout his career and life, constantly trying to align his skills with the challenges and opportunities.” 

During his doctoral studies, Shealy also worked closely with psychologists at Columbia on translating behavioral science theories to engineering decision-making. Together, they explored how showing engineers what other teams had accomplished could motivate them to rethink what was possible. Psychologists refer to these influences as role models and descriptive norms, and their research showed that they could encourage engineers to pursue more ambitious sustainability goals.

“That helped shape my viewpoint of, 'How do we get engineers to think differently?'” Shealy said. “Everything else since then has been trying to do that.”

Engineering for a rapidly changing world

Under the overarching banner of changing behavior, Shealy has allowed his interests to range widely. “I've been motivated by, 'Where do I think I can make the biggest impact?'” he said. “I'm going to do that. That's been my North Star.”

Early in his career, that meant using brain-imaging research to examine how engineers used Envision, a sustainability rating system like LEED that is used by approximately 7,000 engineers across the country. In its first iteration, engineers could earn points from Envision for designing projects that were more sustainable than the industry norm.

But Shealy suspected that the system might have more influence by capitalizing on loss aversion — humans’ instinctive hatred of losing something they once had. He used his brain imaging machine to study how engineers’ brains reacted when the Envision system was redesigned so that engineers started with a perfect score, then lost points for each less-sustainable choice. They were far more motivated to avoid losing points than they had been to gain them.

“We literally changed where the cognitive effort was happening in their brain,” Shealy said. “And it worked.” 

Based on its behavioral science research, the Institute for Sustainable Infrastructure, Envision’s creator, ultimately changed the Envision rating system used by 7,000 working professionals. “That seems like a pretty big impact,” Shealy said.

Shealy believes that for civil engineers, increasing empathy might be one key to changing behavior. 

In a recent study with Ph.D. student Joshua Trump, participants donned virtual reality glasses and, for a few technology-aided moments, embodied a bird avatar. “We had them fly around the site as a bird, then we had them do a design process where they looked at the site and came up with a conceptual design for it,” Shealy explained. “Engineers who experienced the site as a bird generated more ideas that supported both wildlife and people.”

Increasing a person’s feeling of empathy for nature, they discovered, can change how people think and ultimately change their design ideas. Simply giving engineers tools to view a problem differently carries over into the solutions they create for it.

For society more widely, Shealy aims to promote better, more sustainable decision making. During a sabbatical in Glasgow, Scotland, Shealy worked with Professor Anja Maier, head of the University of Strathclyde’s Department of Design, Manufacturing, and Engineering Management, to interview cyclists about their motivations and the barriers they faced. The research was part of an effort to explore design interventions that would encourage active travel — a topic both consider vital for creating sustainable futures. 

“Tripp brings a remarkable combination of curiosity, creativity, and generosity to every interaction, and his good humor is genuinely contagious,” Maier said. “It had been some time since I had personally undertaken data collection ‘in the wild,’ and Tripp approached the experience with enthusiasm, energy, and a genuine interest in engaging with people directly.”

Infrastructure to survive an uncertain future

If he could wave a magic wand, Shealy would convince all engineers to take environmental risks more seriously. He’s quick to present examples of when they didn’t. 

For instance, the time in 2025 when the Third Avenue swing bridge in New York got stuck because a heat wave expanded the metal joints so much that it couldn't close. “Engineers were not thinking about the extreme heat conditions that we're dealing with today,” he said.

Or consider the Kansai Airport in Osaka, Japan, which was built on a manmade island and is now regularly flooded. “We're giving it awards one decade and the next decade it's sinking back into the ocean.”

Shealy sees other examples closer to home, like parking structures that are built with only a handful of electrical vehicle chargers. Part of the work of engineers is future-proofing their designs. “The future doesn't look like the past,” he said. “We're designing for a world that no longer exists. And that's not very rational.” 

Shealy’s latest research project was inspired by another hurricane. After Helene wreaked havoc in the Southeast, Shealy saw firsthand how rebuilding efforts were hampered not just by storm damage, but by limited workforce capacity and supply chain challenges. “We’re using a systems thinking approach to look at the conditions that shape recovery after a disaster. That means understanding how labor, materials, housing, and construction interact and where there may be opportunities to improve the process. We’re trying to answer one question: How do we get people back into homes faster?”

Taking their cue from advanced manufacturing, he and Associate Professor Adam Phillips have gravitated toward industrialized construction, designing 1,600-square-foot homes built out of plywood and oriented strand board parts that are cut out in a factory by a CNC machine. Loaded onto a semi truck, they’re delivered looking just like flat-pack IKEA furniture, then slotted together like puzzle pieces on site. The instructions are engraved onto the material, so you need only low-skilled labor for assembly. And structural testing shows that homes built this way perform just as well or better than stick-built homes.

“You can store the pieces in a warehouse and distribute them after a disaster event occurs,” Shealy said. “Volunteer organizations can be much more productive building those than trying to cut 2x4s and stand up a wall. And the electrical is already pre-programmed into the material, so you don’t need skilled labor.”

Because the system doesn’t require high-tech machinery, just a standard CNC machine and a digital file, warehouses around the country can cut and ship out versions of homes customized to local needs, from snow in the Northeast to hurricanes in the Southeast to earthquakes in the West. 

Flat-pack housing, Shealy said, hits the sweet spot between building in a warehouse and building on site, and it has the potential to make rebuilding after a disaster quicker, cheaper, and less wasteful. 

Bringing the project to fruition has been a collaborative effort involving undergrads, grad students, and professors. “Our plan is to build a house,” he said. “If funded, we have permission from VT to build a 1600-square-foot residential structure on Plantation Drive using our system. And planning to have students build the boxes outside Hitt Hall and time them to see how fast it takes with little instruction.” The last thing they’re waiting on is grant funding; they’re also trying to get industry partners on board. 

Shealy sees this kind of construction as a game changer. But he knows it won’t be an easy change, precisely because it’s so new. “It's going to require doing things in a way that maybe we haven't done in the past,” he said. 

Luckily, doing things in new ways that happens to be Shealy’s specialty. “I’m always asking, 'Why are people still thinking in the same way we've always been doing things?'” he asked. “There's got to be a better way.”