The New York Times has a story today, Inside VW’s Campaign of Trickery, about how Volkswagon conspired to hide their excessive diesel emissions from California regulators.

What was fascinating to me was that the emission violations were discovered by mechanical engineering researchers at West Virginia University, Dan Carder, Hemanth Kappanna, and Marc Besch (Kappanna and Besch were graduate students at the time).

The presence of high levels of lead in Flint, Michigan drinking water was also discovered by an engineering researcher: Marc Edwards, a civil engineering professor at Virginia Tech.

It’s a reminder that regulators alone aren’t sufficient to ensure safety, and that academic engineering research can have a real impact on society.