Four Tufts students won awards last month from the second annual Dow Sustainability Innovation Student Challenge, sponsored by the Dow Chemical Company.
Winning criteria for the grants focused on feasibility and innovation, as well as how the project was connected to Dow's 2015 Sustainability Goals, according to Assistant Provost Vincent Manno, who is also a professor of mechanical engineering.
"The overarching idea of the Sustainability Innovation Student Challenge is to focus on the triple bottom line, which is to support ideas that are not just green, but also environmentally, socially and economically sustainable," Mike McCaffrey, a spokesperson for Dow, said.
"If a solution or program doesn't have all three components, we don't want to do it. By definition, it's not sustainable," McCaffrey said.
The grants are for $10,000 each, according to Manno, who convened the Tufts faculty committee that selected the winning candidates from Tufts. The awards were announced on Oct. 15.
Tufts, along with six other universities — University of California, Berkeley; University of Cambridge; University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; Northwestern University; Peking University; and the University of Sao Paulo are in partnership with Dow.
Winners from all seven universities, as well as representatives from the partner universities and Dow, convened at an awards luncheon at the Sackler School of Graduate Biomedical Sciences on Oct. 22, Manno said.
The committee selected eight finalists from around 30 to 40 applicants, according to Manno.
The Tufts committee reviewed a diverse set of applications, Manno said.
"We had a lot of perspectives from different fields," he said. "To level the playing field, we had a format for people to describe their projects, which emphasized the potential impact of what they were doing."
Karen Kosinski, a Ph.D. candidate in environmental and water resources engineering, won one of the grants. She worked on a primary prevention project in rural Ghana to prevent urinary schistosomiasis, a disease caused by a common parasite transmitted through contaminated water.
Kosinski's project established a recreational water area for more than 500 children in Kwabeng, a town in Ghana.
Dow awarded the grants for research on sustainable solutions to environmental, economic and social problems.
Kosinski said that for schoolchildren, the primary risk of contracting schistosomiasis comes with recreational contact. Since 2007, her project has built a recreational area that opened in 2009 and precipitated a dramatic decrease in disease in the rural community, according to Kosinski.
She believed the project has potential to be implemented in other areas of the world. "The project is considered a sustainable form of research; it capitalizes on rainwater collection instead of using electricity or chemicals," Kosinski said.
Most winners use the award to further work on their research project, according to Manno.
"I spent a big chunk of it in Ghana this past summer to buy extra supplies and pay the translator and lab technician," Kosinski said.
Georgia Kayser, a Ph.D. candidate at The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy in the Water: Systems, Science and Society program, was another winner. She studied technological interventions to improve access to clean water in Honduras and El Salvador.
Kayser collaborated with non-governmental organizations in the area, including the International Rural Water Association, which distributed technologies to the communities.
"Previously, there was no evaluation or knowledge about how effective interventions were," Kayser said.
Kayser recently presented her project at the International Symposium on Rural Water Services. She said her project's methods could be applied to provide sustainable water services in countries by NGOs interested in using similar techniques.
The other two Tufts winners were Ellen Tyler and Amanda Beal, both students at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy in the Agriculture, Food and Environment Program.
Tyler and Beal researched farming and fishing communities in Maine with the goal of bringing them together.
"We both grew up on the coast of Maine, where seafood and coastal resources are a big part of the food economy," Tyler said.
The pair hosted five forums for fishermen and farmers throughout Maine to discuss collaboration through policy, marketing and infrastructure, according to Tyler.
"Fishermen and farmers talked about potentially sharing transportation and going to farmers' markets together or possibly having a CSA [community-supported agriculture] box that includes shellfish," Tyler said.
The project has resulted in a document that will be delivered to the governor-elect of Maine, Paul LePage. It outlines the policy challenges of such collaboration, according to Tyler.
