Moldy Human Cells, Water Pipes, 2-Watt Computers, and Concrete Machines: One Pratt Senior’s Summer Extravaganza

This article is part of Summer Stories, a special, online issue of Dukengineer Magazine, in which students wrote about their experiences in the Summer of 2007 during their time away from Duke.

by Lee Pearson, BME/CEE ‘08

“Viva Peeeruuu!” the perfect stranger yelled to me with Pisco on his breath as he threw his arm around my back and we proceeded to walk towards the concert stage. It was July 27th, the night before the Independence Day anniversary in Peru, and I was walking around Lima checking out the celebration before my flight to Duke the next day. I never imagined back when I began as a freshman engineering student in Pratt that I would be able to have such opportunities at Duke, but here I was on the other side of the equator and heading to the other side of the prime meridian in the following days. It seemed unreal.

This summer I worked in the lab of Dr. Claudia Gunsch as a Pratt Fellow; participated in the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill (UNC) Engineers Without Borders (EWB) project in Ciudad de Dios, Peru; and led a Duke EWB project in Nkokonjeru, Uganda. All together, these experiences made for a busy summer, but also really helped me narrow down the specific fields of engineering that drive my interest.

From the Lab to Peru

As a Pratt Fellow, I am researching the mechanisms of toxicity for toxic mold and developing testing instruments for the laboratory. Over the summer, I worked with a post doc to grow two different strains of toxic mold and extract the mycotoxins (secondary metabolites that make toxic mold toxic) to apply on a human cell line that were also growing in the lab. It was interesting work as I found that environmental engineering has many more applications in biology than many of the biomedical engineering projects I was previously interested in during my first years in Pratt. Through this project I was able to combine my interests in Environmental Engineering and Biomedical Engineering, with a focus more on biology than on electronic medical instrumentation.

After leaving the lab bench, I met with the UNC Engineers Without Borders group several times during the summer and then traveled with Maggie Hoff (CEE ’10) and a graduate student from the UNC to Peru. The project was developed with a professor from UNC who had been working in the small community of Ciudad de Dios for ten years doing archaeology work. He funded infrastructure improvements in the village in exchange for having the local people guarding his dig sites.

We conducted a site assessment for installing a reservoir above the village to provide a water supply to the people in the half of the town who did not receive water and installed a valve and flow metering system on the main pipe into town. This allowed them to shut off the water to repair leaks and track how much water the town was receiving from the water supplier. We created a GPS map of the village and Duke and UNC EWB students will work with professional engineers to design the reservoir, pump, and piping system for the town to be installed next summer.

Off to Uganda

I then returned to Durham for a day, flying out to Uganda with the Duke EWB team the next day to take part in the Rural Agency for Sustainable Development (RASD) project—an effort that proved to be the most rewarding of my college career. I had had the opportunity to build the original connections with RASD the summer before and work with them to develop project ideas.

RASD, in Nkokonjeru, Uganda, mission is to improve the quality of life for rural citizens by disseminating information and giving seminars on a variety of topics, including sanitation, rainwater harvesting, agricultural techniques, and technical skills. The organization is led by Ignatius Bwoogi, a graduate of Makerere University, who decided to come back home to his native district of Mukono instead of taking a higher paying job elsewhere. Our goal for the project was really to try and help Ignatius build the organization and to establish a connection that would allow for future collaboration. The project also represented the first partnership between Duke EWB and the Duke Smart Home. Tom Rose (director of the Smart Home program), and Scott Steinberg (BME/ME ’09) of the Smart Home program worked with Will Patrick (ME ’10) and myself (CEE/BME ’08) on the project.

We did several things to help the organization. Our first task was to help improve the RASD resource center. In addition to its role in the local community, RASD can also serve as an overseas laboratory for Pratt students to field tests their engineering designs for developing world applications. Ben Abram (CEE/PubPol ’07) and I had contacted and visited RASD for a few days last summer, and started building relationships between that NGO and Duke Engineers Without Borders. While we it was perhaps risky to give funds directly to the NGO for the resource center's construction, the building needed to be complete before we arrived in order to conduct our project and it built trust between our groups.

Our trust in them paid off. This August when we arrived, the buildings looked amazing! The hollow brick shells that we visited last year had been transformed into usable spaces. The buildings had been roofed, plastered, painted and windows installed, as well as shutters, doors, and gates. The new life that had been given to the center was incredible. The director then handed our group receipts for every expense and documentation for where every dollar had gone from the funding we provided.

While in Uganda, we worked with both an American company called Inveneo and a Ugandan company called Linux Solutions to install a solar-powered computer station system we had designed at Duke during the previous semester. Our team learned a lot about solar power technology, planned out our design loads, the system capacity and then selected the company and products that best fit our needs. We also equipped RASD with a printer and a digital library of appropriate technology books (over 2,000 books). In the end, the solar power worked exceptionally well. We had near the designed maximum efficiency of the system, which was quite impressive considering the last minute changes that needed to be made and the trouble shooting we had to do.
The solar power company had arrived with a panel holder designed for a flat roof. Since the RASD roof was sloped, we had to quickly calculate the changes needed to get a final slope of 4 degrees. While this would be a simple task with a calculator and a measuring tape, having neither that day made it more of a challenge; using some trigonometry and a size 13 shoe, we determined the necessary additions of metal we needed to weld to the legs. Since the power was out in town, we had to travel to a nearby town in order to find a welding station to do the job.

Then, once the panels were up, at first they didn't work. We had to search through town for a multimeter, eventually findings one at a shop called “The Fantastic Beauty Salon” – you can’t judge a book by its cover, or a shop by its name in Uganda.

A Nut-Sheller on the Side

Building on our combined interests at Duke the previous year, we networked with others to compete and ultimately take first place in the social track division of both Duke and UNC’s startup challenges for a concrete nut sheller device. While in Uganda, I was then able to see the production facility that our winning funds built and connect RASD to this operation.

Now, farmers that RASD works with can use this very simple technology to increase their profits by up to five times. We also built connections with a national coffee research center in the district, a coffee exporter in Kampala, and an agricultural engineering and appropriate technology research center north of Kampala. In the coming years, Pratt engineering students will be able to intern at the engineering research center and then use their skills to design and implement appropriate technology at the RASD Resource Center to make a substantial impact in the community.

While I came to Pratt interested in biomedical engineering and medicine, I found that my interests lie more with using engineering to improve quality of life. While doctors serve the community on the specialized, patient to patient level, I find myself drawn more towards holistic community-level solutions. For instance, instead of treating individual cases of water borne disease, I am drawn more towards installing a community borehole which would provide clean water. Instead of treating cases of malnutrition resulting from extreme poverty, I am more interested in developing appropriate technology so farmers can add value to their crops and achieve increased economic stability.

I have come to believe that sustainable development is one of the most important causes of our time. Developing solutions that enable us to meet present needs without compromising our future is required around the world. With an increasing world population and a decreasing set of resources, the demand for increasing efficiencies and new technologies using renewable resources is paramount. It will take an informed group of dedicated policy makers, scientists, and engineers to solve these problems. I want to be on the leading edge, engineering solutions for society’s needs and addressing global problems in a sustainable way.