Engaging in sustainability and leadership from an engineering lens with Taylor Stimpson - Program Manager
Taylor Stimpson holds a B.Eng & Society and MASc in Chemical Engineering from McMaster University and has over 6 years of expertise in interfacial engineering with a focus on bio-based, sustainable, and compostable materials. She is, at heart, a passionate problem-solver and environmentalist working to lead systems change toward a more climate-positive, equitable, and socially-just future, letting her passion guide her to her current role as Program Manager at the Academy for Sustainable Innovation (ASI).
Taylor is also a sessional instructor for McMaster’s undergraduate Engineering & Society Capstone course. She is actively involved with mentoring young people in climate action, including the Youth Climate Lab's RAD Cohort, owns and operates a small textile upcycling business, Waste Knot Co., and loves to spend her time reconnecting with nature and creativity.
In this interview, Taylor shares her story about combining her passions in engineering and sustainability, some career advice for scientists and engineers, and plenty of optimism about learning, connecting, and sustainability!
**This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
I loved chemical engineering, and even though I'm not working in engineering right now, I loved learning about chemistry, biochemistry and polymers. That was something that I've loved since I was really young. I remember being in high school chemistry class, and we did this experiment where we created nylon from mixing two liquid monomers in a beaker. I just thought that was the coolest thing ever, to see polymer being pulled with tweezers from the interface between these two liquids. I was like, ‘That's magic. That's so cool.’ So, I feel like it's hard for me to think about what I would've done otherwise, but I think now I'm gravitating a lot towards urban design, urban infrastructure, and how the cities that we live in dictate the way that we engage with each other and the way that we engage with nature. I'm also seeing how there's this bigger system of how cities are designed, even down to, for example, what kind of transportation is encouraged and how that impacts the sustainability of a city. So, if I were to redo it all or if I were to pivot my career, I think it would be something in urban design and urban development.
I think that for me, the concept of sustainability and my interest in nature and in humans’ connection to nature started really young. Growing up, my family would take us up to Algonquin camping for a couple of weeks every summer. Going into university, I was really lost when it came to what I wanted to do and what my interests were beyond just thinking chemistry and chemical engineering was super cool. But I'm a first-generation post-secondary student in my family. For me, I didn't have older siblings or parents to kind of guide me through that process, so I was actually really lucky to be in the first or second cohort in the first sustainability undergrad course at McMaster.
This opened my eyes to how I can merge these ideas of all of the science and the engineering that I love with how we can do better as a society in relation to the rest of the natural world, to contextualize engineering within systems of everything else.
And at that time, sustainability in a corporate context or what a sustainability career path looked like was still budding. I started meeting first-ever corporate sustainability officers at companies and people who had “sustainability” in their title for the first time ever. It opened my eyes to how I can do sustainability and environmental work that doesn't just look like field work.
My job now looks really different than what I expected to get into, especially since I did grad school loving lab work. But then, I took the role that I'm in now at the Academy for Sustainable Innovation (ASI), and I don't do any more traditional engineering in my day-to-day, nor do I really do any kind of STEM work in my day-to-day. But it does really inform what I do in the sense that it's the systems thinking, it's the inquiry, it's the problem solving and the context of just understanding climate change. For everything that we develop at ASI, that, for me, feels like it comes from an informed place because I can understand what sustainable solutions would look like informed by science, but also by other ways of knowing. And so, while I don't work in a traditional engineering job or my path hasn't looked entirely conventional for most chemical engineers, I think having that background really helps me to make informed decisions and to make sure that they’re rooted in biophysical limitations.
I think we need more chemists and chemical engineers who are at the decision-making level for sustainability work. [In climate action decision-making work], I see so many people who come from a policy background, a business background, environmental background. All of that's really helpful, but we also need people who come with an understanding of mass balances and fluid mechanics and an understanding of the technical, scientific side of everything. And I think when we have conversations about, for example, the plastics ban or other policies that are coming to light with sustainability, I really feel like chemists and chemical engineers have a role to play in helping to inform what decisions are end-of-pipe, Band-Aid solutions and what decisions we can move even beyond sustainability into regeneration. I think that's where we need to be headed.
And, unfortunately, I see very few technical folks who are at the forefront of that. They are behind the scenes doing the really important chemistry and research work that publishes papers that inform decisions, but they're not often at that decision-making table.
I’m hopeful to see that shifting, but I think there's still such an opportunity for folks in STEM, specifically in chemical engineering and chemistry, to really get involved with that.
I think being multifaceted in your skill set helps a lot. One of the challenges that I faced coming out of chemical engineering was not seeing the way that my skills from chem eng had a direct route into some of the jobs that I was really interested in. So, I think that that means customizing your skill set, whether that's through continuing education training or certificates. I think being able to round yourself out with a wide array of skills – like policy, government, business – will set you up to better understand different landscapes that aren't just technical engineering. On the other side, I would look to employers and ask, ‘How do chemical engineers and chemists actually have transferable skills? How can we hire in folks that don't come from the same background that you've been hiring in the past?’ Again, going back to problem solving, systems thinking and inquiry, I think that these are skills folks in engineering have a really strong understanding of.
You just mentioned as part of your advice to take more courses or certificate programs. You've done that yourself when you were doing your transition to sustainability, is that correct?
Yeah, I did a lot of that. And if I look back on it, it's hard to know why I got hired for certain things or what aspects of my expertise led to what.
But I think doing the extra training, if not for getting the skills, opened me up to new connections with people that I might not have otherwise connected with. It's really helpful to be able to customize your learning experience to what you want to do.
Traditional degree programs don't necessarily do that very well. So yeah, I would strongly encourage folks to do extra certificate courses or do retreats or workshops, not so much to build your resume, but just to learn more and to move yourself closer towards how you want to be spending your career.
I continue to try to learn to be a better listener and a student of everything. I think it's really easy when we leave academia and the traditional schooling system and think that your learning is done or that the learning that comes after is to build your resume. So, what I try and do is just learn from everyone and from everything. I'm going out for a walk in the morning before I start my workday because I feel like that gives me new perspectives just from learning about the world around me, understanding seasonality and changes in weather patterns. I see the blueberries coming out at different times every year. And those kinds of things you are learning just through observing, through just being open, and that's really inspiring to me.
I also get really inspired by people around me. I'm part of a few youth groups that really, really inspire me to challenge myself to think differently. I’m continuing to listen to these folks around me who are doing such incredible work, who have such inspiring ideas that keep me coming back to do better and be better and figure out better ways to do the work that I do.
I would actually say my partner, Devan. We’ve been together for almost a decade now, and I continue to be inspired by how much he comes with a curiosity and a joy for learning and exploring new things. He is the person who, when we're out on a walk and seeing the way that different coloured flowers bloom together and compliment each other, he is thinking about, ‘What's the physics behind that? What's the chemistry behind that?’ So, I think that being around him all of the time is inspiring me to continue to challenge myself and to remain curious and find joy in things like that. I think that it's very easy in a lot of the cultures around STEM to get stuck in the grind of all of it, but I think my partner does a really good job of reminding me that STEM is also magic as well.
With ASI, we're gonna be launching our Sustainability Professionals Members Network in September, which I'm so excited about because this was born from us hearing from our communities of sustainability practitioners across Canada that the community is lacking a space for casual person-to-person interaction around how we can learn from each other. So, we’re creating this learning and listening community of folks who are doing all of this amazing work in a Canadian context to be able to learn best practices, what hasn't worked in the past for sustainability work or how to move projects forward in the funding systems within a Canadian and provincial context and so on. To pull together people and ideas and create community around that is just so exciting for me because it reminds me that we don't do this work alone. We can't do this work alone. And there's an opportunity for us to do it together and not feel siloed in the hard work.
A personal project that I'm excited about right now is sort of my promise to myself to get back into curiosity and creativity. I am creating this sketchbook of all the native [plant] species that I've seen around my neighbourhood and when I go on trips. I'll sketch them and write out their names and even what they've been used for by Indigenous peoples in the area if I can find that information. Just getting into connection with nature that way has been really fun, but there's also the herbalism aspect of it, which feels like chemistry. I feel like I’m a different kind of scientist now, out in the world making observations and writing them down, and I think that's super exciting.
I thought pretty hard about this one, but honestly, I came to a really obvious answer, and I think it's gotta be carbon. I feel like carbon has a really bad rap these days. Carbon has been put in this light that it’s the villain, but carbon is a building block of life, and it's so essential to who we are and where we are. I think that we have an opportunity to rewrite the current story of carbon, especially on a broader societal scale. We have a chance to tell the story that nothing is bad or good when it comes to chemistry; it's what we choose to do with the elements that determines positive or negative outcomes. It's just a matter of balance. So, yeah, I think it's definitely carbon.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
If you hadn’t pursued chemical engineering, what would you be doing today?
Why did you decide to embark on a career journey in sustainability after chemical engineering?
What aspects of chemical engineering and technical work inform what you do at your job today?
Would you have any advice for folks who might be interested in pursuing that route?
How do you stay inspired to keep learning and building your skills?
What's one thing you're working on right now that you're particularly excited about?