Since today is Blog Action Day 2008 and this year's theme is poverty, we thought it would be a good time to remind readers about how Missouri S&T students and researchers are doing their part to improve living conditions around the globe. From students traveling abroad to build latrines, design sewer systems and rebuild hurricane-stricken areas to researchers developing alternative energy sources to alumni developing innovative and inexpensive ways to thresh grain in impoverished areas, Missouri S&T's people are helping to make the world a better place.
Engineers Without Borders is perhaps the best known student organization on our campus that is helping to address the needs of people in developing nations. EWB members have posted extensively on this blog about their work in Guatemala, Bolivia, Honduras and elsewhere. Most recently, a team of EWB students traveled to Bolivia and Honduras. In Tacachia, Bolivia, the group assessed the possibility of building a foot bridge to make it easier for residents of that mountain village to travel to La Paz for medical visits. In Santiago, Honduras, a community of 7,000, S&T students helped install an additional water storage tank, rainwater collection systems, and slow-sand-drip water filtration systems.
Reinventing the wheel -- for threshing grain -- was a project S&T alumna Michelle Marincel worked on over the summer. Marincel, who holds S&T degrees in nuclear engineering and environmental engineering, helped design an ergonomic thresher that would reduce the amount of labor required by African women who harvest grains. The process involves using a bicycle to thresh millet. This kind of approach could save labor and time, allowing the women to more efficiently process this food staple with minimal effort.
Creating biodiesel from algae -- a topic we recently blogged about -- may not sound like research that addresses poverty. But Paul Nam, the chemistry researcher who is working to turn pond slime into fuel, believes that algae, if we think of it as a crop, could play a big role in the unfolding dramas associated with preserving traditional sources of food, finding alternative sources of energy and reducing greenhouse gasses. All of those issues have an impact on global living conditions. Another researcher working in this arena is Dave Summers, who envisions a day when thousands of algae-filled Plexiglass tubes stored underground much like wine in a temperature-controlled cellar and grown underground, perhaps even in abandoned mines.
These are just a few of the dozens of ways in which students, researchers and alumni are involved in the fight against poverty.
