Bridges connect communities and are essential to our social fabric but some of them can do more, like support renewable energy strategies, report on their structural health and inspire the next generation of STEM innovators. Bridge construction is expensive and disruptive to the community and the environment. So, we need to maximize the societal benefit of our public investment by asking our bridges to do more jobs. To accomplish this, we need vision and collaboration to push past what we thought was possible for bridge design and construction. Erin Santini Bell is a professor and department chair of civil and environmental engineering at the University of New Hampshire. Her research expertise is in the area of structural health monitoring and bridge condition assessment, including structural modeling, instrumentation, field testing and performance, and remaining life prediction. She has enjoyed an interdisciplinary research collaboration to enhance the Memorial Bridge in Portsmouth, NH to support a structural health monitoring system, a renewable energy installation, and STEM education. Dr. Bell holds a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology and a master’s degree and a doctorate in structural engineering from Tufts University. She lives in Rowley, MA with her husband, her son, Owen, and her daughter, Allie. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx