Friends at the Epicenters

Patrick Henry Winston ’65, SM ’67, PhD ’70

Damage in Haiti.

I experienced an earthquake once, high up in a Tokyo hotel. It scared me—really, really scared me—but the next morning, when I expected everyone to be talking about the earthquake, I heard not a word. Frightening as it was to me, the magnitude was too small be a topic worth raising.

So I should have thought more about the horror of Tuesday, 12 January 2010, when a real earthquake, magnitude 7.0, hit near Port-Au-Prince, Haiti. Then, less than two months later, 27 February 2010, a magnitude 8.8 earthquake hit near Concepcion, Chile,

It becomes terrifyingly real when you realize you have colleagues and students from those places, and you learn you can’t be from there without having lost somebody.

My good friend and colleague, Michel DeGraff is from Haiti. My good friend and student, Daniel Rosenberg, is from Chile. So I sent a little money to MIT sites set up for Haitian and Chilean donations. I sent small amounts, but I know about superposition, and I know a lot of small amounts can make a big pile.

Michel has just returned from Haiti. He has several suggestions for donations. Daniel suggests you give via a site set up by MIT and Harvard students that takes you to site set up by MIT for helping Chile.

Or ask one of your friends where they think your donation can do the most good.

 

Kendra Johnson ’09 Revisits Public Service Project

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Kendra Johnson with residents of Santa Ana.

Guest blogger: Kendra Johnson ’09

As a Public Service Fellow, Kendra Johnson ’09 undertook a big project—establishing family-size rainwater collection systems in indigenous communities in the rain forest of Ecuador. Today she’s a medical student in San Francisco but she recently revisited the area to check on progress at the original village and nearby sites where MIT students and local residents are installing the system.

Here’s an excerpt from Johnson’s blog about her recent trip back to Ecuador:

“The community water system is still working. It is not textbook perfect, but they know about the problems and how to solve them, and that means my role is to step back and let Santa Ana handle these challenges for themselves….

“We also repeated a house to house health survey and found that the reported number of times a child had diarrhea in a year dropped from an average of 6.9 to 1.9 times per year from before our intervention, which is quite promising….”

“The most exciting part of all is that the new mayor has made water her top priority for the next 5 years. Two communities have asked for Santa Ana’s help to apply to her for funding for the tanks, and they have both gotten tanks and are working with Santa Ana’s water technical team to do the installations. How amazing is that?”

Johnson’s blog, such stuff as dreams are made of, documents the water project,  Sachu Yaku; her semester in Cuba; and her new life in medical school. Or you can read only the Sachu Yaku posts that describe the early stages of the project.

Interested? The Public Service Center is looking for MIT students to continue the project this summer.

 

Dean Focuses on Public Service Center

Chris Colombo, Dean of Student Life

Next time you are using Google, try this search: enter “public service center” into the search box. When I did last week, MIT’s Public Service Center (PSC) was first out of 315,000,000 results.

Impressive results, I’d say, in a world full of service organizations. On the other hand, the PSC get results all over the world, so I can’t say I’m surprised.

Scot Frank ’09, from left, Catlin Powers, and Amy Qian ’11 developed a solar project pictured here in western China.

If you’re not familiar with the PSC, visit the website. Every year, 3,000 students come to the center to participate in service projects within the United States and all over the world—58 countries over the past five years. That’s a remarkable percentage of our students dedicating their time, energy, and skill to help others.

I had the opportunity in November to hear a presentation by Scot Frank ’09 and Amy Qian ’11, whose PSC project in the Himalayas inspired them to create a start-up nonprofit company, One Earth Designs. One of their first products is the SolSource 3-in-1, a solar-powered device for cooking, heating, and generating electricity.

The SolSource 3-in-1 is a solution that was conceived with the active participation of the local population, so it’s sustainable. And it became a reality with the best MIT has to offer: innovation, inspiration, vision, and entrepreneurship, all in service to a people in need. One Earth Designs now also has projects dedicated to water quality testing, textiles as a source of heat, and science books in local languages.

Not every PSC project evolves with this kind of breadth. A surprising number do, though. I’m not one to get caught up in rankings, but I can’t deny that I’ll enjoy their spot at number one on Google while it lasts.

 

Glamour Magazine Honors Class of 2010 Wheel Chair Pioneer

Tish Scolnik '10 working in Tanzania.

Glamour Magazine named Tish Scolnik as one of their Top 10 College Women (video), recognizing her work on mobility issues for the disabled, in the October issue. As a Public Service Center Fellow, Tish has traveled to Africa three times working with wheelchair workshops. Tish designed a three-wheel folding “small-business wheelchair” and five have since been built. Tish is also a member of the Leveraged Freedom Chair team, which designed a long-distance, lever-powered wheelchair that can traverse rugged terrain. Tish is also working with one of her community partners in Tanzania to build a new wheelchair workshop and skills training center.

Tish has helped four disabled entrepreneurs to start small businesses in Tanzania. These pilot entrepreneurs, emplower with their new wheelchairs, began by selling batik and bead jewelry, fixing small electrical goods, and repairing shoes. The shoe repair man has used some of his business profits to help two other disabled entrepreneurs to set-up shoe-shining businesses close to his stall.

 

Policy Wonks: Contribute to the Faculty Newsletter

The MIT Faculty Newsletter is stretching its editorial wings, directing its content toward the Obama administration as well as the campus community. The Special Edition: Science and Technology for the Twenty-First Century, published this summer, was addressed to President Obama and distributed to members of Congress. Now the editorial team hopes for comments and future articles from faculty and alumni.

Energy demand is a national issue.

The special issue praises administration moves such as the appointment of scientists to the cabinet, channeling stimulus funding to research and development, and eliminating barriers to stem cell research. Here are a few of the faculty topics:

• A new slant on taxing fossil fuels that redistributes monies to energy-conscious users.

• Redesigning buildings, which consume 40 percent of the primary energy.

• 21st century uses of mobile phones as catalysts for global economic growth.

• Defining whether the economic crisis was caused by a few rotten apples or a rotten barrel.

In the next issue, you can expect to find articles on biomedical research, chemistry and chemical engineering, science education, and social aspects of globalization. And maybe your article. Alumni comments and articles about these and other topics are welcome. Email the managing editor at fnl@mit.edu.

 

Literacy Bridge: Cast Your Vote for Talking Books

Talking books used in Ghana's schools.

Good intentions rarely change the world, but today with a click of the mouse you can take action. The creator of Gmail and Adsense at Google is pledging to give money to deserving nonprofits based on online voting by supporters. At top contender is Literacy Bridge, an all-volunteer nonprofit started by MIT alumni, which is using hand-held audio computers to boost literacy and improve life in rural Ghana.

Executive Director Cliff Schmidt ’92 started Literary Bridge’s Talking Books project after spending six weeks in rural Ghana in 2007. Supported by individual donations and thousands of volunteer hours, the group completed R&D, produced 100 Talking Book devices, and began feasibility studies in January 2009. Just six months later, you can now check the Literacy Bridge blog to see and hear how the devices have been used to improve farming methods and health care—and school kids love it.

Talking Books.

A recent article in JumpIntoTomorrow.com describes the device as “a low-cost (<$10 US) audio compute designed to help spread information within impoverished rural communities, while helping illiterate people learn to read.”

You can vote on the Literacy Bridge site, learn about Schmidt and other alumni volunteers,  and investigate this interactive philanthropic event.

 

Gen. Petraeus Commissions His Son and 11 Other ’09 Graduates

General Petraeus congratulates his son, Stephen '09, at the ROTC commissioning ceremony, as President Susan Hockfield applauds. Photo: Darren McCollester.

At MIT’s ROTC commissioning June 5, General David Petraeus was beaming like a proud father. And he was. As he presided over the commissioning of 12 members of the Class of 2009, he included in that oath his son, Stephen. The new graduate, a political science major, appears to be following his dad’s footsteps not only into the army, but into a larger understanding of world issues. The senior Petraeus holds a PhD in international relations from Princeton.

This commissioning event also kicked off a new affinity group, the MIT Military Alumni/ae Association. The MITMAA aims to engage alumni with military experience or interests. Is that you? Learn more about the MITMAA online.

 

EECS Grad Leads Muslim Community

Bilal Kareem

A grassroots organization opened New England’s largest mosque last fall led by Bilal Kaleem ’03, MNG ’03, executive director of the Muslim American Society (MAS) of Boston. In a Boston Globe Magazine article, Kaleem talks about the legal dustup that accompanied the project, but he’s focused mostly on the group’s goal—to help the 60,000+ local Muslim community play a positive local role in their own spiritual growth and the community’s social change.

Kaleem, who has worked in MAS youth programs and as a mentor and teacher at a local Somalia center for immigrants, brings his own international past to this endeavor. Although his parents came from India, he grew up in Zambia, Nigeria, and New York, according to media reports. After he earned his MIT degrees in computer science and electrical engineering, he worked for Oracle and Goldman Sachs briefly before becoming involved with MAS. He is also pursuing graduate study in sociology and religion at Boston University, with a focus on the American Muslim community and their role as positive citizens in society.

“Boston is a cradle of a lot of religions….The first church of almost every sect is here,” says Kaleem. “So it’s significant that Muslims have such a beautiful mosque, the first in this historic city, that’s built in a grand scale, with full Islamic architecture in mind.”

 

A Beautiful Cause–Support for People with Mental Illness

Help for people with mental health problems is a painfully intimate issue for Alicia Nash ’55 and her husband, Nobel laureate John F. Nash. He was an MIT professor when she married him in 1957. The following year, when she was pregnant with their son, John, he began suffering from schizophrenia. The family’s struggle with his decades-long bout with mental illness was the basis for the Oscar-winning film, A Beautiful Mind.

Today, they live near Princeton University where he earned his PhD and served on the faculty. He shared the 1994 Nobel Prize for his work in game theory, which he described to an MIT audience in 2001. She has worked as a programmer and systems analyst for the New Jersey Transit System. Their son, who earned a doctorate in mathematics, is now facing his own struggle with mental illness.

The Nashes are soon to meet with the New Jersey governor and legislative leaders to advocate support of mental health programs, which are in danger of severe state budget cuts, according to the Times of Trenton.

“In the mental health field, John and Alicia are very much heroes because they were really one of the first public figures who would lend their stature and put their name to the cause of breaking down stereotypes and humanizing people with mental illness,” said Debra Wentz, a mental health lobbyist.

 

MIT Alumni—Can You Help?

IAP Close to Home Panel: National Service Opportunities for Summer and Post-Graduation

For many students, the days following graduation are marked with sleepiness, sweet pride over their hard-earned degrees, and little lumps in their throats that signal the start of job hunting season. What’s a student to do? The Public Service Center has answers.

At an IAP event yesterday, the PSC convened a panel of folks from nearby teaching programs who offer recent (and some not-so-recent) grads paid opportunities to teach and tutor area students after graduation. Four different organizations were represented: Breakthrough Cambridge, Match Corps*, Teach for America*, and the Massachusetts Promise Fellowship*. Each occupies its own niche in the service-teaching landscape, but there were a few surprising commonalities that they shared.

*These programs are open to recent grads and alumni

5 skills you’ll hone in an immersive teaching/tutoring job:

1. Leadership Management: The Teach for America representative stressed this skill over and over again, saying that when you walk into a room of rowdy high school kids, you have to learn quickly how to get control of the classroom—and keep it.

2. Communication: “If you think it’s easy to waltz into a room and start chatting with a 16-year-old Dominican girl from Dorchester, that’s fine,” said the Match Corps representative. “But most people have to learn a lot about communication on the job. It’s essential.”

3. Motivation: One of my best friends completed the Match Corps program, which involved tutoring a handful of students throughout the academic year, sleeping on the fifth floor of the school that he worked in, and constantly racking his brain over how to keep his kids motivated and engaged with their school work. I remember him saying that with one student, he would tutor “in character,” using a different voice and persona to keep things interesting. He took his kids out to dinner, coached them day and night, and learned a ton about how to keep his students–and himself–motivated.