Resnik Lecture: Climate Justice Solutions and Global Impact: A Lafayette Engineer's Journey with Hank Cauley ‘77

Since receiving his BS in Chemical Engineering, Hank Cauley '77 has woven a career that spanned work from Somalia refugee camps to corporate board rooms to tropical forests in Papua New Guinea to launching a social justice organization focused on climate change. He has created, turned around, and built seven major programs from scratch or within organizations, each one asking him to apply an engineer's instincts — systems thinking, disciplined problem-solving, comfort with ambiguity — to problems no engineering course ever described. What looks from the outside like an eclectic, even improbable path has, from the inside, followed a consistent logic: find where the need is real, build the thing that meets it, and let the destination stay open.

In this talk, Hank will share stories from across that path — moments of clarity, hard failures, and necessary compromises — and the insights he's drawn from each. He'll make the case that an engineering degree is not a narrow track but a foundation flexible enough to carry a career anywhere purpose leads it, and he'll leave students with practical ways to think about their own first steps: how to recognize the transferable skill underneath the credential, how to find work that impacts real people, how to create and manage teams to take on complex challenges, and how to build a career that stays enjoyable along the way.

The Resnik Memorial Lecture is named in honor of Astronaut Judith A. Resnik, an electrical engineer who lost her life in the challenger space shuttle disaster on January 28, 1986. The event is sponsored by the John and Muriel Landis Lecture Fund and the Farber Memorial Endowment Fund for the Resnik Memorial Lecture series.