Tristan Knotts ’20

Photo of Tristan KnottsClass of 2020
Project Manager
Majors: Computer Science, Mathematics
Lyle Scholar
SEAS Award
Lyle Senator
Lyle Ambassador

Tristan Knotts graduated from Southern Methodist University, majoring in Computer Science and Mathematics. He was a Lyle Scholar, SEAS Award recipient, and a member of the Lyle Ambassadors program, the face of the Lyle School of Engineering and Lyle’s primary recruiting organization. Tristan has held many key roles within the organizations he is involved, including Lyle Senator within SMU’s 104th Student Senate, the captain of his intramural football team, and Treasurer of the Cyber Security Club.

In  summer of 2018, Tristan, worked at AT&T, a global leader in technology, media, and communications, as a software developer and project lead, designing and developing a software application. At AT&T, he gained valuable insight into the technology and communications industry, as well as experience in an innovative corporate environment. He was given a key role within a new project that allowed him to complete most of the project development lifecycle and saving AT&T operation costs of hundreds of thousands of dollars over the next few years.

In the summer of 2017, Tristan, worked at the defense contractor Raytheon, as a cybersecurity intern, designing application frameworks, and conducting software testing. Tristan also worked at SMU’s Caruth Institute for Engineering Education for two weeks, teaching high school students the fundamentals of engineering, and drone piloting.

At the Hunt Institute, Tristan worked as a project manager, where he oversaw student-driven projects through the project lifecycle. He was drawn to the institute by its inspiring mission to help others and provide solutions to real-world humanitarian and environmental issues. He enjoys the opportunity to make an impact on the global community, and hopefully inspire others to make a difference.

“Upon first walking into the Hunt Institute I could see the passion, integrity, and innovation the team expressed daily. The projects taken on by the Hunt Institute are highly innovative and all have the potential for positive impact, making it rewarding to participate. The institute’s encouraging and supportive environment inspires me to work to help others and give back whenever I can. I look forward to working with the institute throughout my college career to make a difference in the community.”

After graduating from SMU, Tristan has been working as a Business Analyst at Deloitte Consulting.

To read more about the Hunt Institute’s work to develop future-focused solutions to some of the world’s biggest problems, please click here. For the latest news on the Hunt Institute, follow our social media accounts on LinkedInFacebookand Instagram. We invite you to listen to our Podcast called Sages & Seekers. If you are considering engaging with the institute, you can donate, or sign-up for our newsletter by emailing huntinstitute@smu.edu.

Andrea Dac Chau Nguyen ’20

Photo of Andrea Dac Chau NguyenClass of 2020
Research Analyst, Blockchain
Majors: Markets and Culture, Anthropology
Minors: History, Human Rights
Dedman College Scholar
Dean’s Scholar
Honor Roll
President of Career Development Ambassadors
Andrea graduated from Southern Methodist University with B.A. degrees in Markets and Culture and Anthropology and Minors in History and Human Rights. She was also an SMU Dedman College Scholar and President of the Career Development Ambassadors.
She lives in Allen, Texas and is passionate about how blockchain technologies are applied in social impact spaces. Andrea conducted research for the Hunt Institute on the history of blockchain technology and its cross-industry usage, with the goal of contributing vital information to Dallas nonprofits and start-ups interested in beginning their own blockchain applications.
While at SMU, she worked in various locations on- and off-campus, with experience working as an intern at the International Rescue Committee, with the SMU student newspaper, tutoring on-campus, and engaging in interdisciplinary research in sociology and political science. After graduating from SMU, she is currently pursuing a Master of Science in Transportation Technology and Policy at the University of California, Davis.

To read more about the Hunt Institute’s work to develop future-focused solutions to some of the world’s biggest problems, please click here. For the latest news on the Hunt Institute, follow our social media accounts on LinkedInFacebookand Instagram. We invite you to listen to our Podcast called Sages & Seekers. If you are considering engaging with the institute, you can donate, or sign-up for our newsletter by emailing huntinstitute@smu.edu.

Dinesh Rajan, Hunt Institute Senior Fellow

Dinesh Rajan, PhD., Hunt Institute Fellow

Dinesh Rajan, Ph.D., Hunt Institute Senior Fellow is the Department Chair for Electrical and Computer Engineering and a Professor. His areas of research focus are in wireless networking, computational imaging and signal processing, and system optimization.

Dinesh Rajan received his B.Tech degree from Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Madras in Electrical Engineering. He was also awarded the M.S and Ph.D degrees from Rice University, Houston, Texas both in the areas of Electrical and Computer Engineering. He is currently Department Chair and Cecil and Ida Green Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering at Southern Methodist University (SMU), Dallas, Texas.

Dr. Rajan’s broad interests are in the sensing/extraction, transmission, and dissemination of information. His current research is interdisciplinary and spans the traditional areas of communications theory, wireless networks, information theory, system optimization, and computational imaging. His work has lead to the design of algorithms that can improve energy efficiency of next-generation mobile devices by an order-of-magnitude compared to existing methods.

Dinesh has published over 100 peer-reviewed technical articles in leading journals and conferences. He has also co-edited 2 books. His work has been supported by federal agencies such as NSF, ONR, ARL, DARPA, and companies including Toyota and Nokia. He was technical program chair for the IEEE vehicular technology conference in 2009 and served on several other conference executive and technical committees.

Dinesh is the recipient of a National Science Foundation CAREER award in 2006 for his work on applying information theory to the design of mobile wireless networks. He has also received the Ford Research Fellowship in 2012 and the Golden Mustang Award in 2008 from SMU. IEEE Dallas named him outstanding young engineer in 2009. He has received multiple outstanding EE faculty teaching awards at SMU.

When asked what his motivation is for doing impact work he replied, “The simple joy in knowing that my actions have impacted another individual in a positive way is what motivates me to do what I do.”

To read more about the Hunt Institute’s work to develop future-focused solutions to some of the world’s biggest problems, please click here. For the latest news on the Hunt Institute, follow our social media accounts on LinkedInFacebookand Instagram. We invite you to listen to our Podcast called Sages & Seekers. If you are considering engaging with the institute, you can donate, or sign-up for our newsletter by emailing huntinstitute@smu.edu.

Jessica Burnham, Hunt Institute Fellow

It is with pleasure we announce Jessica Burnham as a Hunt Institute Fellow. The Hunt Institute Fellows are appointed for their expertise and demonstrated excellence in their fields. During their tenure, they will collaborate on projects and contribute to the endeavors of the Institute.

Jessica Burnham has a BFA in Communication Design from the Metropolitan State University of Denver and a MFA in Design Research and Innovation from the University of North Texas. She got her start in community engagement and community-based design through her thesis project that looked at how community can be built through communication. She wanted to research transitioning from Communication Design to Designed Communication and wanted to investigate areas of the city that have gone through physical renovations but needed to also go through relational renovations. Her efforts led to creating a business association on Lowest Greenville Avenue called the Lowest Greenville Collective which led to her role as the Executive Director of the Deep Ellum Foundation for three years.

During her time in Deep Ellum she was integral with rebranding the Deep Ellum Foundation, the Deep Ellum neighborhood-wide website, and initiating extensive policies and procedures. The largest effort she helped create was the Deep Ellum Public Safety (DEPS) program that recognized the need for more public safety elements in the area and worked with property owners and business owners to raise funds on a monthly basis to hire off-duty officers and private security to patrol the neighborhood on foot during peak entertainment hours. This program has tripled the original Public Safety budget and has gotten extensive recognition and attention from the Dallas Police Department, the City of Dallas, and other Public Improvement Districts throughout the city.

Jessica also played a major role in creating a living prototype and proof of concept to shut down one of the small cross streets in Deep Ellum, Crowdus Street, to be a pedestrian only street. She headed up a design team that included members from SMU-MADI, Gensler, StudioOutside, Event Nerd, and Stash Design to build out three blocks of the street as a pedestrian plaza and then programed 52 events in 30 days. The goal of the project was to show the possibilities of what could happen in space that was exclusively for people. Her team put together a list of events and programs that could happen in a year and tested them throughout a thirty-day period. At the end of the month-long test several staff members from the City of Dallas were invited to see the space and asked about transforming the street permanently. The project proved to be successful and is slated to be a part of the 2017 Bond Program as a part of the Commerce Street Redo and should be complete by 2022.

Currently, Jessica is the Program Director and Clinical Assistant Professor of the Master of Arts in Design and Innovation (MADI) program at SMU. This program trains students to use Human-Centered Design to help solve and improve unwieldy social problems. Jessica lives in Richardson, Texas and loves finding new restaurants, going on long road trips, and exploring any art history museum she can find with her husband and two young boys.

To read more about the Hunt Institute’s work to develop future-focused solutions to some of the world’s biggest problems, please click here. For the latest news on the Hunt Institute, follow our social media accounts on LinkedIn, FacebookTwitter, and Instagram. We invite you to listen to our Podcast called Sages & Seekers. If you are considering engaging with the institute, you can donate, or sign-up for our newsletter by emailing huntinstitute@smu.edu.

Jolanta Stankeviciene, Hunt Institute Fellow

Jolanta Stankeviciene

It is with pleasure we announce Jolanta Stankeviciene as a Hunt Institute Fellow. Jolanta has long standing experience developing and managing impact investments in emerging markets to ensure sustainable business operations, as well as innovating financial instruments for SMEs in energy efficiency. At the International Finance Corporation (IFC) and other international corporate and European governmental institutions, Jolanta is a champion in promoting and facilitating innovative private/public partnerships and initiatives in a multinational business environment.

Jolanta originally entered the field of finance and investment in Lithuania, through a senior position with the SME lender/investor Baltic American Enterprise Fund. This led to a position with IFC, where Jolanta developed the Commercializing Energy Efficiency Finance (CEEF) Program as Lithuanian Country Manager and later as Baltic States Regional Program Manager, also delivering IFC climate solutions. When subsequently based in IFC’s Moscow office, Jolanta provided advisory support in Ukraine and to the Russia Residential Energy Efficiency Project.

Currently based in Brussels, Belgium, Jolanta has valuable know-how of European government policy and EU decision-making processes through her work with the European Commission’s Regional Development Directorate and the Secretariat of the Audit Progress Committee, chaired by European Commission First Vice-President Frans Timmermans.

Jolanta has a master’s degree in history and a joint MBA/EMBA from Baltic Management Institute.

To read more about the Hunt Institute’s work to develop future-focused solutions to some of the world’s biggest problems, please click here. For the latest news on the Hunt Institute, follow our social media accounts on LinkedIn, FacebookTwitter, and Instagram. We invite you to listen to our Podcast called Sages & Seekers. If you are considering engaging with the institute, you can donate, or sign-up for our newsletter by emailing huntinstitute@smu.edu.

Jeff Snell, Ph.D., Hunt Institute Fellow

 

Hunt Institute Fellow wearing a jacket handmade by textile artist in Uzbekistan, Dr. SnelI, International Folk Art Alliance
Dr. Snell’s jacket was a gift from a textile artist in Uzbekistan

Jeff Snell, Ph.D is a Hunt Institute Fellow. He brings his expertise to the Institute work in the area of Social Entrepreneurship and Enterprise. He serves as Special Advisor to the Dean & Vice Provost for Lifelong Learning at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His focus areas include teaching social entrepreneurship, applying a social innovation lens to reaching nontraditional learners, and mentoring social entrepreneurs in the UW-Madison Discovery to Product program. His mentored start-ups have garnered best new business awards by local chambers of commerce, receipt of the Morgridge Force for Positive Change award in Wisconsin, and individual national recognitions, including honors from the Manhattan Institute, selection as a Fellow for Ashoka, and receipt of a MacArthur “Genius” Award. Several models are highlighted in his TEDx talks.

Dr. Snell defines social innovation as “a field dedicated to solving social problems—a welcome departure from managing them.” Aligning social innovation models with the values of the surrounding community is a key characteristic of successful SI.

Jeff says, “I believe that social innovation work is, ultimately, about increasing human capability and honoring human dignity. There’s joy to be discovered for everyone engaged in the doing.”

Prior to UW-Madison, Jeff served as Chief Executive Officer at the International Folk Art Market Santa Fe, the largest artisan-social-enterprise accelerator globally and voted “best arts festival” by USA Today readers. Before then he served as Special Advisor to the President, Marquette University, where he the led the school’s Changemaker Campus initiative, resulting in the campus social innovation resource hub; and as Chief Operating Officer at the Argosy Foundation, a private family foundation.

As founder of Midwest Social Innovation, LLC, he has designed regional executive education in social enterprise models, served as Entrepreneurial Mentor for the National Science Foundation’s I-Corps program, and launched a partnership with the New York Times to embed Social Innovation as an interdisciplinary learning tool across the curriculum (selected by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation as one of 10 winners in a field of 1,000 proposals from 15 countries).

He completed a Ph.D. at Marquette University where he later received a Distinguished Alumni Award; elected in 2011 to Alpha Sigma Nu, the international honor society for Jesuit colleges and universities; appointed in 2018 as a Fellow at the Hunt Institute for Engineering and Humanity at Southern Methodist University; and appointed in 2019 as Senior Fellow in Social Innovation at ASU’s Lodestar Center. His family lives in Madison, Wisconsin.

To read more about the Hunt Institute’s work to develop future-focused solutions to some of the world’s biggest problems, please click here. For the latest news on the Hunt Institute, follow our social media accounts on LinkedInFacebookand Instagram. We invite you to listen to our Podcast called Sages & Seekers. If you are considering engaging with the institute, you can donate, or sign-up for our newsletter by emailing huntinstitute@smu.edu.

Introducing Our First Hunt Institute Scholar, Sara Langone

Photo of Sara LangoneSara Langone’s work with the Hunt Institute focuses on designing and conducting qualitative research projects at an organizational and community level on topics related to the Hunt Institute’s three pillars of food systems, infrastructure and inclusive economy. Langone’s qualitative approach provides rich, contextualized insight that helps enable the Institute and its partners to better understand communities and create bottom-up solutions to systemic issues.

As an undergraduate, Langone received the awards for Outstanding Student in Organizational Communication and Outstanding Student in the Corporate Communications and Public Affairs Honors Program at Southern Methodist University. Langone is also a member of the Kappa Tau Alpha Honor Society. Langone graduated from Southern Methodist University in 2017 with bachelor’s degrees in political science and corporate communications and public affairs.

To read more about the Hunt Institute’s work to develop future-focused solutions to some of the world’s biggest problems, please click here. For the latest news on the Hunt Institute, follow our social media accounts on LinkedIn, FacebookTwitter, and Instagram. We invite you to listen to our Podcast called Sages & Seekers. If you are considering engaging with the institute, you can donate, or sign-up for our newsletter by emailing huntinstitute@smu.edu.

Break Bread, Break Borders

Break Bread, Break Borders (BBBB) is a catering company with a twist. BBBB hires women who came to Dallas as refugees and equips them with the tools to thrive in a new country. Not only does BBBB help build a necessary sense of community among women who have lost nearly everything in their home countries, but BBBB also facilitates a discussion about immigration in the United States.

“A refugee is someone who has been forced to flee his or her country because of persecution, war, or violence. A refugee has a well-founded fear of persecution for reasons of race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or membership in a particular social group. Most likely, they cannot return home or are afraid to do so. War and ethnic, tribal and religious violence are leading causes of refugees fleeing their countries.” -United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.

BBBB founder Jin-Ya’s story can be explained like a braid. Different aspects of her life were prominent at different points. These different threads twisted together in 2016 to form BBBB. The five threads that makeup Jin-Ya’s story are: immigration, food, art, loss, and action.

Thread one: immigration

As a child, Jin-Ya moved from Taipai, Taiwan to Tulsa, Oklahoma, with her parents. She had to leave family, friends, and familiarity to follow her parents in pursuit of better opportunities in America.

“I was the kid they started ESL for,” Jin-Ya said with a laugh.

For most people, the phrase “middle school” is unsettling enough. Now imagine navigating the awkward middle school years in a foreign country without an understanding of the language.

While finding her new identity as an American, Jin-Ya’s parents encouraged her to try everything. She had loved art from the age of three, but coming to America made her realize that art was a universal language.

Thread two: art

Jin-Ya explained that in a new country she needed to find her own voice. She witnessed her mom find her voice through cooking. Jin-Ya found that sense of strength and confidence in art. After high school, she pursued an interdisciplinary degree from the University of Texas at Dallas, where she found her passion for photography. After college, Jin-Ya worked for different fashion companies, including Neiman Marcus and JCPenney, as an art director. Today, Jin-Ya works as a Packaging Manager for Fossil.

Jin-Ya has been able to blend her love of photography with her passion for activism. In addition to teaching art classes to people of all ages, she originated the idea of “Rock Your Heart Out,” the Human Rights Initiative’s annual fundraiser.

Thread three: food

Jin-Ya’s aunt and uncle owned a restaurant chain. Her parents worked at the restaurant after they moved to America and eventually purchased their own franchise in Dallas.

Jin-Ya’s parents would always hire immigrants and refugees. At the restaurant, people from all over the world would learn English, how to cook, achieve financial independence, adjust to a new culture, and gain a sense of community. For Jin-Ya and her family, food was never just something to eat. It was a chance to build relationships by finding common ground over a shared meal.

Thread four: loss

Two years ago, Jin-Ya’s mother passed away. As Jin-Ya was working through her grief, she looked back on her mother’s life and saw a woman who believed in kindness. She was a woman who hired displaced people, taught them how to work in the food industry, and sent them on to bigger and better jobs.

Jin-Ya harnessed her grief and turned it into action. That action was BBBB: a vehicle for taking the skills individuals already have and using those skills to facilitate the transition to the American job market and culture. In short, it’s access to success.

Thread five: action

“You’re about to take part in a social justice initiative,” Jin-Ya proclaimed to a group of Teach For America team members who had hired BBBB to cater their lunch.

The social justice initiative was a BBBB lunch. Jin-Ya noted that the food tastes better when you understand the story behind it.

While everyone munched away on Syrian foods, two women stood up to share their stories. Maryam One and Mariam Two. With a smile, Jin-Ya explained that they were so-called because of the order that she met them. Mariam Two stepped forward to share her story with her limited English vocabulary.

In Syria, Mariam Two taught Arabic and lived with her husband and four children. As instability swept over Syria, Mariam knew she had to leave. She walked across the desert with her four children and eventually made it to Jordan. Mariam Two explained that in Jordan, “I want to work, but don’t find it.”

Finally, Mariam Two had the opportunity to come to America. She had to leave her eldest two daughters behind in Jordan because the girls had gotten married. Mariam and her youngest two children took the plunge and crossed the ocean to find their new home in Dallas.

“Everyone smiles here,” Mariam Two observed. “Everyone is so free.”

BBBB aims to empower women both socially and economically. It is a chance to build a community. It is a chance to invest in others. It is a chance to break bread and break borders.

The Hunt Institute is proud to spotlight BBBB, a Hunt Institute Social Entrepreneur, that’s making waves in the DFW area. For more information about BBBB please click here or, email breakbreadbreakborders@gmail.com to learn how to get involved.

Story Contributors

Written by: Anna Grace Carey

Edited by: Maggie Inhofe

Images courtesy of Anna Grace Carey and Jin-Ya Huang.