{"id":383639,"date":"2010-03-03T10:30:39","date_gmt":"2010-03-03T15:30:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.epa.gov\/blog\/?p=1350"},"modified":"2010-03-03T10:30:39","modified_gmt":"2010-03-03T15:30:39","slug":"science-wednesday-the-role-for-science-in-international-development","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/383639","title":{"rendered":"Science Wednesday: The Role for Science in International Development"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Each week we write about the science behind environmental protection. Previous Science Wednesdays.<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

What\u2019s that, you say? International development is best left to experts in policy and economics? Well, think again because I believe that engineers and scientists have an important role to play.<\/p>\n

While it\u2019s easy for most of us to take our roads, electricity, schools, police forces, and food supplies for granted, there are still billions of people around the globe for whom these are not yet a reality.<\/p>\n

Think about how much people\u2019s lives\u2014their health, education, safety, and well-being\u2014would improve if they had the same level of infrastructure many of us probably take for granted. Transportation is faster and safer with paved roads; electricity improves education and healthcare, which, in turn, improves quality of life and people\u2019s productivity, feeding tax revenues to the government to use in further improving infrastructure.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s positive feedback, spiraling upwards if we could only get it started!<\/p>\n

This is what motivates me and the rest of my team. Over the past six years, we have been working to improve energy infrastructure in developing countries by building a better option for distributed energy generation: one that is renewable (uses solar energy), affordable, and can be made entirely with local materials, skills\u2014and people.<\/p>\n

\"imageThe technology, which we call a Solar ORC, uses a solar thermal co-generation technique to simultaneously provide electricity and hot water in volumes required by typical rural institutions such as schools and clinics, allowing them to improve services, stretch their budgets, and avoid environmental degradation due to burning of fossil fuels. At the same time, local fabrication and dissemination of the technology provides good jobs and spurs the local economy.<\/p>\n

In conjunction with our partners in southern Africa, we have already installed and tested several prototype systems, optimized for construction in Lesotho. Our most recent achievement is the initiation of our first full-scale system installation at a rural health clinic in Lesotho in 2009.<\/p>\n

This type of work is challenging but also immensely rewarding. With each installation I am directly involved in improving the quality of infrastructure\u2014and quality of life\u2014for local people.<\/p>\n

So to all of the young scientists and engineers out there wondering how you can make an impact on the world\u2014think outside of the box and consider whether international development might have some challenges in store for you.<\/p>\n

About the Author: Amy Mueller is a Ph.D. candidate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a co-founder of STG International<\/a>, a non-profit organization combining science and engineering with international development. STG\u2019s work developing a novel solar energy technology is supported in part by an EPA People, Prosperity and the Planet (P3) Award<\/a> research grant.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Each week we write about the science behind environmental protection. Previous Science Wednesdays. What\u2019s that, you say? International development is best left to experts in policy and economics? Well, think again because I believe that engineers and scientists have an important role to play. While it\u2019s easy for most of us to take our roads, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6469,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-383639","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/383639","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6469"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=383639"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/383639\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=383639"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=383639"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=383639"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}