This article is part four of a five-part series on #EngineeringtheUnexpected, in celebration of  the first Global Day of the Engineer on February 24, 2016.

Brian Mech’s (UTIAS PhD 9T7) career path was inspired in part by the fictional civil engineer Cyrus Smith in Jules Verne’s The Mysterious Island as a teenager. “He basically develops a whole civilization on this island,” says Mech. “I just thought it was remarkable how much engineers knew and how much they could do.”

While he knew he wanted to build things that had never been built before, Mech still wasn’t sure what form that would take. During his graduate studies at U of T Engineering, he focused on improving the materials used to build nuclear reactors. He continued in this field as a post-graduate researcher, but things took a sharp turn one day in 1999 when he got a call from a fledgling company called Second Sight. They wanted his expertise in materials science to help develop an artificial retina that could restore vision to the blind.

“For the most part, the engineering and scientific community held that it was impossible to build a device that would work,” says Mech. Over the next 16 years, Mech and his team proved them wrong. They designed and built an ultra-thin, self-contained implant capable of receiving external signals — sent from a special pair of glasses worn by the user — and turn them into electrical signals that stimulate cells at the back of the eye. Today, the device is restoring vision loss in hundreds of patients with a condition called retinitis pigmentosa.

Over time, Mech found himself drawn toward the business side of the company, and eventually returned to school part-time to complete an MBA. Recently, he left Second Sight to become the CEO of eSight, a Toronto-based company that builds wearable devices which restore nearly normal vision to people with a wide range of sight-damaging conditions.

Given the twists and turns in his career, Mech says that engineering was the ideal background to have. “When you train as an engineer, you learn some very fundamental techniques about analysis, being data-driven and developing a plan. You’re very organized in your approach to a problem,” he says. “I just think it’s excellent training for almost anything you want to do.”