A building materials engineer's decision about concrete can determine whether a hospital survives a hurricane. So why don't we talk about these jobs?

Table of Contents

1. The Problem We Don't See Coming
2. The Concrete Decision That Changed Everything
3. What We Talk About When We Talk About Building Security
4. The People Behind the Materials: A Hidden Workforce
5. When the System Breaks Down: Lessons from Recent Disasters
6. The Education Paradox: Training for Jobs We Don't Understand
7. The Supply Chain as National Security Issue
8. The Climate Problem That's Bigger Than We Think
9. What Happens When We Get This Right
10. The Questions We Should Be Asking

The Problem We Don't See Coming

Here's a question that keeps me up at night: Why do we know the names of tech CEOs but not the people who decide what materials go into our hospitals?

I started thinking about this after Hurricane Ian hit Florida in 2022. The images were devastating—entire neighborhoods underwater, roofs torn off, lives disrupted. But buried in the aftermath reporting was a detail that stuck with me: some buildings performed dramatically better than others, even when they were built in the same area, under the same building codes, facing the same storm.

The difference often came down to materials choices that were invisible to everyone except a small group of professionals most of us have never heard of. A decision about concrete additives here, a choice between steel alloys there, a specification for insulation that prioritized fire resistance over cost savings. These weren't dramatic, headline-grabbing innovations. They were incremental, technical decisions made by materials engineers, polymer scientists, and supply chain analysts—people working in what I've come to think of as our invisible infrastructure.

This invisibility bothers me because I think we're missing something important about how modern society actually works. We spend enormous amounts of time debating the visible aspects of policy—how much money to spend on infrastructure, which projects to prioritize, how to regulate construction. But we spend almost no time thinking about the people whose expertise determines whether those investments actually make us safer.

And that oversight is becoming more dangerous as the challenges we face become more complex.

The Concrete Decision That Changed Everything

Let me tell you about a decision that illustrates what I mean.

In 2018, engineers at a major hospital system were planning a new emergency facility in hurricane-prone coastal area. They had to choose between two concrete formulations for the foundation. One was cheaper and met standard building codes. The other cost about 15% more but included specific additives that would help it maintain structural integrity even if partially submerged in saltwater.

The decision ultimately came down to a materials engineer whose name I won't use because she still works in the industry. She had two decades of experience, advanced degrees in materials science, and had worked on disaster recovery projects. She also had something else: institutional memory of what happens when critical infrastructure fails during disasters.

She chose the more expensive concrete.

Three years later, that facility weathered a Category 4 hurricane that flooded much of the surrounding area. The hospital remained operational throughout the storm and served as a critical resource for the community's recovery. Meanwhile, a hospital built just five years earlier, with conventional materials that met all code requirements, suffered foundation damage that required months of repairs.

The difference between those two outcomes—between a community having emergency medical care during recovery and not having it—came down to a technical decision made by someone most people in that community had never heard of.

But here's what's interesting: that materials engineer told me the decision was actually harder than it should have been. Not technically, she was confident in materials science. Institutionally,  her recommendation required justifying higher upfront costs for benefits that might never be visible, to administrators who were evaluated on budget performance, for a building that might never face the extreme conditions she was designing for.

"The incentive structures are all wrong," she told me. "We're optimizing for the costs we can see and measure, not for the disasters we can't predict."

This gets at something deeper about how we think about infrastructure and resilience. We've built systems that reward visible efficiency over invisible preparedness. And the people with the expertise to navigate that tension are largely absent from the conversations where these tradeoffs get made.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Building Security

When policymakers discuss infrastructure resilience, they usually focus on funding levels, regulatory frameworks, and project priorities. These are important conversations, but they often skip over a crucial question: Do we have the right people, with the right expertise, making the detailed technical decisions that determine whether our investments actually work?

I've been talking to professionals in the building materials industry for the past year, and I keep hearing variations of the same concern. The technical challenges they're being asked to solve, developing materials that can withstand more extreme weather, creating sustainable alternatives to resource-intensive traditional materials, designing systems that can be rapidly deployed during disasters, are becoming more complex just as institutional knowledge is becoming more fragmented.

Consider the challenge of wildfire-resistant construction. It's not enough to use materials that don't burn, you need materials that maintain structural integrity at high temperatures, that don't release toxic gases when heated, that can be cost-effectively applied to existing structures, and that perform well across a range of other conditions. Solving this requires expertise in chemistry, physics, manufacturing, logistics, regulatory compliance, and field application.

But here's the problem: the professionals with this expertise often work in isolation from each other. The polymer scientist developing fire-resistant coatings may never talk to the supply chain analyst figuring out how to distribute those coatings during wildfire season. The failure analysis engineer studying why certain materials fail under extreme heat may never share findings with the building code officials who write the standards for future construction.

This fragmentation means we're often not asking the right questions. Instead of "How much should we spend on wildfire-resistant materials?" we should be asking "Do we have systems that effectively connect materials innovation to real-world application?" Instead of "What standards should we set for disaster-resistant construction?" we should be asking "How do we ensure that the people setting those standards have access to the latest materials research?"

The People Behind the Materials: A Hidden Workforce

The building materials industry employs millions of people in roles most of us never think about. There are materials engineers developing earthquake-resistant concrete formulations, metallurgists ensuring that structural steel can withstand decades of stress cycles, polymer scientists creating insulation systems that improve both energy efficiency and fire safety.

But when I started trying to understand what these jobs actually entail, I discovered something surprising: even many of the people doing this work struggle to articulate how their daily technical decisions connect to broader questions of community resilience and national security.

I talked to a supply chain analyst who manages procurement for emergency shelter materials—the temporary structures deployed after disasters. She has deep expertise in logistics, materials performance, and rapid deployment. She can tell you exactly how long it takes to get fire-resistant insulation from manufacturing facilities to disaster sites, which materials perform best in different climate conditions, and how to balance cost with performance when speed is critical.

But when I asked her how her work connects to broader questions about disaster preparedness, she paused. "I don't think anyone's ever asked me that before," she said. "I solve problems as they come up. I don't really think about policy."

This disconnection between technical expertise and policy thinking seems to be systemic. The professionals with the deepest understanding of materials performance often work within narrow technical domains, while the policymakers making decisions about infrastructure investments often lack the technical background to ask detailed questions about materials choices.

The result is a kind of expertise gap. We make policy decisions about infrastructure resilience without fully incorporating the knowledge of the people who best understand how materials actually perform under stress. And we ask materials professionals to solve technical problems without giving them much context about how their work fits into broader social and economic systems.

When the System Breaks Down: Lessons from Recent Disasters

This expertise gap becomes most visible during disasters, when the materials choices made years earlier determine how well communities can respond and recover.

After the 2021 Texas winter storm, I read through post-disaster assessments looking for patterns in infrastructure performance. What I found was revealing: the most critical failures often occurred at the intersection of materials performance and system design—areas where technical expertise needed to be integrated with broader system thinking.

Water pipes failed not just because of cold temperatures, but because of complex interactions between pipe materials, insulation systems, and building design that few people fully understood. Power systems failed not just because of ice accumulation, but because of materials choices in transmission infrastructure that hadn't been designed for the specific combination of ice, wind, and temperature fluctuations that occurred.

The professionals who understood these technical details were often called in after failures occurred, to conduct forensic analysis and recommend improvements. But they had rarely been involved in the original design decisions, or in the policy conversations about infrastructure investments, or in the emergency preparedness planning that could have mitigated some of the impacts.

This pattern repeats across different types of disasters. The expertise needed to build resilient infrastructure exists, but it's often not integrated into the decision-making processes that determine how that infrastructure gets built and maintained.

The Education Paradox: Training for Jobs We Don't Understand

Here's where this gets really interesting from a workforce development perspective. We're trying to train people for careers that we don't fully understand the importance of, in an industry that's changing rapidly, for challenges that are difficult to predict.

Traditional materials science education focuses heavily on technical fundamentals—understanding how materials behave at the molecular level, how to test and characterize performance, and how to design materials with specific properties. This technical foundation is essential, but it's not sufficient for the challenges these professionals are increasingly being asked to solve.

The materials engineer working on hurricane-resistant hospital construction needs technical expertise, but she also needs to understand disaster response logistics, healthcare facility operations, regulatory environments, and cost-benefit analysis. The supply chain analyst managing emergency shelter materials needs expertise in logistics and materials performance, but also needs to understand emergency management protocols, international aid distribution, and geopolitical factors that affect materials availability.

Current educational programs often do a good job with the technical fundamentals but provide less preparation for the systems thinking and interdisciplinary collaboration that these roles increasingly require.

I talked to professors at several materials science programs, and they're grappling with this challenge. How do you prepare students for careers that require deep technical expertise but also broad systems understanding? How do you teach students to communicate technical concepts to non-technical decision-makers? How do you help them understand how their work fits into larger questions about community resilience and national security?

Some programs are experimenting with more interdisciplinary approaches—bringing in guest lectures from emergency management professionals, incorporating case studies from recent disasters, requiring students to work on projects that connect technical materials research to real-world applications.

But this evolution is happening slowly, and unevenly, while the need for professionals who can bridge technical expertise and systems thinking is growing rapidly.

The Supply Chain as National Security Issue

The COVID-19 pandemic exposed vulnerabilities in supply chains across many industries, but the implications for building materials are particularly significant because infrastructure investments are long-term commitments with critical safety implications.

I spent time talking to professionals who work in materials supply chain management, and they describe a system that's more fragile than most people realize. Critical materials often come from limited numbers of suppliers, sometimes concentrated in specific geographic regions. Alternative materials exist but may require different manufacturing processes, different installation techniques, or different performance validation.

When supply chains are disrupted—whether by pandemics, natural disasters, or geopolitical tensions—the impacts can cascade through the construction industry in ways that affect community resilience for years or decades.

A supply chain analyst I spoke with gave me an example: specialty concrete additives that improve performance in earthquake-prone areas. These additives are produced by only a few facilities worldwide. When one facility went offline during the pandemic, construction projects across multiple seismic zones had to choose between delays, cost increases, or accepting reduced seismic performance.

"People think of supply chain disruptions as temporary inconveniences," he told me. "But when you're talking about infrastructure materials, the decisions you make during disruptions can affect communities for fifty years."

This creates a national security dimension to materials careers that's rarely discussed. The professionals who understand these supply chain vulnerabilities, who can identify alternative materials and suppliers, who can adapt specifications when preferred materials aren't available—they're essentially working on critical infrastructure resilience, even if they don't think of their work in those terms.

The Climate Problem That's Bigger Than We Think

Climate change is creating materials challenges that go beyond what most people realize. It's not just that we need materials that can withstand more extreme weather—though that's important. It's that we need materials that can perform across a wider range of conditions than anything in the historical record.

Traditional approaches to materials selection rely heavily on historical performance data. Engineers choose materials based on how they've performed in similar applications under similar conditions. But climate change means that historical conditions may not be good predictors of future conditions.

I talked to a materials engineer who works on bridge infrastructure, and they described the challenge this way: "We're being asked to design for hundred-year storms that might now happen every decade, temperature extremes that are outside our historical data, and combinations of conditions that we've never seen before."

This requires a different kind of expertise than traditional materials engineering. It requires professionals who can model materials performance under novel conditions, who can design adaptive systems that can be modified as conditions change, who can work with incomplete information and high uncertainty.

But it also requires professionals who can communicate these uncertainties to decision-makers in ways that lead to good policy choices. How do you justify higher upfront costs for materials that provide benefits under conditions that may or may not occur? How do you balance the costs of over-designing for extreme scenarios against the risks of under-designing for rapidly changing conditions?

These are not just technical questions, they're questions about risk management, resource allocation, and social priorities. But they require technical expertise to answer well.

What Happens When We Get This Right

Despite all these challenges, I've also seen examples of what happens when technical expertise gets effectively integrated into broader systems thinking about resilience and security.

After Hurricane Sandy, New York City undertook a comprehensive review of building standards for critical facilities. But instead of just changing regulations, they created processes for ongoing collaboration between materials experts, emergency management professionals, healthcare administrators, and community representatives.

The result was a set of standards that didn't just meet technical requirements, but that were designed around how hospitals actually operate during emergencies. Materials choices were evaluated not just for structural performance, but for how they would affect patient care, staff safety, and community access during disasters.

This collaborative approach led to innovations that probably wouldn't have emerged from purely technical or purely policy-driven processes. For example, emergency power systems that use materials designed to continue operating even when partially submerged, but that are also designed to be maintained by hospital engineering staff rather than requiring specialized contractors.

"The breakthrough wasn't in the materials themselves," one of the engineers involved told me. "It was in getting the right expertise into the room at the same time, early enough in the process to influence the fundamental design decisions."

The Questions We Should Be Asking

All of this leads me to think we're asking the wrong questions about infrastructure resilience and workforce development.

Instead of asking "How much should we spend on disaster-resistant infrastructure?" we should be asking "Do we have effective ways to translate materials expertise into infrastructure investments that actually improve community resilience?"

Instead of asking "How do we train more materials engineers?" we should be asking "How do we develop professionals who can bridge technical materials expertise with systems thinking about community resilience?"

Instead of asking "What building standards should we set?" we should be asking "How do we create ongoing connections between the people who understand materials performance and the people who make policy decisions about infrastructure?"

These different questions lead to different kinds of solutions. Instead of just increasing funding for infrastructure, we might focus more on improving the processes through which technical expertise gets integrated into infrastructure planning. Instead of just expanding materials science education programs, we might focus more on developing interdisciplinary collaboration skills and systems thinking capabilities.

The people working in materials careers are already solving many of the technical problems we need solved to build more resilient communities. What we're missing are the institutional structures that would allow their expertise to be more effectively integrated into the decisions that determine how that expertise gets applied.

The materials engineer who chose the more expensive concrete for that hurricane-resistant hospital had the technical knowledge to make a good decision. What she lacked was an institutional context that made that decision easier to justify and implement. Building that context—creating systems that reward invisible preparedness over visible efficiency, that connect technical expertise to policy decisions, that give materials professionals the tools and authority to contribute to broader conversations about community resilience—might be the most important infrastructure investment we can make.

Because here's what I've learned: the people who choose our materials are already holding more power than we realize. The question is whether we're going to help them use that power effectively.

Frequently Asked Questions

What makes building materials careers different from other technical fields? Materials professionals make decisions that directly affect community safety and resilience, often with implications that last for decades. Unlike software or consumer products, materials choices in infrastructure become embedded in systems that are difficult and expensive to change, making the expertise behind these decisions particularly consequential.

How do these careers connect to national security? Materials supply chains, infrastructure resilience, and disaster response capabilities all have national security implications. Professionals who understand these connections—and can work across technical and policy domains—are increasingly important as infrastructure faces more complex threats.

What skills do building materials professionals need beyond technical expertise? Systems thinking, interdisciplinary collaboration, risk communication, and the ability to work with incomplete information under high uncertainty. The technical challenges are becoming more complex just as they require more integration with policy and social considerations.

Why aren't these careers more visible in policy discussions? There's a systemic disconnect between technical expertise and policy-making processes. Materials professionals often work within narrow technical domains, while policymakers often lack the technical background to ask detailed questions about materials choices.

How is climate change affecting building materials careers? Climate change is creating materials challenges that go beyond historical experience, requiring professionals who can model performance under novel conditions and design adaptive systems. This requires different expertise than traditional materials engineering.

What educational preparation do these careers require? While technical fundamentals remain essential, these careers increasingly require interdisciplinary knowledge and systems thinking skills that traditional materials science programs don't always provide. The field is evolving toward approaches that integrate technical expertise with broader understanding of infrastructure systems.

How do supply chain disruptions affect these careers? Supply chain vulnerabilities can cascade through infrastructure systems in ways that affect community resilience for decades. Professionals who understand these vulnerabilities and can identify alternatives are working on critical infrastructure resilience, often without recognizing the broader implications of their work.

What happens when building materials expertise isn't integrated into infrastructure planning? Poor integration of technical expertise into decision-making processes can lead to infrastructure investments that don't actually improve community resilience, missed opportunities for innovation, and systematic optimization for visible efficiency over invisible preparedness.

How do these professionals contribute to disaster response and recovery? Materials experts evaluate damage, recommend repair strategies, coordinate supply of materials for emergency repairs, and help communities rebuild more resiliently. Their expertise is often most visible during disasters, when materials choices made years earlier determine how well communities can respond.

What does effective integration of building materials expertise into policy look like? Successful integration involves creating ongoing collaboration between materials experts and policy makers, rather than consulting technical experts only after policy decisions are made. This requires institutional structures that reward long-term preparedness and facilitate interdisciplinary collaboration.