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Center for Creative Leadership to study innovative learning method of SMU Lyle School

Interdisciplinary approach teaches soft skills like cooperation and communication across disciplines and genders

The Innovation Gym in SMU’s Lyle School of Engineering was buzzing and clanking on a recent morning as students tested robots they built for a specific task — collecting and remediating water samples. Lyle faculty and students have been doing the water work by hand in refugee camps in Africa and Bangladesh.

The strong work dynamic that emerged among members of the first-year design class and their embrace of the inter-disciplinary team approach used to teach it has drawn the attention of the Center For Creative Leadership, which will send a team of researchers to SMU Lyle in fall 2013 to study the student techniques.

What the team gleans from observing the SMU course could foster new tools and processes that can benefit organizations and educational institutions around the country.

“I had a chance to visit the Lyle School in February and see first-hand the innovative structure of the first-year design course,” said Kristin Cullen, faculty researcher with CCL’s Research, Innovation and Product Development Group. “Using student teams – really cross-functional teams – and having them work on a very intense project really does mirror the type of environment students will be in when they leave college and enter the workplace.”

“They are using what we would call agile work processes.” Cullen said. “We’re very interested in working with the Lyle School to learn about the relationships and the networks these students develop over the course of their project to learn what makes them successful as a team and as individuals in the course. The plan moving forward is to share what we find with other universities.”

Cullen expects that her team will provide feedback to the students and teachers throughout the fall, but says they will also return at the end of the semester to show the SMU Lyle students what they have learned from observing them.

“This kind of experience is as much about teaching soft skills like cooperation and communication across disciplines and genders as it is about engineering,” said Andrew Quicksall, the Lyle School’s J. Lindsay Embrey Assistant Professor. The robotics assignment that the first-year design students have been working on this academic year is based on the remediation work Quicksall and Lyle graduate students have been doing in refugee camps where ongoing water quality issues are posing health problems.

The Lyle School’s Hart Center for Engineering Leadership began a partnership in 2011 with CCL, a global nonprofit education and research organization, to bring leadership development to all Lyle students. One of CCL’s goals in the partnership is to prepare students to work in volatile and fast-changing work environments, said Preston Yarborough, CCL project manager at the Lyle School. “Success in today’s workplace requires an astute understanding of the informal networks that really drive how organizations work,” Yarborough said.

Teaching the first-year design course is a team experience, too – tapping the skills of Quicksall, an environmental engineer; Mark Fontenot, a Lyle computer science lecturer; Kate Canales, director of design and innovation programs at Lyle; Adam Cohen, visiting assistant clinical professor in mechanical engineering, Joseph Cleveland, visiting lecturer in electrical engineering, and CCL’s Yarborough.

The Introduction to Engineering Design class is the first of its kind at SMU – a “Ways of Knowing” course designed to cut across disciplines to explore how natural scientists, social scientists, humanists, artists, engineers and professionals in business and education go about addressing important issues. Under the new University Curriculum, all undergraduates who enter SMU in the 2012-1013 academic year and thereafter will be required to complete one “Ways of Knowing” class taught collaboratively by faculty members from different disciplines and organized around a major topic or question.

As highlighted in CCL’s 2011 Annual Report, understanding team networks is a “big idea” that the organization sees impacting leadership in the 21st century. The CCL team’s research at SMU’s Lyle School is being funded by an Alfred J. Marrow New Directions in Leadership Series grant supported by Naomi and Paul Marrow. — Kimberly Cobb

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SMU is a nationally ranked private university in Dallas founded 100 years ago. Today, SMU enrolls nearly 11,000 students who benefit from the academic opportunities and international reach of seven degree-granting schools. For more information see www.smu.edu.

SMU has an uplink facility located on campus for live TV, radio, or online interviews. To speak with an SMU expert or book an SMU guest in the studio, call SMU News & Communications at 214-768-7650.

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SMU faculty, students to help UNHCR clean up refugee camp water

The search for solutions to dangerous water quality issues in refugee camps is driving an SMU lab group’s partnership with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. SMU faculty and students will work in the lab and on the ground in Kenya, Uganda, Liberia and Bangladesh.

The group will integrate information from other sources to develop a database that will help UNHCR planners provide safer drinking water in existing and future refugee camps.

Supported by a $270,000 grant from UNHCR and additional SMU funds, faculty member Andrew Quicksall and his graduate students in SMU’s Lyle School of Engineering are collecting water samples in UNHCR camps, bringing samples back to SMU for analysis and also training workers in and around the refugee camps to test water supplies.

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“They’ve asked us to build out a whole picture, truly worldwide, for what’s in the drinking water in refugee camps,” said Quicksall, the J. Lindsay Embrey Trustee Assistant Professor in the Lyle School of Engineering. “So we’re going to go on-site, collect water, analyze some in the field and bring quite a bit of water back to our SMU laboratories and get a full picture.”

Database to identify contaminants in camps with half a million people
The database developed by Quicksall’s group will identify contaminants in drinking water and allow UNHCR officials to track water quality in the camps over time. Some water quality problems are indigenous to the regions where the camps are situated, some develop over time, and some are the nearly instant consequence of thousands of people collecting in unsuitable locations to escape war and famine faster than sanitary infrastructure can be built.

For example, the agreement with UNHCR commits Quicksall’s team to investigate critical water issues in Dadaab, Kenya ̵ home to the largest refugee complex in the world. Nearly half a million people are concentrated in three camps there, many living in makeshift shelters of twigs, reeds and scraps. Refugees pouring across the border to escape war and famine in Somalia continue to face shortages of food, water, shelter and sanitation hazards there.

“The technical challenges of supporting refugee populations of this size will require that our teams stay engaged with the UNHCR for years to come,” said Geoffrey Orsak, dean of the SMU Lyle School of Engineering. “Fortunately, our new Hunt Institute for Engineering and Humanity makes it possible to lead efforts of this magnitude nearly anywhere on the globe.”

Research to investigate solutions to safe but unpalatable drinking water
Some camps have safe drinking water available, but the taste is so off-putting that residents seek out other sources. In Nakivale, Uganda, for example, the high iron content in well water drives refugees to drink surface water that is frequently contaminated with coliform bacteria. Quicksall’s group also will investigate methods of improving the taste of such safe, but unpalatable, drinking water.

Preliminary research results have revealed problematic concentrations of iodide in drinking water at Dadaab and fluoride in both Southern Uganda and Kakukma, Kenya. Some types of contaminants may not create problems short-term, Quicksall explains, but create severe health issues for people over the long term — particularly children and the elderly. His study group will have the opportunity to both recommend and implement remediation methods for those problem water sources, he said.

“To work with the science in the lab and see it applied internationally — I don’t think there is an opportunity like this anywhere else,” said graduate student Drew Aleto, a member of Quicksall’s study team.

UNHCR and the Hunt Institute for Engineering and Humanity at SMU have signed an agreement establishing a framework for increasing the role of engineering and innovation in support of refugee camp operations. This agreement calls for the engagement of universities, government-run research institutes and corporations to address technical and infrastructure issues faced by UNHCR in helping refugees in relation to water, sanitation, shelter, communications and health care. — Kimberly Cobb

SMU is a nationally ranked private university in Dallas founded 100 years ago. Today, SMU enrolls nearly 11,000 students who benefit from the academic opportunities and international reach of seven degree-granting schools. For more information see www.smu.edu.

SMU has an uplink facility located on campus for live TV, radio, or online interviews. To speak with an SMU expert or book an SMU guest in the studio, call SMU News & Communications at 214-768-7650.