“I just try to invite people to be whole…be all of who you are while you’re also an engineer. You're a neighbor, you’re a friend...you’re a person, and that means you have moral agency, you have politics, your existence is political.” 

 

Khalid Kadir, a Lecturer at UC Berkeley, is acknowledged for his contributions to Engineering Education and his commitment to inspiring the next generation of engineers.

 

In his popular course Engineering, Environment, and Society, Kadir teaches engineering students how to approach and engage humbly with local community partners on environmental justice issues. “I deeply believe, to do good work, you have to have place-base knowledge; you have to know the people and the context and the history of the place you're working with”, Kadir said to the Constellation Prize committee after being nominated as an inaugural recipient.

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Kadir has “almost single-handedly made social and environmental justice an and integral part of engineering education at UC Berkeley”, said Dean Chahim, a former student and Ph.D. Candidate at Stanford University. As a trained environmental engineer, Chahim reflected, “I know just how badly [we] need Khalid’s pedagogy across the engineering world; his work transforms the way engineers think with an infectious positivity and energy”.