Muhlenberg

In June, three students, including Ji-In Friess of Allentown, looked closely at the issue of water scarcity in refugee camps and came up with an idea: a rain collection system with interlocking water tanks, for better stability.

Each pair of tanks is tall and narrow, to fit between huts, and each individual tank can hold 415 gallons, enough to last a family of five about 90 days.

The students’ final task was to come up with a list of everything they would need to do in order to bring this innovation from sketch to prototype.

The idea for students Ji-In Friess, ’20, Grace Imanariyo, ’20 and Jeff Pennington, ’21 began to sprout in The Seed Box, the four-week pilot program conceived by Rita Chesterton, director of innovation and entrepreneurship, and Rich Niesenbaum, professor of biology and director of sustainability studies.

The program was funded by a $9,000 pilot grant from VentureWell, which supports entrepreneurship education with an emphasis on social value.

Chesterton and Niesenbaum wanted to bring together students from their two academic programs, which frequently overlap in terms of curriculum, in pursuit of one of VentureWell’s E-Team Grants.

These go to student entrepreneurship teams collaborating with faculty to bring an innovation to market.

The goal of The Seed Box, Chesterton says, was to form a team that could create a sustainability-focused innovation concept to potentially use for an E-Team Grant application.

“What the application requires is the solution itself be feasible: You have to be able to say ‘this is something we could do’ or ‘the science behind it is proven,’” Chesterton said.

“You don’t have to have the business model part completely figured out.”

The students had only four weeks to come up with a specific innovation they could all get behind.

In the first week, each student presented a sustainability-related topic they were passionate about as a potential starting point.

Imanariyo, an international student from Rwanda, brought up a refugee camp she’d seen in her home country as well as one she had researched in Kenya, where residents also struggled with both flooding and water scarcity.

The group rallied around that issue and began researching specific sites and reaching out to experts who might know more about on-the-ground conditions.

They employed techniques such as design and systems thinking, and within a couple weeks, the students had come up with the rain collection system.

The next step would be to actually apply for the E-Team grant, which the students will do only if they are interested in pursuing the project come fall.

Imanariyo and Friess, rising seniors who will both need to complete a capstone project to graduate with innovation and entrepreneurship minors as planned, could use this concept for that purpose.

And, as Imanariyo points out, if they follow through and bring this product to market, it could be used anywhere water is scarce.

“It can start as one idea to solve one problem in a specific community, but you never know where that might go,” she said. “It might end up helping more people than you anticipated.”

RIT

Local residents graduate

Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester, N.Y., conferred some 4,200 degrees this academic year at all its campuses - including in Croatia, Dubai, Kosovo and China.

The university held its 134th annual commencement celebration in May.

The following local residents received degrees:

Fogelsville: Timothy Turner, Bachelor of Science in mechanical engineering;

Orefield: James Clee, Bachelor of Science in computing security; Orianna Henry, Bachelor of Science in chemical engineering; and

Schnecksville: Elaine Donmoyer, Bachelor of Fine Arts in film and animation.