Dr. Camille George poses next to the Ultralight Mod Pod, a breadfruit drier she co-designed last year. (Photo by Mike Ekern ’02)

The event, open to members of the St. Thomas community, begins with a 4:30 p.m. reception. The program runs from 5 to 6 p.m. Those planning to attend are asked to RSVP here.

Highlight of the celebration is the premiere of the documentary “Field to Fork,” a film is about Dr. Camille George’s work to engineer the post-harvest processing of breadfruit in Haiti.

“My five-year goal is to feed 100,000 Haitian school kids a day,” she said.

In 2003, George, an associate professor of mechanical engineering, led student-teams from the School of Engineering, French Department and Communication and Journalism Department to St. Vincent and collaborated on preliminary designs for shredding and drying breadfruit.

Later, another team of students studied the entire process of using breadfruit, from harvesting to shredding to drying to grinding it into flour. And in 2012, the School of Engineering, along with Minnesota-based nonprofit Compatible Technology International, held a “Peace Engineering” contest to build and deliver a breadfruit-drying device to the Breadfruit Institute, a subdivision of the National Tropical Botanical Garden in Kauai, Hawaii.

Breadfruit is an underutilized staple crop long recognized for its potential to provide food security in tropical regions. The fruit, named for its bread-like fragrance, is high in carbohydrates and contains many minerals and vitamins. A significant challenge in taking advantage of this food source, however, is its short shelf life once picked.

In addition to the breadfruit project, George and the Peace Engineering program have worked on a low-power cooling system, solar-powered water-pasteurization system and a method to produce shea butter more efficiently.

A goal of each project is to use engineering to help empower impoverished women and enabled them to profit from their countries’ natural resources.

The May 9 event also celebrates the collaboration of the St. Thomas School of Engineering with the Fetzer Institute, Compatible Technology International, Satag Inc. and the Hennepin Avenue United Methodist Church.

More information can be found at this Peace Engineering website and in this article, “Dr. Camille George Engineers the Future of Breadfruit.”

The Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship and Excellence in Education Program was established by Congress in 1986 to honor Sen. Barry M. Goldwater (R-Ariz.), who had served 30 years in the U.S. Senate. The program was designed to foster and encourage outstanding students to pursue careers in mathematics, the natural sciences and engineering.

This year the program awarded 271 scholarships for the 2013-14 academic year to undergraduate sophomores and juniors from the United States.

Dr. Kyle Zimmer, associate professor of biology who is St. Thomas’ Goldwater program chair, said, “The Barry Goldwater Scholarship and Excellence in Education Program is a national competition that is extremely competitive, so it’s a real honor for these three students to be awarded scholarships and honorable mention.”

Augustin, an Eagan, Minn., native, is analyzing the promoter regions of the Rap1 genes, related to the Ras oncogene. He also has begun studying the cell-type specific expression of the Rap1 genes in various human cell types, comparing the expression regulation of these genes in both “normal” and cancerous cells. After he graduates, he plans to research in the field of cancer biology through either an M.D. or an M.D./Ph.D. program.

Annoni, an electrical engineering and physics major from White Bear Lake, Minn., said, “I am interested in automating medical diagnostics, especially pertaining to image acquisition and processing.” After graduation she plans to attend graduate school for biomedical engineering. “From there, I hope to be part of a research and development team in the medical industry,” she said.

Painter, a biology major from Rochester, Minn., has worked at the Mayo Clinic investigating the role of PD-1, a protein expressed on the surface of cells involved in T-cell interactions of the immune system, in ovarian cancer; currently, he works at St. Thomas to characterize the core promoter for the Rap1B gene and describe the regulation of Rap1B gene expression. His plans include research on “cancer immunology at the cellular level − looking at how cancers evade the immune system and how the immune system can be primed to respond specifically to growing tumors, pursuing a Ph.D. in immunology/cell biology and perform research in this field for a short time after receiving my doctorate,” and continuing his research while teaching as a university professor, he said.

The Goldwater Scholars were selected on the basis of academic merit from a field of 1,107 mathematics, science, and engineering students who were nominated by the faculties of colleges and universities nationwide. A total of 176 of the scholars are men, 95 are women, and virtually all intend to obtain a Ph.D. as their degree objective. Twenty-seven scholars are mathematics majors, 159 are science and related majors, 71 are majoring in engineering, and 14 are computer science majors. Many of the scholars have dual majors in a variety of mathematics, science, engineering, and computer disciplines.

The one- and two-year scholarships will cover the cost of tuition, fees, books, and room and board, up to a maximum of $7,500 per year.

Recent Goldwater scholars have been awarded 80 Rhodes Scholarships, 118 Marshall Awards, 110 Churchill Scholarships and numerous other distinguished fellowships. Since 1998, 21 St. Thomas students (including Augustin) have received Goldwater Scholarships.

Since 1989, the Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship and Excellence in Education Foundation has awarded 6,550 scholarships worth approximately $40 million.

For more information about the Goldwater Scholarships, contact Zimmer (651) 962-5244.

The Opus College of Business ranks No. 110 out of the 494 schools that hold accreditation from the Association to Advance Collegiate School of Business. The school ranked No. 104 a year ago, the first year that Opus was eligible because of its December 2010 accreditation, and last fall Opus’ undergraduate program ranked No. 117 among 388 AACSB-accredited programs.

“While we would like to move upward each year, we are very pleased that our rankings in only our second year of AACSB accreditation continue to place us well inside the top 25 percent of all AACSB-accredited business schools,” said Dr. Christopher Puto, dean of the college. “We see this as demonstrable proof that our mission-driven approach to business education resonates in the business community.”

The School of Law ranks No. 124, an improvement from its highest ranking of No. 135 two years ago. The School of Law was ranked for the first time in 2007, when it appeared in the third tier.

The School of Social Work, a joint program sponsored by St. Thomas and St. Catherine University, continues to be ranked No. 52, as it was a year ago. U.S. News does not conduct a new social work survey every year; in a ranking three years ago, the St. Thomas-St. Catherine program placed No. 53.

The School of Education, part of the College of Education, Leadership and Counseling, is not ranked numerically by U.S. News but alphabetically among schools in the second tier.

The St. Thomas School of Engineering is not listed in the national graduate rankings because it does not offer doctoral programs. Last fall, U.S. News ranked St. Thomas No. 69 among 193 engineering schools that offer bachelor’s and master’s degrees, but not doctorates, and are accredited by the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET).

Greg Mowry

While I now smile at this memory, it did stimulate my imagination and ultimately led me to research optics and laser technology. The next thing that strengthened my love for science and engineering is a bit compounded: the space race along with the television series, “Star Trek.” The phrase, “To boldly go where no man has gone before” still echoes in my mind. All three gave me a thirst for discovering the unknown. (I am still trying to invent a warp drive and a teleportation device.) Finally, attending Davenport Central High School solidified my future in science and engineering. Davenport Central had math, chemistry and physics courses taught by former college professors, all of who were exciting and had an eye to the future. These teachers inspired me. Davenport Central also had access to a state-of-the-art IBM-360 computer (which dates me if you know anything about these) and a great shop program.

At Iowa State University (ISU) I earned B.S. and M.S. degrees in metallurgical engineering with a solid-state emphasis. Today that curriculum would be akin to a combined mechanical and materials engineering curriculum. There I worked as a junior researcher in the Rare Earth Information Center of Ames Laboratory under Dr. Spedding and Dr. Gschneidner. Today they are considered to be the fathers of rare-earth metal research. Both of these men, along with a host of other scientists and technicians at Ames Lab, helped hone my skills as a scientist. My work in magnetics began at Ames Lab and continues to this day. Magnetism and its applications are fascinating.

While at ISU I also was inspired to eventually pursue electronics and electric machines. A visiting professor from India was instrumental in this process. He taught the required ENGR-350 and ENGR-410 course equivalents (electricity and controls) that all non electrical engineers ‘had to take’ and his style so resonated with me that I developed a love for these topics as well. After graduating from ISU and with corporate support while working at Hewlett-Packard and later Seagate Technology, I worked on advanced degrees at Stanford University and the University of Minnesota. At Stanford I worked on a non-thesis M.S. program in electrical engineering and afterward received a Ph.D. in electrical engineering with a minor in physics from the University of Minnesota. My Stanford work focused on micromagnetic phenomena while my Ph.D. dissertation involved high-power semiconductor lasers.

Both Hewlett-Packard and Seagate Technology (two of the three large corporations that I worked for) required that all young engineers/scientists partner with experienced senior-level mentors. My mentors noted in me an aptitude for academics and discussed the possibility of ultimately transitioning from industry to academia. When the offer to join the School of Engineering at the University of St. Thomas materialized, it occurred at a time when my family and I were poised to pursue the opportunity for which I had prepared a lifetime. This launched my adventures at St. Thomas.

While working at Seagate Technology I also had the opportunity to take a significant amount of job-related international travel. Over the years this significantly altered my views on people, wealth, entitlement; and ways of doing business. My travels ultimately provided the stimulus and direction for applying the results of my research.

If one were to list the disciplines that are important or useful for alternative energy research, then the list would minimally include physics, mechanical engineering, chemical engineering, energy systems and electronics. In an unplanned and serendipitous manner, my career (the accumulated degrees and experiences in almost all of these disciplines) was an excellent preparatory process for this research.

My first international research project (and first alternative energy project) came shortly after arriving at St. Thomas. The project involved collaborative work with faculty at the Technical University of Moldova (TUM) in the capital city of Chisinau. The research launched me into the world of both small and large power systems as well as solar, wind and hydro-based alternative energy systems. I led a team of six St. Thomas students to the TUM during a long and cold J-Term circa 2005. The team performed extremely well and the research progressed so fast that it was clear to me that alternative energy research would become my last great focus area. In addition, it became very clear that there was a need to develop small, robust and economic power (and water) systems for use in developing countries. The success of this research could make a significant and positive impact in many developing countries.

The alternative energy research and development that began in Moldova ultimately expanded into multiple research lines – all with a humanitarian focus. To date this has included: Developing the alternative energy power systems for a150-bed hospital in Dodoma, Tanzania, inventing a method for erecting grid-size wind turbines (for use in developing countries) that does not require cranes, inventing a new catalyst and heat exchanger for portable biodiesel productions systems for use in developing countries, a village solar-power-lighting project in Uganda, a small wind turbine project that is currently ongoing, development of a technical MSME program at St. Thomas that has a power requirement and the pending announcement of a technical MSEE at St. Thomas, which contains a significant power, power electronics, electric machines and alternative energy emphasis. This work has engaged several dozen undergraduate and graduate students over the past seven years. Many of these students are now working in energy related fields. The research has also spawned multiple senior design and additional research projects.

There is a great need for social entrepreneurship with the goal of developing economical and robust systems that provide fresh water and electricity. The engineering challenges are significant but surmountable. It simply takes will and funding. Engaging students in these research projects resonates with the students who often view social entrepreneurship, with an engineering emphasis, as a positive and valuable alternative to conventional corporate careers. The work is exciting. It is one thing to perform
research that ultimately helps develop systems using the techy toys that we have available in developed countries; e.g. the United States. The question is whether the research can pave the way for engineering systems that help people in developing countries, where the techy toys and spare parts are not available and where the work will be done without technician support. This is not to mention what happens when people come to depend on these systems and they fail (hence the need for economics and
robustness).

The work that the student teams and I have performed has demonstrated that research with a social entrepreneurial focus can lead to discovery, peer-reviewed technical publications, patents and importantly, solutions and products that benefit society. To me this demonstrates a holistic approach that integrates career, heart, mind and soul.

Over the years I have lost track of the number of undergraduate and graduate students who have been engaged by my research; however, they all are an integral element in all of my research.

My research projects are selected so that students will be challenged as they grow and mature, learn to solve problems and earn that “sense of ownership” that comes from substantive contributions toward a common vision. I make sure that the students are engaged in tasks that I cannot do; or more often then not, do not know how to do. This empowers the students because they develop the solutions, not me.

I have been blessed with the opportunity to meet and work with an amazingly diverse and truly wonderful group of colleagues, sponsors and friends (along with a very supportive family) while helping others. It was either in Tanzania or Uganda that I saw a billboard that read, “Our most valuable resource is our people.” This statement resonated with me and captures why I truly enjoy my work and my student researchers, and why I invest myself in this endeavor while remaining focused on the people whom I help.

Greg Mowry is associate professor at the School of Engineering.

 From Exemplars, a publication of the Grants and Research Office.

Bennett said, “This award represents many things: supporting applied engineering; encouraging diversity in STEM fields; promoting technological literacy; and inspiring students of all ages. I am proud to accept it and to share credit with countless others who deserve the same recognition.”

The annual Minnesota Tekne Awards honor companies, innovations and individuals that positively impact Minnesota’s technology-based economy, awarding those who play a significant role in discovering new technologies that educate, improve lifestyles and impact the lives and futures of people living in Minnesota and all over the world.

This year marks the award’s 13th year.The Tekne Awards began in 2000 and are presented by the Minnesota High Tech Association.

The rankings include:

• School of Engineering undergraduate program. It ranks No. 69 among 193 schools that offer bachelor’s and master’s degrees but not doctorates. The survey was based solely on peer assessment – deans ranking each others’ programs – and only schools with accreditation from the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET) were eligible. “As one of the newest engineering programs in the United States, it is an honor to be recognized in this manner,” said Dr. Donald Weinkauf, dean.

• Opus College of Business undergraduate program. It ranks No. 117 among 388 programs accredited by the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business – an increase from No. 185 last year, the first year of eligibility because of accreditation. This survey also was based solely on peer assessment. “We are pleased to see how well our undergraduate business program is regarded,” said Dr. Christopher Puto, dean. “The breadth of our concentration offerings and the emphasis we place on Business Ethics and Business 200 courses as requirements for every business major are reasons why our program is so strong.” Last March, U.S. News ranked St. Thomas No. 104 of 448 AASCB-accredited schools in a separate “best business schools” ranking that included graduate programs.

• High school guidance counselors. St. Thomas ranks No. 121 among 281 institutions in the National Universities category. High school counselors were asked which schools offered the best undergraduate education.

Overall, U.S. News ranks St. Thomas No. 113 in the National Universities category, an improvement from No. 115 a year ago, No. 124 in 2010 and No. 137 in 2009.

It’s one of the ways, and we’re not talking partially hydrogenated Skippy-brand peanut butter. Just ask Dr. Jim Ellingson, assistant professor in St. Thomas’ School of Engineering, and junior mechanical engineering major Noel Naughton.

Peanuts fill the hopper of the Omega VI grinder. Photo by Mike Ekern ’02.

The pair spent their summer vacation grinding 25 pounds of roasted, unsalted peanuts for a study that will help local nonprofit Compatibility Technology International (you might remember them from Friday’s Newsroom story ”Dr. Camille George and the Future of Breadfruit“), pave this road. The organization creates a range of “practical food and water tools that empower the global poor to better feed and support themselves.”

Ellingson, who has attended technology meetings at St. Paul-based CTI for two-and-a-half years, jumped on the opportunity to help the organization determine baseline data for one of those tools, the Ewing IV grinder: a hand-cranked burr mill used throughout Africa and Asia to grind everything from peppercorns into pepper, millet into flour and, in Ellingson and Naughton’s case, peanuts into smooth, creamy paste.

CTI, which makes three models of grinders, notes their achievements on its website: “CTI’s grinders have enabled women to start business selling high-value ground products in the market, they help kids pay for school fees, and they’re even used to bring back severely malnourished children from the brink of starvation.”

Ellingson echoed the nonprofit’s vision for its grinders: “The biggest impact we can make in Africa is with peanuts, or ‘groundnuts’ as they’re known there.”

As a highly nutrition-packed food source, groundnuts thrive in many areas of Africa. The Omega VI, the CTI model he and Naughton used in their research because it allowed for a motor attachment, also is used in homes in Africa where it is human-powered. Generally, one family owns one mill.

Creamy, ground peanut paste falls from the grinder. Photo by Mike Ekern ’02.

Ellingson explained that “our goal was simple − to provide a baseline for the grinder’s efficiency. CTI already has shipped hundreds of its grinders to African families, and with great success. But they didn’t have baseline data. We’re not suggesting design changes. We’re providing guidelines and expectations for the device’s output.”

To this, Naughton added, “the best way to reduce hunger is to give farmers the ability to grow their own food, and our data will provide some scientific evidence for how the grinder is used best.”

Ellingson said that “CTI is not interested in chunky peanut butter. So we’re studying the power required to make fine peanut butter, which naturally requires more effort.”

Specifically, their data measured: 1) the grinder’s output, or how many grams of peanut butter the Omega produces per minute based on 2) the torque – which is equal to the amount of force produced at any given distance – in this case, the distance equalled the length of the crank used to turn the steel grinding plates of the mill; and 3) the quality, or fineness (viscosity), of the peanut butter produced.

The reason the fineness measurement is vitally important, he said, is because “peanut butter is their daily bread. It’s not something they spread on their daily bread, so it has to taste good. The thicker stuff doesn’t lend itself to palatability.”

So what did they discover? “Really good peanut butter,” according to Ellingson, ”has a particle size of 3/1000 of an inch – the consistency of a strand of hair” or, dare we say it, Skippy. For a person grinding nuts by hand, they determined that the typical person (in Africa, typically the grinder is the female head of the household) would need to generate 10 pounds of force at the end of a one-foot crank (the typical crank-length in African homes) at a speed of 60 revolutions per minute to produce an output of 1/2 of a pound of fine-quality peanut butter per minute. A comfortable, reasonable limit, Ellingson said, is “10 pounds of force or less for someone who does this type of work daily.”

Peanut butter fills the metal burr of the grinder. Photo by Mike Ekern ’02.

To arrive at these numbers, they had to standardize and simplify their study so that the traditionally hand-cranked grinder would turn at a consistent speed that mimicked the pace of a human (0-120 rpms). A scale positioned at the end of the crank would give a direct readout of the force required to turn. To that purpose, Naughton spent half of the summer designing a system that would allow him to mount the grinder to a motor, then he built it to those specifications.

Ellingson explained that “our apparatus allows for the quantitative measurement of the effort required for a given task. Where these grinders will be used, human power is much more readily available than electric power and much cheaper, so it is the first choice.”

They used a simple and expensive instrument called a Hegman gauge to measure the fineness of their output (peanut butter).

CTI’s statement underscores the significant impact of Ellingson and Naughton’s study: “Women and girls living in the developing world spend most of their day farming and preparing food for their families by hand. They work for hours grinding their crops with rudimentary, inefficient hand tools like mortar and pestles or stones.”

Behind the, at times, complex science of their data collection lies a simple, humanitarian goal: to reduce the amount toil undertaken by people in developing nations to produce their family’s daily sustenance. Naughton said, “Once you give them this initial investment, they can take charge of their own livelihoods.”

And it was for this cause that Ellingson wanted to take part in this research: “Partnering with CTI is a good fit for St. Thomas. As an engineering department and a service university, what greater calling is there than to feed the world?”

Since 2002, George has led St.Thomas’ partnership with local nonprofit Compatibility Technology International, which creates “practical food and water tools that empower the global poor to better feed and support themselves,” according to its website. The partnership, part of the School of Engineering’s “Peace Engineering” initiative, has involved around 45 undergraduate and graduate students since it began.

George said she has since ”grown to appreciate the notion of engineering solutions for the bottom billion – or the base of the pyramid. Too often we just think of engineering for Fortune 500 companies or for defense; there are many basic issues (food, water, shelter) that could be addressed by the profession.”

George’s 10-year collaboration with CTI has focused solely on its breadfruit tools, and last month marked her latest milestone with the nonprofit. She flew to Kauai, Hawaii, to present and build a breadfruit drier on the grounds of the National Tropical Botanical Gardens. It eventually will be on permanent display, complete with the university’s logo, in the “Food for Thought” exhibit, which should open in a few years at the garden’s headquarters in Kauai.

Three variations on the breadfruit drier: (front to back) the “Oldsters’” drier; the display-quality drier designed by George and Bach this summer; and the Ultralight Mod Pod.

George co-designed the drier with St.Thomas adjunct engineering professor Bob Bach. They received around 200 hours of design and logistical help from St.Thomas seniors Garrett Faust and Dan McQuillan, both mechanical engineering majors, since they began work on the redesign in late May.

The drier is a hybrid based on two driers designed earlier this year. The first was the winning design in the Peace Engineering contest − a contest George proposed and organized for St. Thomas ”to gather any ideas Bob and I hadn’t thought about and also to communicate to the public what we (at the School of Engineering) were doing.”

The contest called on two- to three-person teams to design, build and deliver in March a breadfruit-drying device to the Breadfruit Institute, a subdivision of the NTBG, in Kauai. A School of Engineering-sponsored contest, it was judged by a panel consisting of all St.Thomas alumni who had experience working for communities in the developing world.

The winning drier was designed by retired General Mills engineer and CTI founder George Ewing, retired chemical engineer and longtime CTI member Hank Garwick, and retired physics teacher Dave Elton, who is also a longtime CTI member. The team, which dubbed itself ”The Oldsters,” created the simplest and least expensive of the 15 entries received, George said.

The other design used in making the hybrid was created by George and Bach, who had promised to design a drier for CTI in tandem with the contest. They christened their device the ”Ultralight Mod Pod.” Fully assembled, it looks like a small, simple, open-roofed house framed in fiberglass and sided with clear vinyl (pictured, with George, in the feature photo above).

“The idea behind the Ultralight,” she said, “was we wanted a lightweight drier with a small footprint. Our 10-foot-by-10-foot device dries 150 square feet of breadfruit shreds, which is about 0.6 pounds per square foot of drying area, so our drier was lighter than The Oldsters’ design. Bob and I took the best elements of our design (small footprint and rain protection solution) and combined them with the best elements of The Oldsters’ design (low cost and structurally easy to use), and that’s the hybrid we built in August. In the hybrid we wanted it to withstand tropical storms, have good rain protection, have the netting in contact with the food both food-safe and washable, and we wanted low cost.”

From user comments in Haiti and Hawaii, they learned that rain and tropical storms are a common occurrence during the breadfruit harvest season, so they incorporated Lexan weatherproof panels to help it withstand tropical rain storms. George noted, “One cooperative in Jeremie, Haiti, stated that they lose one-third of their breadfruit chips to rain! Also, all the potential users I interviewed this summer wanted something robust and sturdy. That is why we incorporated a strong secure rain covering. By making the covering transparent we also increased the temperature in the top one-third of the structure by 20 degrees Fahrenheit to further facilitate the drying.”

George was very happy with the redesign, which also included flexible and washable food-safe shelves that sat on very low-cost structural netting. “The collaborators in Hawaii were very pleased with the drier shelves being off the ground − they thought The Oldsters’ design was too close to the ground; they have a lot of issues with feral chickens, pigs and rats,” she said. “They were also very happy with the robust and waterproof construction (nothing on the drier can rust) and that the new hybrid can be put away as flat panels at the end of the season.”

The hybrid drier had to be display quality and was fabricated completely with materials from Minnesota, including aluminum, Lexan and PVC tubing. This semester, Faust and McQuillan will “simplify the design, bring down the cost, and work with a fabricator in Haiti to purchase and build some of the heavier materials on site, because, George asserted, “We’re not shipping the frame again!”

Faust and McQuillan will spend J-Term in Haiti doing the “heavy building” on site. The only parts they’ll ship beforehand will be food-safe-netting shelves, on which the shredded breadfruit will dry. “The drier Garrett and Dan will help make this semester will further improve the quality of the product,” George said.

A “field-to-fork” enterprise: from tree to flour to bakery

Dr. Camille George holds dried, shredded breadfruit. (Photo by Mike Ekern ’02)

In a December 2011 Bulletin Today story promoting the drier contest, George explained that a significant challenge in taking advantage of breadfruit is its short shelf life once picked: “Drying takes out 70 percent of the water in the fruit, making the crops much easier to move and increasing their shelf life. If these designs work, it’ll be huge.”

Just a few months later, George was able to see, and take part in, the fruits of her labor.

During this fall’s harvest, the NTBG will test the hybrid drier on three varieties of breadfruit. But the “bigger picture” of the drier, she said, is much more than simply the drying of breadfruit. It even extends beyond food security for Haitians.

“We’re introducing social entrepreneurship from a franchise perspective,” she explained. “The drier is just a small piece of the whole enterprise.”

Specifically, the dried breadfruit will be ground into flour, which will fully support a new bakery, Palmaeres, in Port-au-Prince, the capital of Haiti. “With this bakery, we have shown proof of concept from field to fork!” George said.

“The idea is that we would have a ti Champion (“Little Champion”) franchise, in the form of moveable kiosks (food carts).” The plans aren’t yet complete, but the hope is that small-business owners would lease the kiosks with a profit-sharing business model.

Over the summer, George tested a waffle kiosk in Port-au-Prince, which was a huge success. She explained, “In the future, people will be able to take their kiosks onto the streets to make waffles, probably served with a Creole (tomato-based) sauce.”

Palmaeres will be a fully operational bakery, selling ti Champion baked goods, which are mostly breadfruit-flour-based, such as rum cakes, molasses cookies and pizelles − Norwegian-style waffle cone-like cookies − in dark and light chocolate. It also will be a breadfruit flour vendor and produce 100-percent breadfruit-flour dry mix for the waffle kiosks − essentially serving as the hub for the ti Champion franchise.

“I honestly feel that the franchise idea is a wonderful idea for Haiti because it is a collective culture. People work together in family clans,” George said. She noted that the average Haitian has an outdoor kitchen and that family meals are cooked over charcoal. “It’s not an oven culture, and baking is not a part of the culture, so that’s why the bakery as a wholesale hub makes sense. With these kiosks, you can see that it creates a ready-to-eat product for consumers to buy.”

Hennepin Avenue United Methodist Church and Satag Inc., a Haiti-based organization, have assisted with the bakery’s opening and also are major contributors to the Peace Engineering initiative, helping to bring food and financial security to Haiti via breadfruit.

With apps, smart phones, and point of purchase sales, mobile technology is quickly becoming one of the hottest topics in business today as it is changing the way everyone does just about everything. Mobile technology allows people to use information technology without being tied to a single location.

This new Mini Master of Mobile Technology is designed for people interested in the trends of mobile technology and how it affects software development. This Mini Master class will award Continuing Education Units (CEUs) instead of credit, and there is no homework and no tests.

The class will begin Wednesday, Sept. 26, and will run 10 Wednesday evenings until Dec. 5, from 6 to 9 p.m. on the university’s St. Paul campus.  (There is no class the evening prior to the Thanksgiving holiday).

To register for the program or for more information, contact Graduate Programs in Software, (651) 962-5500.

St. Thomas junior Matthew Schmidtbauer is an electrical engineering student with aspirations of someday working for a high-performance electric car manufacturing company. He always has enjoyed electronics and boasted “the world’s largest tub of K’Nex” as his favorite boyhood building set. One might assume, then, that his hobbies include gadgets, robotics or other tinkerings with technology.

The subjects of his pastime, however, are not motors or revolutions per minute, but tens of thousands of honeybees that he cares for each summer.

His first foray into beekeeping began when he was 12 years old. While many boys that age are asking their parents for the latest video games, for Christmas that year Schmidtbauer asked for a beekeeping starter kit. “Isn’t it every 12-year-old’s dream to be a beekeeper?” he chuckled. “A lot of kids have ant farms growing up. A beehive is like an ant farm on steroids.”

According to Schmidtbauer, his parents are supportive but at first weren’t sure what he was getting himself into. “They wanted to make sure I was spending my own money,” he said. “Even as a kid I was tight with my money, so they would ask ‘are you sure you want to spend it this way?’” What they didn’t realize at the time was Schmidtbauer’s beekeeping would become somewhat of a self-sustaining hobby.

Now 20 years old, Schmidtbauer has expanded from one hive and a beekeeping starter kit to 10 hives and a full-fledged honey business. In the fall of 2010, he produced 33 gallons of honey with six hives. This year, he has six hives at his parents’ home in Nowthen, Minn., and four hives at his grandparents’ home near Buckman, Minn. “Bees are just amazing to me; there’s always something changing.”

To talk to Schmidtbauer is to get a lesson in beekeeping vocabulary and business savvy that rivals some of the best vendors at any farmer’s market. He’ll tell you the process is quite straightforward: You pick up the bees in the spring, dump them into the hive, and basically just check on them every week or so throughout the summer until you’re ready to harvest the honey.

The idea seems simple enough, but the process is much more involved and includes a number of steps to ensure happy bees and optimum honey production.

Schmidtbauer’s bees arrive in the spring on a truck from California. Bees are measured by the pound and shipped in screened boxes. He typically orders three pounds, which measures out to approximately 10,000 bees, including the queen who is housed separately in the same box.

Once he gets his bees home, he dumps them into the hive. A hive is a series of boxes that each houses 10 frames on which the bees build their comb. To distribute the bees into the box takes a special trick he picked up in a beekeeping tutorial film. “The phrase that always sticks with me is that it’s like spreading sauce on a pizza – that’s the consistency you should have,” Schmidtbauer said. “And that’s exactly what it feels like.”

Once the bees settle into the hive and accept their queen, they’re fed sugar water.Schmidtbauer continues to feed the bees until they stop eating. “At that point, I just let them do their thing. You keep checking and as the boxes fill up with honey, you add more boxes as they need them.

“The ‘honey flow’ is the time of season when bees are collecting the most nectar because that’s when the most plants are flowering,” he said. “In our area, bees collect most of their nectar from clover.”

Eventually, the bees fill their comb with honey – which is created when the nectar’s moisture has been reduced to about 18 percent.

At the end of each summer, Schmidtbauer begins the harvest process. Each frame is carefully removed from the hive and the honey extracted. He prides himself on producing the purest honey. “After I extract the honey, I filter it and let it rest so the bubbles dissipate,” Schmidtbauer said. “But it basically goes straight from the hive to the bottle.”

In the fall, he sells his honey at festivals near his hometown. His customers can’t seem to get enough. “I think I only had about a gallon left after the shows last fall,” said Schmidtbauer. But as a hobbyist, he’s not concerned with profits. “If I break even I’m happy. I don’t do it to make tons of money.”

When talking to any apiarist, an obvious question arises: How many times has he been stung?

“Normally, I only get stung once or twice a year – no big deal,” Schmidtbauer said. “In fact, I don’t think I’ve been stung at all for at least a year and a half.” He hasn’t always been so lucky.

When Schmidtbauer brings his honey to sell at local festivals, he likes to bring a small glass beehive with some of his bees to display. It was the night before he was supposed to sell at a festival a few years ago that he quite literally felt the sting of bad  beekeeping.

“It was late and I was trying to get everything ready to take to the show at 8 a.m. the next morning,” Schmidtbauer said. During the process, he broke three cardinal rules of beekeeping: Never handle the bees when it’s cold, when it’s getting dark or when it’s raining. The trifecta of missteps led to angry bees who took out their frustrations on  him.

“They basically covered me from top to bottom. The first one stung me on the sock.So I swatted at it, then I opened up my pant leg and they started crawling up my leg.And then they just started stinging.”

Schmidtbauer estimates he was stung about 50 times that day. “I had never hyperventilated before in my life, but that day – it was bad.”

Even after such a painful experience, he still feels a connection with his colony. “I wouldn’t say it’s the same level as owning a pet, but I take a lot of pride in my bees,” he said. “I feel some attachment. Most beekeepers in the area usually let their bees die in the winter. I personally can’t do that. I would rather leave enough honey in the hive for them to live off of to at least give them a chance to survive.”

But the realities of sometimes-harsh Minnesota winters take their toll and his bees often don’t make it. “You can protect your hive from the elements to a certain extent, but it’s tough. If you keep the hive too warm, the bees think it’s warm outside and they fly out and freeze. If you keep it too cold, they become immobilized and can’t reach their food, even if it’s only an inch away.”

With such an admiration for bees, it could be assumed that Schmidtbauer would pursue a future in biology or other natural sciences. The electrical engineering student sees it differently. “I’m a technology guy. I love computers. I love technology. This is an escape to nature. You just go outside and listen to bees buzz. It’s just so different, but I like it.”

While Schmidtbauer has become quite adept at beekeeping, he has been surprised by the additional skills he has picked up from his hobby. He has become an entrepreneur in many senses of the word. “Bees have gotten me into everything. You initially start and it’s kind of like a science project. But then you move on and it becomes a business venture. And all of the sudden it’s a website thing – I didn’t know how to build a website before I started www.MattsBees.com. Then you have to realize all the plants that are flowering. I didn’t know anything about plants in the beginning.”

The residual benefits will stick with Schmidtbauer as he moves on to the next steps in his life. “It’s taken me in so many different directions that it’s been a really educationally fulfilling hobby.”

And it’s a hobby he has passed along to others, including his grandfather. According to Schmidtbauer, “My grandpa’s a farmer; he dabbles a little in everything.” Once Schmidtbauer began keeping hives at his grandparents’ farm, it only seemed natural that the two began bonding over the hobby.

“Matt asked me for money to buy a beehive when he first got started,” his grandfather said. “When I found out how much they cost I said, ‘Holy catfish! I’m not paying for no beehive.’” But Schmidtbauer persisted and eventually his grandfather conceded. “He’s a good kid – anything to keep him from causing trouble.”

Schmidtbauer’s grandfather wasn’t surprised when his grandson’s hobby became an important part of his life. “Once he sets his heart to something, he does it.”

While Schmidtbauer and his grandfather enjoy challenging each other about the best way to tend to their hives, there’s no family rivalry when it comes to selling their product. Schmidtbauer’s grandfather gives most of his honey away and donates it to his church bazaar. He’ll even give a little to his grandson to sell when he runs low, perhaps as a gesture of gratitude for introducing him to a new pastime. “Matt taught me 99 percent of what I know about beekeeping.”

The next couple of years will be telling in regards to his future. He will graduate and move into a career that could take him almost anywhere. While that part is uncertain, he is sure of one thing: “There might be lulls every couple of years, but I plan on being a beekeeper.”

For as much as he discovered a passion for his bees, the unexpected stinger, as he puts it: “I really don’t even like honey that much.”

Read more from St. Thomas magazine

Senior Ryan Delaney, junior Nate Webster and sophomore Mitch Hoffmann have been working on the “TurtleBot” since early June (though Delaney and Webster have worked together on related projects since last year). The robot, which comes with mapping and navigation capabilities, is an open-source-software device, which means users can “tinker,” or rather, have creative license to program it to do what they wish. According to Turtlebot’s website, the bot “can explore your house on its own, build 3D pictures, bring you food, take panoramas, and more.”

Mitch Hoffman works in the basement of O’Shaughnessy Science Hall. (Photo by Mike Ekern ’02)

Delaney, Webster and Hoffman are using their Turtlebot to map all four floors of O’Shaughnessy Science Center and the building’s basement. But their overarching goal is to use those maps to program the bot to navigate autonomously from their lab in OSS’s basement to School of Engineering Dean Dr. Don Weinkauf’s office on the first floor.

Delaney said “mapping is easy” – the basement took about 30 minutes – and the original intent was to map just the basement of OSS. “To make things interesting, we added to our plans and decided to program it to do multifloor navigation.”

But the team ran into a not-so-easy road block when the Turtlebot encountered an elevator.

“The gap between the floor and the elevator is confusing to the robot,” Delaney explained. Dr. Jim Ellingson, a St. Thomas engineering professor and the project’s lead adviser, added, “The challenge is that the Turtlebot wants a fixed environment, and the elevator is not fixed. It’s open sometimes and closed others. It takes 40 seconds for the Turtlebot  to compute that the door is open – and by then the door shuts. … It’s a bit like ‘The Matrix’; there’s the reality, then there’s the perception of it” as far as how the Turtlebot calculates differences between open spaces and physical objects.

The team, which also is advised by Dr. Chris Greene and Dr. Kundan Nepal of the School of Engineering, has been working on the elevator dilemma for the past two weeks so the Turtlebot can navigate to Weinkauf’s office one floor above their lab. (As smart as the Turtlebot is, it can’t climb stairs.) Delaney said they are programming it to wait for the “up” button to be pushed by a team member, then to detect when the door opens and to drive itself inside. Because it does not have arms, a team member will need to accompany it on its trip to the first floor and push the floor button. The robot then will need to detect when the doors reopen and drive itself out, and it’s up to the team to ”teach” these steps to the robot. Greene said last week that he believes “they’re getting very close.”

A close-up of the “Turtlebot.”

At first glance, the TurtleBot could pass for a children’s side table from Ikea. Just 11 inches tall, the bot is comprised of three round, white shelves, each 31 centimeters wide, which can be mounted in various configurations and are supported by four aluminum dowels.

Ellingson and Greene said most robots are not humanoid in appearance, as science-fiction films would have us believe; however, the Turtlebot’s parts, Ellingson noted, have components comparative to those on humans. The base of the Turtlebot is, essentially, the better-known Roomba, made by iRobot, which is sold for home vacuuming. It contains three wheels, which serve as the robot’s “legs” and allow it to navigate.

The robot’s “eyes” are comprised of a Microsoft Kinect sensor, a black, horizontal bar that is mounted beneath the top shelf. The Kinect generates the data used for mapping spaces in 2D. It “sees” by scanning every measurable part of a space using infrared lightwaves that bounce off objects (such as walls) to calculate depth. It also relies on an RGB (red, green, blue) camera for color readings to complete its mapping.

Lastly, a PC (a laptop that rests on the Turtlebot’s top shelf) serves as its “brain.” Once the PC has mapped the floor, the team, from a PC in its lab, “talks” to the robot by using a mouse to point it to its destination, or by typing in coordinates. Once the mapping is complete, the bot can use its own judgment, so to speak, to determine its route.

Ellingson, who is Delaney’s undergraduate adviser, believes “robotics gets students excited about engineering,” a sentiment that seems to run through this team.

Hoffmann, who learned of the project through Nepal, said, “I’ve always had an interest in robotics and coding, and this project was the perfect gateway for me to begin exploring that career path. I will only be in my second year of college this fall, so I am just beginning to feel around for what I want to do in the future, and this project was a great stepping stone. I get to have fun while working with a talented crew of professors and students.”

Webster, who studied robotics in high school and plans to work in the field after he graduates, believes “mobile robotics are important because they are becoming more integrated with our world. It’s a field that will only grow and become more important.”

Delaney, who will graduate next spring, imagines most households in the future will have robots to perform household chores and other tasks like walking the family dog. He is excited to see where robotics as a field will go.

Code for the “Turtlebot.”

He is pleased that prices for devices such as the Turtlebot have come down enough to make them more widely accessible. “The last three to four years has seen an explosion in (robotics) growth and development, which has brought costs down. With this $1,000 platform, smaller schools like St. Thomas can participate in this advancement. … We are doing the exact same things that bigger schools like M.I.T and Stanford are doing with half-million-dollar robots; basically, somebody has an idea, and you see if you can do it.”

What else is in store for St. Thomas’ Turtlebot? Greene said he’d like to see it give tours of OSS. Nepal “would love to see us move toward an autonomous robotic vehicle capable of navigating the outdoors as well as the indoors.” Similarly, Ellingson would like to see the Turtlebot go outdoors, but noted that the Kinect camera does not work well outside due to constantly shifting light conditions.

So it seems there are many possibilities. As Delaney said “the most interesting part of this project is that we don’t yet know where it’s going.”

Editor’s note: Ryan Delaney, Nate Webster and Mitch Hoffmann’s research was funded in part by a Summer Housing grant.

People wander down the gravel road and dirt paths flanking the brick buildings and stone or mud huts that serve as storefronts and homes. They pause to talk and to laugh. Dozens gather under two wooden canopies to watch young men shoot pool, and there is good-natured hooting and hollering as someone sinks – or misses – a shot … under the lights.

Nearby, Milton Muhaivwe stands in his doorway and surveys the scene. The 54-year-old man was born across the road and has lived in Kitembe his entire life. Like many others, he is a subsistence farmer who grows matoke and beans, and he sells a few items in his storefront, with a bed in the back for his wife and their baby girl. He only nods when asked about the lights.

A few doors away, Betsy Katushabe cradles her baby boy while grabbing a bottle of water for a visitor. The 25-year-old woman has two other children and sells bananas, eggs, onions and other staples in her storefront while living in back. She, too, is excited about the lights.

Lights … We take them for granted. Flip a switch, there is light. Walk into a room, a light goes on. When dusk falls, streetlights automatically shine.

Not in Kitembe, a village near the equator and the Rwanda border, about 180 miles southwest of Kampala. The village encompasses a hilly region of several square miles, and in the valley is the trading center, where for centuries there have been no lights. As the sun would fall in the western sky early every evening, darkness would envelop Kitembe for 12 hours.

And that bothered Brian Osende. He decided to do something about it.

The St. Thomas graduate, with bachelor’s and master’s degrees in mechanical engineering, was raised in Kampala and moved to Minnesota in 2005. His mom grew up in Kitembe and her parents still live there. Only a handful of people can afford to pay for the electricity provided by power lines that run through the countryside, so the village has gone without power.

“As a kid, I was always tinkering,” said Osende, 25, a standards engineer for Xcel Energy. “I figured out how electricity was made when I was in grade 5. I made a mini-generator, and I always had this dream to bring power to my mom’s village.”

Muhaivwe would burn wood outdoors for light or use kerosene lamps – if he could afford  the kerosene – but those bothered his breathing. So he went without light.

“It’s hard to describe,” said Dr. John Abraham, a professor in the St. Thomas School of Engineering, “but think of it this way: when the sun goes down, the light ends and you go to bed.”

“When it gets dark over there, it’s really, really dark!” Osende said. He recalled a night when “it was so dark I could not see the road. I would pause on the road and wait for lightning, and when lightning struck I would see the road. Things like that stuck with me.”

His mom, Dorothy Michori, smiles when she recalls her son’s dream.

“He started talking about it when he was young,” Michori said. “He would say, ‘Maybe we can create our own electricity!’ I would laugh at him and say, ‘How are you going to do it?’ I shut him up and told him to stop talking like that.”

Osende graduated from Woodbury High School, where he knew Chris Dease, an art teacher and the sister-in-law of Father Dennis Dease, president of St. Thomas. He persuaded Osende to enroll at St. Thomas, and Osende rekindled his dream of bringing lights to Kitembe.

Abraham and faculty colleague Dr. Greg Mowry encouraged Osende to develop a proposal for his master’s degree project. He made trips to Kitembe in 2007 and 2009 to do research; secured funds from Abraham, Dease and Xcel, where he had an internship; and recruited 15 people to participate in the 2011 January Term project.

Osende’s family still had its doubts.

“My mom thought Brian was crazy,” Michori said. “I told her, ‘Mom, don’t ask.’ He knew what he was doing. He was committed. He said, ‘I can do this. I know it can be done.’ He had so much confidence. Maybe too much confidence!”

Osende traveled to Kitembe in December 2010 to buy $7,000 in equipment and supplies. The St. Thomas contingent, including Abraham, Mowry and five students, arrived in early January and finished the project in less than two weeks, although not without some drama.

“The local Army chief came by and thought we were stealing power,” Abraham said. “He had a belligerent, antagonistic attitude, but I showed him how the solar panels worked and an hour later he became one of our biggest supporters. We had him provide security for us.”

Here is how the system works: Independent power lines extend in two directions along a 300-meter path, and originate from a centrally located array of eight 175-watt solar panels that store energy in four 12-volt batteries. Up to 10,000 W-hours can be generated from each full day of sunlight; light bulbs collectively require 4,000 W-hours and four cell phone and battery-charging stations require 1,000 W-hours.

The power lines proved to be “immense and the most time-consuming issue,” Osende said. “When I originally bought the equipment, I had 200 meters of wire. By the end of the project, we used 2,000 meters. I guess I didn’t plan very well!”

The crew installed 93 seven-watt fluorescent bulbs in 46 houses, a school and two medical clinics and erected eight external “security” lights – what we think of as streetlights.

Villagers’ curiosity evolved into interest and then excitement in the three years between Osende’s first research visit and his team’s arrival, “and they were more than willing to help,” he said. They offered land for the solar array station, brought food from their gardens and became true believers, “and that meant a lot to me … that I could achieve this dream.”

When the day came to flip the switch for a test, nothing happened.

“I was so tense,” Osende said. “I sat down and had to think. It was such a simple thing but I couldn’t see it. When I looked at the schematic on how the inverters were wired, that’s when it occurred to me: I had designed a 24-volt system and I was trying to use a 12-volt system.”

He made the fix and the power went on.

“It was so big,” Osende said, gushing in stream-of-conscious superlatives. “Everybody was clapping – the volunteers, the villagers, everybody. We let the system charge up all night … and the next night at 7 the power went on … I have never been so happy in my life … Up to then, it had not sunk in that it would happen. … Was I dreaming? I guess it really happened. It was really, really something!”

Osende returned to Uganda in May 2011, after graduation, to check on the project and was amazed at the transformation in the trading center. It was vibrant at night, and he found a makeshift “house” had been constructed between two other houses – and around an external security light. He learned that Janet Musevini, the wife of Uganda’s president, had visited Kitembe.

Then came the news in September that lightning had struck the solar arrays and knocked out the power. Osende’s grandmother Sarah, 85, a former teacher, was blunt with him:

“She said, ‘You introduced people to power, and now they can’t live without it. They keep bugging me every day: when is it going to be back on?’”

Osende met with Abraham, who joined with Dease to cover the $6,000 repair costs. Osende’s cousin, Denis Bazalirwe, who will begin master’s degree studies in software engineering this fall at St. Thomas, traveled from Kampala to Kitembe to assess the problem. He returned a dozen times to coordinate repairs, including installation of a lightning mast, and collaborated by phone and email with Osende and Abraham. The system was fixed last Jan. 14.

Four days later, a St. Thomas group arrived to document the project for this magazine. Osende couldn’t make the trip, but his mom did, as did Molly Rolfsmeier. She is Abraham’s wife (and he joined her the following week in Kampala to go through a monthlong process to adopt Avory Nanyunja Abraham, a two-year-old Ugandan girl).

Villagers greeted the St. Thomas group with open arms – it’s rare that a muzungu (white person) travels through the area – and a party emceed by Robert Kayeyera, a Kitembe native who works for the president of Uganda and assisted with the repairs. Four hundred people jammed into a town square-like area where the solar array is located for speeches, music and dancing by the Kitembe Cultural Drama Group. This writer, after thanking the villagers for their warm hospitality, had the privilege of flipping the switch … and the power was on!

As satisfied as Osende is, he wants to do more, and he is not alone. Michori, his mom, and the Caring Hearts organization in Kitembe are raising funds to build a health care clinic up the hill from the trading center. Dr. Simon Emms, a biology professor at St. Thomas, hopes to find funding to bring lights to other Ugandan villages and demonstrate the university’s commitment to sustainability and carbon neutrality.

Osende views the Kitembe project as proof that “you don’t need a million dollars” to bring light and happiness to others, and he always thinks about it when he goes into a dark room at work.

“The motion sensor that turns on lights here reminds me of the project,” he said. “It brings back memories of how, at the end, we saw the lights come on. It gives me joy. It makes me believe that at least one of my biggest dreams, that the reason I went to school, that the reason I became an engineer, that the reason I actually live, is being achieved – to make the world a better place.”

And Osende never will forget what it was like that first night 17 months ago, when his St. Thomas team walked through the dark to its lodging a mile away.

“You get on top of the hill and you can see the trading center,” he said. “All this darkness around us and this stream of lights along the road that showed the trading center. That was something else. That was something I will never forget.”

Read more from St. Thomas magazine

In a former retail storefront on a rut-filled dirt road in Ndejje, a poverty-stricken area southeast of Kampala, the first Hope Medical Clinic opened in November 2007. The sign outside says “Eddwaliro,” Ugandan for “health care,” in bold red letters, and 40 to 50 people show up every month or treatment of malaria, typhoid fever and the flu.

In an abandoned house two blocks off Kasubi Road, a bustling north Kampala thoroughfare jammed with merchants selling food, a second Hope Medical Clinic opened two years later. Patient No. 2,000 walked through the door in early January.

And three miles away on Bombo Road, the Ruth Gaylord Maternity and Pediatric Hospital is taking shape on three acres of land donated by the Archdiocese of Kampala on the grounds of Jinja Kalori (Built on a Rock) Church. Two buildings are complete and will open in March, and construction will begin on a third building when funds are available.

These are impressive achievements – the result of efforts of a St. Paul priest disturbed by the lack of quality health care for the poor, a native Ugandan overseeing every detail of operations pro bono, and dozens of generous Minnesota donors. Everywhere you go and every person you talk to, one word seems to be repeated over and over: miracle.

“This is testimony for how miracles happen,” Monsignor Charles Kasibante, vicar general of the archdiocese, told an audience of 200 people on a mid-January day at a formal blessing of the hospital. “This hospital was not only wanted here but it was needed, and lives will be saved.”

“I didn’t expect the hospital to be this big,” said Father Richard Kakoma, pastor of Jinja Kalori. “People are very happy about it. They call it a miracle.”

“This man is a miracle worker,” said Father Dennis Dease, president of the University of St. Thomas, as he points to Charles Lugemwa ’03, a St. Thomas master’s in software engineering alumnus who lives across Bombo Road and supervises the hospital’s construction. “With his abilities and my big rosary, we are going to complete this project!”

The crowd laughed as a translator restated Dease’s remarks in Ugandan. He held up a wooden rosary seven feet long and with beads two inches in diameter. “This is the biggest rosary that I have,” he said, “and I’m going to need a really big rosary to raise the rest of the money” ($90,000 is needed to construct the third building).

The ceremony ended in song and dance, and people wandered through the buildings. Dozens waited for free immunization shots or fittings for hearing aids; 5,330 were donated and delivered in March in Kampala by the Starkey Hearing Foundation of Eden Prairie. Visitors marveled at the size and scope of the buildings, and Dease and Lugemwa found themselves in an unfinished room reminiscing about how the project began.

Dease never intended to become a health care entrepreneur in his spare time, but one day several years ago a Twin Cities businessman told him about “minute care” clinics that he wanted to establish in his native Ghana. He asked Dease to look at the clinics and he said yes – but only if the businessman would continue on to Uganda with him to ascertain the possibility of clinics there.

Dease turned to Lugemwa, a Uganda Revenue Authority administrator already helping St. Thomas by identifying prospective undergraduate students, to develop a business plan. Lugemwa admits he was “scared” by the challenge, “but then I prayed over it, and I realized we could do it.”

“The Ghana model was more like a business, a franchise type of approach,” Lugemwa said. “Ours is not a franchise; it’s the idea that the community sustains the facility. We employ professionals to run the facility and the people around it sustain the facility.”

Lugemwa also was attracted to the project for personal reasons. His baby daughter died several years ago because she received the wrong medication.

“The way I could contribute was to make sure that did not happen to any other person,”he said. “With our clinics, we’re preventing that from happening.”

Lugemwa had friends who, when hearing him describe the clinics project, would say, “I think this guy is mad.” So, was he crazy? “Yes, sometimes!” he said with a smile.

The Ndejje location has struggled to break even because of its location; the lower income of residents, many of whom are subsistence farmers; and the higher costs of doctors whose travel expenses need to be reimbursed. Consequently, modest profits from the more successful Kasubi clinic have subsidized Ndejje.

“We made mistakes,” Lugemwa said. “If I were to choose a site again for a clinic, I still would choose Ndejje, but that was a learning point. We wouldn’t give up just because we selected the wrong site. We benefited in terms of the knowledge we gained.”

Four employees staff Kasubi. An administrator, two nurses and a laboratory technician work fulltime and receive free lodging and two meals a day, and a doctor drops in to check on patients. Lugemwa calls or visits regularly, too. The renovated house has a reception room with a small pharmacy, overnight rooms for men and women (two beds each), a laboratory and a pediatric ward.

Administrator Daphine Namyenya, 27, was the clinic’s first employee and makes 250,000 Ugandan shillings ($125) a month. She oversees the staff, patient files and appointments, prepares monthly financial statements and keeps meticulous handwritten records; there are no computers. She is proud to open a ledger that shows the clinic treated 153, 178 and 100 people the last three Decembers; two-thirds were first-time
patients and the rest were returners.

“Those are great numbers,” Lugemwa said. “It shows the need for a place like this. We always want more new patients, and when they return, that shows we are doing a good job.”

The clinic had two patients the morning of the January visit by a St. Thomas delegation: a young girl with malaria and 56-year-old John Tibenkna, who lives in the neighborhood and came in at 2 a.m. with a high temperature, an upset stomach and the sweats. Namyenya, who lives upstzairs, summoned a nurse from an adjacent apartment building and they put him on an IV.

“This is a good clinic,” Tibenkna said. “My family members have been here – my children and grandchildren. They are taking very good care of me.”

Lugemwa said Tibenkna was a typical patient in terms of his illness – most patients have malaria, typhoid fever or diarrhea – and the clinic’s treatment philosophy.

“Other clinics do not have lab facilities,” he said. “They treat you without knowing the illness you have. It is trial and error. We insisted on having a lab here. Before you are treated, you are tested. We also don’t want to have to refer them to a hospital. That means the patients will need to pay more than they can afford, and it’s like you are condemning them.”

Over time, Dease and Lugemwa realized the need for just that – a hospital. The conditions for pregnant women at Mulago, a large public hospital in Kampala, shocked Dease.

“For me, it was something like out of horror movie,” he said. “Mothers were giving birth on the floors in rooms and in corridors. It was really a very disturbing picture, and that was what prompted us to decide to find a better way to serve mothers in delivery. I think Charles captured what the mission of this hospital is when he said our motto should be, ‘Every mother goes home with a healthy baby, and every baby goes home with a healthy mother.’”

A hospital, however, would be expensive. As plans were drawn up and the price tag jumped over $200,000, Dease mulled over ways to raise funds. Monsignor James Habiger, the retired Minnesota Catholic Conference executive director who lives at St. Thomas, became aware of plans for the clinics after reading a Dease column about Lugemwa in the fall 2008 issue of St. Thomas magazine.

“The hospital will become a model for the rest of the country in terms of care for women and then for their children,” Habiger said. “It will save so many lives.”

“I didn’t ask him for money,” Dease said. “He came up to me one day and said, ‘I want to be part of it.’ He has been very generous, as nhave others. Roberta Mann Benson (another benefactor) spontaneously told me one day that she wanted to make a substantial contribution.”

Habiger, as the lead donor, asked Dease if the hospital could be named for Ruth Gaylord, a lifelong friend who taught music in Minnesota schools during her career. She was flattered and embarrassed by the attention, but an acquaintance told her she was being “too Minnesotan.” Describing herself as a “plain, ordinary woman,” she asked Habiger why her name should be on the hospital.

“And he told me, ‘Because I want women in Africa to know that a plain, ordinary woman in America cares about them.’”

Hope for the City, a Minnetonka-based nonprofit that distributes corporate surplus materials around the world, has donated $800,000 in medical equipment, supplies and furnishings to the clinics and hospitals.

“When Father Dease started talking about what he wanted to do with the clinics, we wanted to be part of it,” said Megan Doyle, co-founder of Hope for the City with her husband, Dennis Welsh, chairman of Welsh Companies, a Twin Cities real estate firm. ”We said, ‘Let’s do it.’”

Brian Mark, president of RBC Tile & Stone in Plymouth, Minn., is another benefactor. He donated all of the floor and wall tile for the hospital buildings as well as funds for a wall around the hospital grounds because he thought it was important to be involved in this kind of humanitarian effort.

Gerald Schwalbach, a Twin Cities real estate developer, and his wife, Sue, made donations for the hospital’s labor and delivery room and a convent and chapel that will be built on the property.

Dease and Lugemwa knew how important it would be to hold down hospital costs, and they came up with an idea on how to avoid acquiring land, paying rent and holding a mortgage.

“Uganda is 90 percent Christian, and there are churches all over the country,” Dease said. “We put two and two together and we approached the Archdiocese of Kampala. The archbishop said he would donate three acres of property from this parish, Jinja Kalori, for us to build our hospital.

“Then we began to realize other advantages to being associated with a very large parish. One of those is instant marketing. Another is instant credibility, because not all health service providers here are people of good will and not all the pharmaceuticals distributed are bona fide. We also realized that the parish would be a source of volunteers who could go out and teach people about water, mosquito nets and the importance of child immunization.”

A final advantage is the hospital’s interaction with the Catholic Church – a tradition that Americans have valued for more than two centuries. The Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary Reparatrix, founded in Uganda in 1948, will staff the hospital.

“The African people tend to see healing as not just a physical reality but also a spiritual reality … that spirit is an active agent in a person’s recovery,” Dease said. “That became another plus in terms of putting this hospital next to a church.”

Dease also is delighted that Dr. Timothy Schacker, a 1978 St. Thomas alumnus who is director of the Infectious Disease Clinic at the University of Minnesota, will be involved. Schacker has made more than a dozen trips to Uganda over the last five years to do research on why drugs for HIV-AIDS patients have different outcomes on Ugandans and Americans.

“There will be opportunities for our medical students in residency to assist at the hospital and participate in what Charles and Father Dease are creating,” Schacker said. ”Their model is interesting because it’s sustainable. It could be a game changer in medical care in Uganda.”

As hospital construction continues, Lugemwa and Dease are grateful for many things.

Lugemwa talks about how, next to his family, the greatest gift he has received in his lifetime “is the gift of education – a gift that makes me do what I do” – and he credits St. Thomas with imbuing in him the spirit of volunteerism.

“I never did this before. I used to see so many people get involved in community service work, and I love it,” he said. “You can have money, but you might not be happy. I do this, I don’t get any money, but I feel happy. That’s what life is – it’s not just about money.”

Dease nods as Lugemwa speaks and says his friend’s greatest gift is that “he embodies as much as anyone I’ve met the mission of St. Thomas.

“How do you count the value of the lives that he already has saved, and will save?” Dease asked. “He serves the common good. That’s what St. Thomas is all about, and the day we forget that is the day the lights go out.”

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But the path to arrive there is far different from the one most Americans would follow. An intuitively smart young man growing up in Uganda, Kisitu lacked the education, business acumen and finances to carry out his dream.

Enter St. Thomas and a chance meeting seven years ago between Kisitu and Father Dennis Dease, who was in Kampala on business. Kisitu was working as a guide and driver, and Dease asked him why he didn’t go to college. His response: he couldn’t afford it.

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“He called me later and asked me if I was really interested in going to school,” Kisitu said. “I said yes, and he said he would see what he could do to help. Two weeks later, he sent me admissions information about St. Thomas. I was startled.”

Kisitu applied. A strong letter of recommendation followed from New York Times East African Bureau Chief Marc Lacey, attesting to Kisitu’s intelligence and organizational and problem-solving abilities. Kisitu had served as driver, guide, translator and aide to Lacey and other reporters.

Kisitu arrived in Minnesota in 2006, took English Language Service classes on campus to brush up on his speaking and writing skills, and majored in entrepreneurship. He developed a business plan, graduated in December 2009, spent a year working in customer service at a Best Buy store and returned to Uganda to open 1000 Shades of Green, which offers safaris in Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania and Madagascar.

Mike Moore, director of the William C. Norris Institute in the Opus College of Business at St. Thomas, worked with Kisitu on his business plan. Kisitu obtained a $75,000 loan to start the business and today has two vans and two drivers to handle safaris and tours.

“The plan was well put together,” Moore said. “Morgan knows the industry and the challenges he would face, and spent a lot of time examining how he would market his business through the web, tour groups and his St. Thomas connections.”

Kisitu’s experience is similar to that of many other Ugandan students who matriculate at St. Thomas. They are highly intelligent and perceptive young men and women but they need a connection, a lucky break or an angel – and in Kisitu’s case, all three crystalized when he met Dease.

“Ugandans have a huge appetite for learning,” Dease said. “They know the opportunities are limited, and it is like a small miracle for them to get a college education in the United States. They are grateful, and I know that they will make a huge contribution to society.”

After receiving their undergraduate degrees, mostly in the sciences, engineering or business, Ugandans gravitate in one of three directions: they return to their homeland to find a job, stay in the United States for graduate school, often at St. Thomas, or remain in rhe United States indefinitely to work.

Kisitu, 33, wanted to return to Kampala to be with his family and to pursue his dream, and in the process became involved as a supporter of two nonprofit organizations. He gives Kibera Girls Soccer Academy in Nairobi 40 percent of his profits from referrals and 10 percent of other safari profits, and he contributes clothes, food and money to the Kumbaya Child Care Foundation, an orphanage.

“I want to make a difference in my community,” he said. “I have been helped a lot. St. Thomas gave me a great opportunity – my education. I thought, ‘I have to keep this chain going.’ In Africa, there are so many people with so many needs. I can help the underprivileged here.”

Charles Lugemwa feels the same way. When the 2003 master’s in software engineering alumnus returned to his job at the Uganda Revenue Authority, he decided to help recruit undergraduate students for St. Thomas and became involved in the Hope Medical Clinics.

“My prayer was, ‘How do I come back to Uganda and be a different graduate?’” Lugemwa said. “Many of us go to the United States to study and come back to work … but how as a graduate can you make a difference in the community?”

Olivia Lunkuse wants to make a difference, too. She graduated in 2002 from Makerere University in Kampala with a degree in tourism and worked for a safari company and a travel agency, but got frustrated with the industry and decided on a career change.

She went to work in 2005 for Infectious Diseases Institute in Kampala. The institute, which does research and provides clinical resources for HIV-AIDS victims, intrigued her but she wanted to be more than a clerk. Her brother Peter Musimami, a 2004 master’s in software engineering alumnus who is a health information technology specialist in Uganda, told her about St. Thomas, and she enrolled in the Master of Social Work program.

Lunkuse, 33, interned with the Domestic Abuse Project, graduated in 2009 and worked for a year at Catholic Charities in Minneapolis before going home.

“My plan was to come back to the institute and incorporate the work of domestic abuse and how it interrelates with HIV-AIDS,” she said. “But IDI said, ‘We don’t talk about that here. People come to IDI to get free medications, but this is not the place to talk about domestic abuse.’ I thought, ‘There has to be a way to get these women some help.’”

She decided to focus on gender-based violence issues and is seeking funding for her “Voice Project.” She left the institute in January, volunteers at an HIV clinic and is doing research on a Makerere University project to examine the impact of global health initiatives on the health care system in Uganda.

“My dream is to create a center for women where they would be safe,” she said. “I want to work with women who are abused, who are vulnerable. They need to find a way to deal with their situation. They don’t know their rights.”

Albert Kertho and Godino Kalungi, who graduated from St. Thomas last December with degrees in biology and biochemistry, respectively, are in graduate school and medical school with every intention of one day working in Uganda.

Kertho, 24, grew up on a farm, attended a Catholic high school in Kampala and chose St. Thomas over three other Midwest schools because he knew other Ugandan students here. He is in a master’s and doctoral program in plant pathology at North Dakota State University in Fargo in hopes of developing winter wheat resistant to leaf, stem and stripe rust diseases.

“Uganda is 80 percent farmland,” he said. “It depends on agriculture for its livelihood. Food is grown mostly to eat. I want to see agriculture move to a higher level, to increase production by preventing diseases. Smaller farmers cannot afford to buy pesticides. They are living on $1 a day. If they can grow more crops, they can sell more.

“Every time I go home, I talk to farmers about their crops and the need to increase production. They don’t know how, but they will listen to me.”

Kalungi, 25, began dual-degree medical doctor and master’s in public health studies in January at St. George’s University in Grenada. Sandy Grieve, a former St. Thomas trustee, and his wife, Flo, are paying for Kalungi’s room and board at St. George’s, which has a program for tropical medicine and has provided a full-tuition scholarship. After a five-year residency, likely in England, he hopes to create a network of clinics in Uganda for family and rural medicine.

“My dad died because he had no access to health care,” said Kalungi, a graduate of St. Henry’s College, an all-boys Catholic high school. “Many villages don’t have doctors, or the nurses are overwhelmed with work because there are so many patients. This has to change, and I can help make a difference.”

Doryne Tunanukye and Francis Ssennoga are alumni who have remained in the Twin Cities, for now.

Tunanukye, 27, grew up in Kampala and, with her sister Mavreen Ananura, followed their brother to St. Thomas in 2004. The sisters each hold bachelor’s and master’s degrees from St. Thomas – Tunanukye in electrical engineering and software engineering and Ananura in accounting and business administration.

“I like to make things work, to handle something from concept to completion,” said Tunanukye, a project engineer at Wunderlich Malec in Minnetonka since 2008. She expects to eventually return to Uganda “once I have the skills to be independent” because she wants to own a company.

St. Thomas taught her more than just book skills but also “how to work on a team and ask questions,” she said. “The professors were so open, and classes were small enough that we could get one-on-one instruction. That was a huge plus.”

Ssennoga’s aunt, who works in the Binz Refectory at St. Thomas, encouraged him to enroll here. The one-time seminarian and photographer earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in computer science and software engineering before founding Ssensoft, a software applications consulting company. He is serving a two-year term as president of the Uganda North American Association.

“St. Thomas gave me the opportunity to acquire knowledge that I would not have received in Uganda,” he said. “St. Thomas taught me how to do things – to build things that help people. It also gave me role models like Dennis Dease and Patrick Jarvis (a computer science professor).”

He is unsure if he ever will move back to Uganda, but his company and his association work provide the opportunity to accomplish two objectives. “I want to keep one foot in America,” he said, “and one in Uganda.”

Lugemwa speaks for all Uganda alumni and students when he reflects on the value of a St. Thomas education.

“The greatest gift is the gift of education,” he said. “I have utilized it, and it’s helping everybody here in my country. People are seeing what we are doing, learning from us and benefiting from the same gift. Everything else can go away, but that gift never will go away.”

While his kids were having the time of their lives, the St. Thomas associate professor of mechanical engineering unfortunately had other things on his mind. Between carousel rides, Abraham kept checking his cell phone for messages. Headlines like this one – not only in the United States but in Europe, Australia and New Zealand – explain why: “The Monckton Files: Bombshell!!! John Abraham to be Sued!!!”

Abraham had tangled with Scotland’s Christopher Monckton, one of the world’s most prominent global-warming skeptics and a sought-after speaker by the kind of  organizations that share his skepticism.

In fact, what became a global confrontation between Abraham and Monckton can be traced to an invitation that the Minnesota Free Market Institute extended to Monckton in October 2009 to speak on the Bethel University campus in Arden Hills. In his talk (not sponsored by Bethel), Monckton maintained that scientists are wrong about warming temperatures, rising sea levels, ocean acidification and even problems facing polar bears. At last count, a YouTube video of that talk had received 259,517 views.

“I knew I needed to respond,” Abraham recalled. “I could not let that go unanswered,and I asked myself, ‘If I don’t, who will?’” He spent that winter researching Monckton’s statements to the Minnesota Free Market Institute.

“I thought, man, this guy is a great speaker and he is very convincing. If I didn’t know the science, I would believe him. Frankly, the nonscientists in the audience didn’t have a chance. They had no way of knowing what he said was not true. I felt Monckton took advantage of them and he knew he was taking advantage of them.”

As part of his research, Abraham wrote to the authors or the directors of organizations that had published papers that Monckton referenced in his Bethel lecture. In case after case, the scientists wrote back to say that Monckton had it wrong.

If you believed Monckton, Abraham said, you would believe that: the world is not warming, sea levels are not rising, ice is not melting, the ocean is not heating, scientists are lying and there’s a conspiracy.

Abraham’s calm and cerebral response took the form of an 83-minute video that he made available on the web in late May 2010. And there the point-by-point rebuttal sat for some weeks, for the most part unnoticed. That changed, and dramatically so, when George Monbiot, a reporter for the Guardian newspaper in England, wrote about Abraham’s work.

“Viscount Monckton’s assertions have been comprehensively discredited by professor of mechanical engineering John Abraham, at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota,” Monbiot wrote. “Abraham, like the other brave souls who have taken on this thankless task, has plainly spent a very long time on it.

“The results of Abraham’s investigation are astonishing: not one of the claims he looks into withstands scrutiny. He exposes a repeated pattern of misinformation, distortion and manipulation. Some of Monckton’s assertions are breathtaking in their brazen disregard of facts.”

Picking a fight with ‘quite a dragon’

The story might have ended there, but Monckton tossed gas on the fire by responding with the kind of verbal attacks that attract audiences to professional wrestling.

In his initial response, Monckton said Abraham’s comments were a “hilariously mendacious 83-minute attempted rebuttal” that was “delivered in a nasal and irritatingly matey tone (at least we are spared his face – he looks like an overcooked prawn).”

He also wrote that Abraham was “snake-like” and “his deliberately dishonest personal attack on my integrity and reputation is an ingenious fiction.”

But Monckton was just getting warmed up. On the Alex Jones radio and Internet program, Monckton described Abraham as “this wretched little man” who “only belongs to this half-assed Christian Bible college.” Monckton described Abraham’s response as “complete fabrication” and “lie after lie after lie after lie.”

Jones, for his part, called Abraham’s response a “scurrilous list of fiction” and asked Monckton: “Doesn’t he know that you’ve routed all these other fraudulent professors and this time he’s picked a fight with quite a dragon?”

“I don’t think he’s realized it yet,” Monkton replied. He later gave Father Dennis Dease’s email address and encouraged viewers to “email this creep of a president.” (It marked the first time, Dease later said, he’d been called a creep, at least in public.) In the first of repeated threats of legal action against Abraham and St. Thomas, Monckton said, “We are looking at a legal case if we can’t get any sense out of the president.”

Global movement’s salvo ‘fired by a quiet, unassuming professor’

News of the dust-up was still mostly confined to the Guardian and websites that follow climate change.

As the environmental reporter Peter Sinclair blogged: “There’s a building storm of indignation out there among those literate in science – who have gone from depression and despair at the tsunami of fossil-fueled ignorance that’s passed for reporting – to areal resolve and willingness to fight back, not just for the planet, but for the very idea that objective truth exists, and that science is a tool to find it.

“One of the opening salvos of that movement,” Sinclair wrote, “was probably fired by a quiet, unassuming professor at a Catholic university in St. Paul, who did not set out to place himself in the center of a storm.”

A New Zealand-based website devoted to global-warming topics, meanwhile, posted news about the controversy under a headline: “Support John Abraham.” It quickly received more than 1,000 letters of support from around the world.

While news of the controversy was spreading around the world among those following the climate-change debate, back home Abraham wasn’t even a blip on the media radar. At least not until Casey Selix, then a reporter for the online MinnPost, got wind of the story and found that if you Googled “John Abraham and Christopher Monckton” you’d find more than 21,000 search results (as of 01/05/12 it is 27,500). She spent days researching the topic before filing two stories that appeared in July 2010.

“Quite simply,” she wrote, “the scientific community’s inability to explain the risks of climate change on Earth to the public propelled Abraham into action. … Observers and scientists around the world have hailed Abraham’s ‘A Scientist Replies to Christopher Monckton’ as one of the best attempts yet to take on Monckton.”

The Selix stories caught the attention of other reporters; within days newspaper readers across the Twin Cities, state and nation began seeing headlines about the controversy.

It is likely that, worldwide, no other St. Thomas professor has been written about more than Abraham, with the exception of 1968 presidential candidate Sen. Eugene McCarthy, who taught sociology at St. Thomas from 1946 to 1948.

“I thought there would be criticism about my response,” Abraham said, “but I didn’t realize how large the story would get. Initially, it was not a clear path. From the very beginning, though, I have always been concerned about the impact this might have on the University of St. Thomas. I didn’t want my actions to have a negative effect on the university.”

Abraham also is concerned that in his effort to present accurate science on climate change, he will be seen as a “lefty trying to score political points against conservatives.

“I really try to quiet the political rancor on this subject,” he said. “Both sides need tocome together to find solutions to this problem that cannot only help the environment but also fix the economy. I encourage people to work hard to bridge the cultural dividewe have on this issue.

“People on both sides need to be sensitive to the concerns of others. Some of those concerns are well-founded. If we can find ways to work together on mutual goals, we can make some progress toward solving this challenging, but not insurmountable problem,” he said.

Top-down support

In the summer of 2010, when Monckton first threatened legal action, Dr. Susan Huber,St. Thomas’ executive vice president and chief academic officer, called Abraham to her office for a meeting.

“I thought uh-oh, I’m gonna be in trouble,” he recalled later. “But when Dr. Huber called me into her office, she just wanted to make sure I was doing OK. What a great surprise.”

Abraham was in for another surprise when he joined other faculty members at the president’s fall convocation, where Dease shares news and sets the tone for the coming year.

“We can take great pride in scholars such as John Abraham who place their scientific learning and expertise in service to the larger good, even at the risk of personal disparagement,” Dease said. “To his credit, Dr. Abraham knew well that of which he spoke and despite the mounting pressure he did not flinch.

“Thank you, John, for the manner in which you carried yourself! You have brought distinction to this university community, and we are proud to be associated with you. … His presentation was factual and respectful. He reflected so very well the civility that has become a hallmark of this university community.”

Abraham would tell you that the concept of civility is as important to him as the scientific methods he teaches his engineering students. “If I stoop to name-calling, I lose my credibility,” he said. “When Monckton began calling me and Father Dease names, I knew he had lost the battle.”

To maintain his impartiality he does not accept funding for climate research. When he gives speeches (since the Monckton controversy he averages one a week) he never asks for an honorarium. If one is given, he asks that the check be made out to St. Thomas. If a check is made out to him, he gives it to charity.

Beyond Monckton

If Abraham led a busy life before his response to Monckton, it has gone into overdrive. In recent months, he has been asked to provide climate information to the U.S. Congress and the Minnesota Legislature.

In addition to reporters, he has been interviewed for a documentary that was broadcastby the BBC (despite Monckton’s efforts to block it). With two colleagues, he created an international “Climate Science Rapid Response Team” of more than 140 scientists who are available for media interviews, and he supported the creation of a legal-defense fund for climate scientists threatened with legal action.

About John Abraham

To understand Abraham’s interest in climate change, it helps to know that his field, mechanical engineering, has subdivisions. One deals with mechanical things, like engines and pumps and gears. Another deals with fluids and heat transfer, which is Abraham’s field. As he explains it, “the earth’s atmosphere and its oceans are both fluids. The principles are the same, whether it’s the planet or in the laboratory.”

Abraham, 37, earned his three engineering degrees at the University of Minnesota. He received his doctorate in 2002 and came to St. Thomas right out of graduate school,first as an adjunct instructor and later as a full-time faculty member.

Abraham has published 130 peer reviewed journal and conference papers, and in addition to teaching, he’s been an engineering consultant for the past 15 years in the aerospace, biomedical, manufacturing and energy industries. He’s done work on stents and other devices that treat heart disease, on chronic-pain devices, and even methods to cool radar systems on jet airplanes.

He sees great value in blending his consulting and teaching careers. “I spend more of my time on industrial research than on teaching. I enjoy working on real-life problems with students. I get calls from companies that are having trouble with a product, and then I work with students to get working products.”

Between family, teaching, research and consulting, Abraham estimates that since thefall of 2009 he has carved out 1,000 hours of unpaid time to work on climate research and the Monckton controversy.

He decided to jump into the fray, he said, “because it’s just that important.”

“My agenda is to safeguard the future of the planet and to make sure that real science gets out there. And I’ll tell you what, we have some tough decisions to make and we can only make good decisions if we really know the science. The more we argue about whether or not climate change is occurring, the longer we delay making those decisions.”

Editor’s Note: St. Thomas magazine welcomes and encourages a civil dialogue on the contents of the magazine. As publishers, we understand that some of the topics covered in the magazine can elicit strong opinions from our readers. We would like to remind you that any comment deemed a personal attack on an individual – whether the subject or another comment contributor – will not be approved for posting.

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“The goal is to supply all the power, forever, that a cell phone tower would need, independent of the grid,” says engineering professor Greg Mowry.

“It would provide electricity, particularly in places where there is no electrical grid, like the developing world,” adds professor John Abraham, who is co-leading the project with Mowry. “In many cases, they power cell phone towers with diesel generators that are expensive and very dirty. Our goal is to use clean energy solutions like this one to increase communications throughout the world.”

Abraham and Mowry are at the forefront of the innovative, interactive and impressive research making up the heart of the St. Thomas School of Engineering’s mission: To help local businesses, engage students and provide engineering solutions that help make the world a better place. And the school’s body of work – which includes well-chronicled research and projects on renewable energy solutions like biodiesel – is gaining a growing reputation nationally and internationally, along with attracting top students from across the United States.

“We strongly believe that you can’t walk out of here without getting your hands dirty on a challenging set of problems,” says Don Weinkauf, dean of the School of Engineering. “These are not cookbook or token ‘hands-on’ projects. These are real projects with true needs and the potential for significant impact on the technologies that our society benefits from every day.”

Engineering student Brian Plourde couldn’t agree more.

“The classes here have hands-on projects that are fun for the students while also teaching us real-world situations,” says Plourde, who finished his undergraduate degree in mechanical engineering in January 2010 and is enrolled in the school’s graduate program for mechanical engineering. “The professors expect students to be able to come in and have a positive impact on the project, while being independent enough to expand the students’ engineering skills.” Plourde, who grew up in Somerset, Wis., also considered Michigan Tech, the University of Minnesota and the University of Wisconsin before choosing St. Thomas. He said he had learned through comparing notes with friends and co-workers that “St. Thomas is more personal and problem-based than other engineering schools.

“It is a very personal program in that professors really tie you into their classes and projects by getting to know you and your specific interests,” he says. “Students also can count on professors to provide connections to industrial jobs or help with extracurricular projects that students choose to work on.”

Weinkauf says the School of Engineering prides itself on that type of interaction between faculty and students.

“What sets the St. Thomas School of Engineering apart from most is that, in addition to the technical depth and breadth, we have made room in the experience that fosters the qualities that make a complete person and a great engineer,” he says. “These are the qualities of an engineer that are advanced across the university in our philosophy, theology, ethics and foreign language classes, not just in ‘Thermodynamics’ or ‘Embedded Systems.’”

Plourde is among four St. Thomas students working on the miniature wind turbine-modeling project, which is being conducted through grants given by Windstrip LLC, an international wind turbine company interested in developing the technology.

“A typical day involves setting up a series of finite analysis test runs and meetings with both professors and industrial representatives who are involved with the project,” Plourde says. “I get involved with group brainstorming in both the aerodynamic and business sides of the project. It is a unique experience to work with an entrepreneur. It is a fast-paced atmosphere. And each run takes about four days of preparation and calculations, so there is little room for error.”

Mowry says the reason Windstrip turned to St. Thomas for this project was twofold. First, Mowry and Abraham’s previous energy, power and wind turbine work has become well known within the engineering community. Second – and perhaps most important – is that St. Thomas does not end up owning any of the intellectual property that comes as a result of the professors’ and students’ efforts.

“These are the types of projects where we are doing very innovative work for companies, but when the day is over those companies own the intellectual property,” he says. “John and I get acknowledged for our work, the school gets money to engage students, but the companies don’t have to worry about what John and I develop and losing the intellectual property rights. And the IP rights are essential for those businesses.”

In addition to the wind turbine modeling this year, Mowry has worked with students to develop the first portable biodiesel production system – called Generation One – which can fit in the back of a pickup truck.

“They all say the same thing about our graduates.  That our students hit the ground running and know that there is far more to being an engineer than a calculated solution.”

The project’s goal was to help farmers and bring efficient, clean fuel to poor communities. The system, created by Mowry and his students converts plant and animal oils, as well as alcohol, into biodiesel. Because it is a small, mobile solution, Generation One may even be able to power St. Thomas shuttle buses by using alcohol and leftover oils or fat from the cafeteria.

Abraham also is very involved in other projects ranging from heat transfer, fluid mechanics and computational methods, to his work on projects with the Department of Energy at the Los Alamos National Laboratory and as a researcher on a National Science Foundation grant.

“In order to deal with energy supply and the environment, we need to increase our supply of clean energy,” Abraham says. “Wind and biofuels, in my mind, are the most promising in the long term. For instance, wind power has a great potential in Minnesota, and developing wind power would increase the job base here. It also provides a lot of money to farmers who typically receive around $5,000 per year for each wind turbine they have on their property.”

Weinkauf said the School of Engineering continues to thrive because it attracts top talent like Mowry and Abraham to its faculty.

“Every member of our faculty has a doctoral degree from the top engineering schools in the country,” he says. “There is no compromise in the talent that we have put together. Doctors Mowry and Abraham would thrive in any of the top programs in the country, but they have chosen St. Thomas for what we are and what we aren’t. The biggest winners from that choice, of course, are their students.”

Mowry and Abraham’s students also are benefitting from a chance to be on the front end of what could become a huge technological development for the cellular telephone industry. While many people are familiar with the gigantic, windmill-style turbines now becoming more and more visible on farms across the Midwest, the miniature turbines being worked on by Mowry, Abraham and their students could have an enormous impact on reducing the energy costs for cell phone towers – especially in developing countries.

With Americans ditching land lines in record numbers and relying exclusively on cell phones, the industry’s growing need for affordable, clean energy solutions means St. Thomas’ work on the miniature wind turbine project couldn’t have come at a better time.

Although costs to operate cell phone towers are proprietary, Mowry estimates there are several hundred thousand towers already in operation around the world, with another 100,000 added annually.

The new wind turbines would be used solely with cell phone towers, Mowry notes, because zoning laws and energy costs – a typical American home uses two to four times as much energy as a cell phone tower – limit the feasibility of their use elsewhere. Cell phone providers and companies would be the most likely businesses to purchase the end product of Mowry and Abraham’s research project.

Plourde says it is rewarding to know that he can combine his passion and education to help create potential solutions that better the world and help make communications more affordable around the world.

“Both Greg and John have been extremely helpful in guiding the project along and in making sure that I’m able to have the freedom to learn and troubleshoot problems,” he says. “It’s been a great experience.”

Weinkauf says employers also are having a great experience with University of St. Thomas graduates like Plourde.

“They all say the same thing about our graduates,” he says. “That our students hit the ground running and know that there is far more to being an engineer than a calculated solution. That’s what makes me proud of what we are doing, that we are developing a broad range of students with a perspective.”

Mowry adds that the School of Engineering’s ongoing success is leading to more and more cuttingedge projects, which he knows will challenge students while positioning them to land top jobs in the engineering world.

“It’s really a win-win situation for everyone,” he says.

About the author: John Nemo is a frequent contributor to the magazine. He can be reached online at www.NowShareThisBlog.com.

In 2001 St. Thomas received a generous five-year, almost $2 million grant from the Lilly Endowment Inc. as part of a nationwide effort to stimulate a theological exploration of the idea of vocation on college campuses. As Father Dennis Dease, president of St. Thomas, commented when the grant was announced, this initiative “will allow members of our university to consider deeply the meaning and mission of their lives.”

So far “Beyond Career to Calling,” as St. Thomas’ Lilly program is titled, has funded more than 30 different projects on campus in a wide variety of departments and disciplines. They include the vocation of professional women, life values in medicine, law students serving the marginalized, team-teaching theology “bridge courses” such as Theology and Politics, and engaging first-year students in St. Thomas’ urban mission.

“Beyond Career to Calling” differs from similarly funded Lilly programs at other campuses because its framework is decentralized, that is, faculty and staff propose, then direct, individual projects tailored to their department or discipline. “Beyond Career to Calling” is coordinated by Dr. Mary Reichardt, Catholic Studies and English departments. Here are three recently funded projects.

Vocation in Action: Design of a Breadfruit Shredder for Haiti

By Dr. Camille George, engineering, and Dr. Ashley Shams, Classical Languages

One interdisciplinary project, funded by the Ireland Grant for New Initiatives (one part of the Lilly Grant), involved St. Thomas’ engineering and French students in helping women’s cooperatives in Haiti harvest breadfruit for use as a flour substitute in making breakfast bars for school children.

Breadfruit, a naturally occurring food in Haiti, spoils quickly in that highly humid environment. With Dr. Camille George’s mentorship, St. Thomas’ engineering students designed a manual device to shred fresh breadfruit evenly. The breadfruit is then sun-dried, and the resulting dried shreds have a shelf life of up to a year.

With Dr. Ashley Shams’ mentorship, St. Thomas’ French students then created appropriate visuals for the Haitian users of this breadfruit shredder to understand and maintain that technology. The final design for the “Tommie Shredder” was produced by a graduate student in manufacturing engineering and will be delivered along with the culturally appropriate manuals developed by the French students to Haiti very soon.

St. Thomas’ mission to “Challenge Yourself (and) Change Our World” is especially evident in this project. Developing appropriate sustainable technology and helping ensure that the users can work with it effectively provided a meaningful context and objective for students in both major fields to anchor their academic learning. Most importantly, the project helped foster a theological sense of vocation in the students’ lives. The engineering students understood that their skills can be channeled toward creating a world in which every citizen has adequate food and water and access to a renewable energy supply. The French students used their language skills in an authentic service context while working alongside other professionals. For both sets of students, the experience gained from this project broadened their understanding of work as a calling as well as their awareness of cultural and global issues.

Vocation and the Christian Intellectual: A Faculty Reading Group

By Dr. John Boyle, Theology

This ongoing project, funded by the initial Lilly grant, gives faculty the opportunity to reflect on the vocation of the Christian intellectual in a small group setting and through discussion of works of literature. While participants have varied from year to year the group generally numbers about a dozen and meets weekly during the semester. So far, our discussions have centered on Flannery O’Connor’s The Habit of Being, Augustine’s City of God, Dante’s Divine Comedy, and, this year, Plato’s Republic.

The overarching goal of the discussions is to encourage faculty to think afresh about what drew them to the life of the mind in the first place and to renew a sense of their vocation as Christian teachers and scholars. Over the years, many participants have commented on how refreshing it is to have time to discuss with colleagues serious ideas in a sustained manner – too often a rarity in academic life. Many of these conversations spill out into corridors and faculty offices throughout the week.

Some participants in the discussion group teach the books in their classes; most do not. Nonetheless, our readings affect our teaching in that they serve to give new shape to ideas discussed in the classroom and provoke us to think anew about how these ideas can be more effectively communicated.

The life of the mind ought not be an isolated affair. These faculty discussions on the vocation of the Christian intellectual have helped foster a sense of the intellectual life as a shared enterprise, one first shared with our faculty colleagues and then with our students.

Computers and Callings: The Vocation of the Computer Professional

By Dr. Carole Bagley, Quantitative Methods and Computer Science

During the 2004-05 academic year, I directed a program funded by the Ireland Grant for New Initiatives that focused on interdisciplinary computer careers and on viewing one’s computer-related profession as a vocation. I was assisted in the implementation of the program by Dr. Mari Heltne. The program invited a series of guest speakers to campus, with follow-up student discussion sessions. These events were then capped by a student writing contest.

Each invited speaker works in a field where an interdisciplinary approach to work is required, and each understands his or her job as a “calling,” that is, as work that goes beyond merely bringing home a paycheck.

The presenters and topics included Dr. Noreen Herzfeld, professor of computer science at St. John’s University, who spoke on artificially intelligent computers and their theological impact; Curt Melzer, an attorney and CIO of Dorsey and Whitney law firm, who discussed his passion for working with computers in a law practice; Greg Johnson, director of channel management at Thrivent Industries, who presented on the importance of climate in an organization and how professionals can make a difference in the world through their work; Jon Giftakis, senior scientist in neurological therapy research at Medtronic, who spoke on a model for “calling” that a company can instill in its employees; and Dr. Jill Tarter, director of the SETI Research Lab, who discussed working with passion for what you love.

A week after each guest presentation, the Computer Science Club sponsored a student discussion facilitated by a professor. These discussions were open to all students with an interest in pairing computer science, information systems or quantitative methods with another discipline of study. They focused on issues related to the presentation, and specifically on matters of theological vocation and calling in the computer field. Finally, students had the opportunity to submit essays on the topic of computer science as a vocation for a prize.