Engineering Students to the Rescue
Posted on September 17th, 2012 by Mary Lord
Earthquake-shattered Haiti is a world apart from America’s grassy college campuses. Yet for a growing number of U.S. engineering undergraduates, the country serves as a living classroom where they can apply their knowledge and skills to help real people – half a million of whom still live under tarps or tents – recover from the worst natural disaster in modern times.
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Tags: clean drinking water, Curriculum, Disaster relief, Embry-Riddle, Engineering, Engineers Without Borders, grand challanges, Haiti, Humanitarian efforts, Lafayette College, project Haiti, solar power, University of Colorado
Amy Smith teaches mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is the driving force behind the Development Design Summit, which in 2009 hosted hosted more than 70 innovators, from Zambian health care workers to Caltech engineering students, for five weeks in Ghana. Her work encompasses 100 scattered projects in the pursuit of a single goal: using simple technology to lessen the burden of the rural poor. “I believe that there is a need for us to focus on solving the world’s most difficult problems,” she argues – problems that affect “the billions of people who don’t have safe water, sanitation, and enough food to eat.”
