Encouraging Engineering Students in Social Change
In 2008 David challenged a Dartmouth engineering student team to take on a social change project. The project was a system for removing arsenic from groundwater in a geology that runs from Nepal to Bangladesh. In April 2009, the team demonstrated their prototype, inexpensive household-scale system that cuts arsenic concentrations to around 1 ppb, well below the World Health Organization standard of 10 ppb and in a region where villagers’ well water often ranges beyond 200 ppb.
Confirming the merit of their discovery, the sponsors of the Collegiate Inventors Competition (US Patent Office, Inventors Hall of Fame, and Abbott Foundation) awarded the top prize for USA undergraduate innovators to the Thayer School of Engineering team in October 2009.
VTS continues to build an innovation base through U.S. universities:
- Santa Clara University, Graduate Business School Fellowship, 2004
- Dartmouth College, Thayer School of Engineering, ongoing
- Stanford University, alumni speakers program
Read more about this topic: Villagetech Solutions
Famous quotes containing the words social change, encouraging, engineering, students, social and/or change:
“That children link us with the future is hardly news. . . . When we participate in the growth of children, a sense of wonder must take hold of us, providing for us a sense of future. Without the intimation of concrete individual futures, it is hardly worth bothering with social change and improvement.”
—Greta Hofmann Nemiroff (20th century)
“As blacks, we need not be afraid that encouraging moral development, a conscience and guilt will prevent social action. Black children without the ability to feel a normal amount of guilt will victimize their parents, relatives and community first. They are unlikely to be involved in social action to improve the black community. Their self-centered personalities will cause them to look out for themselves without concern for others, black or white.”
—James P. Comer (20th century)
“Mining today is an affair of mathematics, of finance, of the latest in engineering skill. Cautious men behind polished desks in San Francisco figure out in advance the amount of metal to a cubic yard, the number of yards washed a day, the cost of each operation. They have no need of grubstakes.”
—Merle Colby, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“We are students of words: we are shut up in schools, and colleges, and recitation-rooms, for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bag of wind, a memory of words, and do not know a thing.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“There is a city myth that country life was isolated and lonely; the truth is that farmers and their families then had a richer social life than they have now. They enjoyed a society organic, satisfying and whole, not mixed and thinned with the life of town, city and nation as it now is.”
—Rose Wilder Lane (1886–1965)
“It does change the age that is young, once in Paris it was twenty-six, then it was twenty-two, then it was nineteen and now it is between thirty and forty. They tell about a new young man, how old is he you say and they say he is thirty.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)