Mortenson Center Digest - Q2 2023 |
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Disrupting the Status Quo |
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Mortenson Center Director Evan Thomas was a featured speaker in April at TedxCU where he talked about how he and his team at the University of Colorado Boulder are disrupting the status quo. They have developed sensor and analytical technologies to continuously monitor water services combined with the first-ever methodologies and projects to earn financially self-sustaining carbon credit revenue from drinking water treatment and watershed protection. Supported by USAID, NASA, the National Science Foundation, and the World Bank, and with venture backing and project finance, Evan and the Mortenson Center team have already reached over seven million people in Rwanda, Kenya and Ethiopia with improved water services.
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Mortenson Center Honored at Sustainability Awards |
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The Mortenson Center received a Civic Achievement Award in April at the Campus Sustainability Awards. The event was part of the 30th annual Campus Sustainability Summit.
The award recognizes the outstanding efforts of the Mortenson Center toward continuing the leadership and legacy of sustainability at CU Boulder.
Affiliate Faculty member Karen Bailey was also honored at the event with a Green Faculty Award.
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Congratulations Spring Graduates! |
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Megan Ellery - MS in Civil Systems with Certificate
Melanie Holland - PhD in Civil Engineering with Certificate
Nicollette Laroco - PhD in Environmental Engineering
Denis Muthike - PhD in Environmental Studies
Paula Perez - Professional MS in Global Engineering
Taylor Sharpe - PhD in Environmental Engineering
Emma Wager - Professional MS in Global Engineering
Emma Wells - MS in Environmental Engineering with Certificate
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Mortenson Center Director Evan Thomas and Affiliate Faculty member Scott Summers were selected to receive the 2023 Steven K. Dentel Association of Environmental Engineering and Science Professors (AEESP) Award for Global Outreach. This prestigious award recognizes their outstanding contributions and leadership as faculty members through their involvement in environmental engineering and science outreach activities to the global community.
Mortenson Center Associate Director Karl Linden was also selected to be a 2023 AEESP Fellow based on his accomplishments in environmental engineering, science research, teaching and professional service. The AEESP presented the awards on June 21, 2023 in Boston, Massachusetts.
Pictured: Karl Linden receiving his award at the AEESP award ceremony in Massachusetts.
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Global Engineering RAP Moves to Will Vill |
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When fall begins, the first cohort of students will begin moving into Engineering Connections, the College of Engineering's new residential community at Williams Village to include the Mortenson Center's Global Engineering Residential Academic Program (RAP). Engineering Connections will bring together resources and programing to support academic success, wellness, fun and professional development, and will give students opportunities to create their own smaller communities. |
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Mortenson Center Program Coordinator Sarah Goodroad joined Affiliate Faculty member and Associate Professor Tom Yeh's class to hear about students, including Discovery Learning Apprenticeship student William MacDonald, discuss the work and research they are doing with artificial intelligence (AI) in a global context. These students are a part of the Brain, AI and Child (BAIC) lab at CU Boulder.
Some of the students in the class have conducted writing contests for children in Nigeria, Brazil and Switzerland in order to gain an understanding of how young people in other countries view AI. The overarching purpose is to help answer the question, "How can we design and develop better interactive AI systems for children?" The students shared with Sarah some of the cultural differences and similarities between the countries that they discovered from the writing contests, as well as the some of the hopes and concerns children expressed about AI and what the technology could mean for their future.
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Support the Mortenson Center's work and mission & make a donation today.
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Affiliate Faculty Spotlight |
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Mortenson Center Affiliate Faculty member Tom Yeh received his PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for studying vision-based user interfaces. He is now Associate Professor of Computer Science and a Co-Director of the Center for the Brain, A.I., and Child (BAIC) at CU Boulder. His research interests include AI, ethics of AI, assistive technology, 3D printing, STEM education, computer vision, brain imaging, and citizen science.
The aim of the BAIC is to conduct research in the intersection of artificial intelligence and neuroscience and to support young children's development. Tom is working with his students in the BAIC lab who are researching how to design better interactive AI systems for children across the globe.
Tom is interested in research and collaborations that will have international impact. He was recently awarded a RIO Seed grant from CU Boulder for a new multidisciplinary and multinational research initiative to study how AI is shaping the development of young children around the world.
Many AI systems are not yet ethically designed, culturally diverse and developmentally appropriate for young children, which has become a real and pressing issue for society as more and more young children are directly or indirectly impacted by AI systems. The research and pilot studies for which this grant was awarded seek to address these issues. The first pilot is titled: "Fairness Across Cultures Between Children and Robots" and the second is "Cross-Cultural, Child-Centric Evaluation Framework for Chatbots". The Mortenson Center is a collaborator and Managing Director Laura MacDonald will be one of the Co-Principal Investigators on the project.
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Discovery Learning Apprentices |
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The Mortenson Center provides financial support to undergraduate engineering students in the Discovery Learning Apprenticeship (DLA) program. These students are paid for hourly research with faculty whose work aligns with our mission. Read about the 2022-23 apprentices: |
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Luis Munoz is studying environmental engineering. With the Global Projects and Organizations (GPO) research group, he worked on a project that analyzed the factors impacting the social sustainability of sanitation systems. By using household surveys from rural Peru and interviews with stakeholders, the project sought to better understand what motivates households to adapt, construct and use improved sanitation. |
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Luke Tiefel's research project entailed using UV lights to disinfect biofilm formations, especially in water distribution systems. Biofilms are formed when bacteria are exposed to environmental factors such as constant water flowing over them, creating a protective ’shield’ known as a biofilm. Luke and the team researched how effective UV lights might be in inactivating biofilm formations, with the hopes of eventually incorporating this disinfection method over the widely-used disinfection byproduct-forming chlorine. |
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In Ben DeBlasio's project, Engineering for Social Justice, he followed the career paths of post-graduate Global Engineering students to see how college programs that teach social justice and engineering equality influence potential career paths. |
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William MacDonald worked to create a system within an augmented reality (AR) environment that can translate speech between two distinct languages in real time. The system will listen to a user, convert their voice to text, translate the text, and then deliver the translation in the form of either subtitles, speech bubbles, or speech to another user. |
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After spending all of the Fall 2022 semester gathering data on system implementation, Will began to work on developing the subtitle version. His aim was to establish the most efficient way of presenting translated text or audio to users within an AR environment and to then implement the system and test it with AR headsets. |
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Hannah Sanders worked as an undergraduate research assistant for the Building A Legacy in Engineering Project. Her role was to help organize for the Living Learning Lab, a collaborative between Tuskegee University and CU Boulder students. |
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Frank Bergh is a Mortenson Center Online Graduate Certificate student from Cincinnati, Ohio. He earned a bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering with a minor in Spanish from Washington University in St. Louis. Frank became involved in global engineering when he co-founded a chapter of Engineers Without Borders-USA (EWB) at his alma mater. He went on to serve as the President and board member of EWB’s Great Lakes Region. His volunteer service spanning 15 years.
Volunteering with EWB developed Frank’s passion for global engineering and he later founded two companies: Beyond the Grid - a consulting firm focused on energy access and renewable energy in low- and middle-income countries; and, JustDesign Cooperative - an employee-owned environmental justice design firm. As he grew these companies, Frank also served as the principal engineer for solar-powered microgrids, providing electricity to tens of thousands of people in Haiti and the Democratic Republic of the Congo with sponsors such as USAID, the World Bank, USTDA, IDB, and European Development Banks.
Frank is currently pursuing a master’s degree in Next Generation Power and Energy Systems within the Electrical Engineering department at CU Boulder. He is also a Senior Engineer for NRECA International where he works closely with communities and governments in the Global South to promote modern, reliable, affordable and sustainable access to electricity. (Frank is pictured above with installed solar PV panels.) He is also involved with the design, construction, and operation of solar mini-grids and rural electric cooperatives. Frank’s current project portfolio includes electrification plans with African governments sponsored by the World Bank and United Nations, as well as a rural electric cooperative development program sponsored by USAID.
Frank learned about the Mortenson Center through his EWB volunteer work and meetings with Mortenson Center Founder Dr. Bernard Amadei. His favorite part of the Mortenson Center is the camaraderie among students in the program and the exceptional projects on which his classmates are working. In the future, Frank hopes to establish a cohort whose work will inspire and influence his own professional practice as the Mortenson Center has done for him.
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Frank is pictured above center with local contractors after installation of solar PV. |
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Are you an alum with a story to share?
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The Global Promise of Environmental Engineering |
Mortenson Center Managing Director Laura MacDonald was the featured guest on the Trust for Sustainable Living's podcast "Speaking of Sustainability", available on all major podcast platforms.
Laura discusses the Mortenson Center's work and partnerships along with the Center's education programs. The episode is part of the Green Jobs series.
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Water service provider SADEL is included in the cohort of 14 providers in the University of Colorado Boulder study and is located in Kasai Oriental Province. |
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Kathleen Kirsch, a Mortenson Center PhD student in Environmental Engineering, is the lead author of “Study design and baseline to evaluate water service provision among peri-urban communities in Kasai Oriental, Democratic Republic of the Congo”. The Mortenson Center’s Chantal Iribagiza, John Ecklu, Pacifique Mugaruka Ntabaza, Christina Barstow, James Harper, Amy Javernick-Will, Karl Linden, and Evan Thomas are also among the authors on the paper.
To research the real-time service provision of 14 nearby water service providers, the University of Colorado Boulder piloted a pre-intervention impact evaluation. The study seeks to continue this impact evaluation throughout the lifetime of USAID’s peri-urban water project so that residents of Kasai Oriental receive quality and sustainable water service delivery for years to come.
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Water-vending Kiosks in Sierra Leonne |
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Mortenson Center alum Matthew Falcone defended his PhD in Environmental Engineering in June and is the lead author of “Effectiveness of a water-vending kiosk intervention toward household water quality and surveyed water security in Freetown, Sierra Leone”, recently published in Science of The Total Environment. Mortenson Center Teaching Assistant Professor Carlo Salvinelli and Director Evan Thomas are also among the authors on the paper.
The government of Sierra Leone, in partnership with the United States Millennium Challenge Corporation, implemented a demonstration project of ten water kiosks providing distributed, stored, treated water to two neighborhoods in Freetown.
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The study showed that water kiosk intervention had lackluster impacts on household water security and household water quality. Furthermore, there was low functionality and adoption and low levels of impact on kiosk users.
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A water vending kiosk (blue building) installed in Freetown, Sierra Leonne. |
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Mortenson Center Adjunct Associate Professor Gunārs Platais was a keynote speaker for the Brazilian Society of Ecological Restoration. He is seen here on the beach in his Mortenson Center shirt in front of the beautiful Rio de Janeiro skyline. |
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Mortenson Center in Global Engineering | University of Colorado Boulder |
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