The children’s home was supposed to be a refuge. It was the place where children went to find safety and health.
Except the home wasn’t safe, and the children weren’t healthy. Stagnant water all around the site meant mosquitoes. Mosquitoes meant malaria. With no gas stoves, the residents cooked food using large, open fires indoors – even in the nursery.
There was only one tank of...
Growing up in the Karachay community within Clifton, NJ, most of Ece Fatima Koch’s friends and peers were first-generation Americans.
The Karachay hail from the North Caucasus – a territory that is now a republic of Russia. Several generations of Koch’s family lived in Turkey before her parents moved to the United States.
Language may often be a challenge. Cultural norms could get lost in translation. So...
Want to get Kyle Bareither talking?
Here are some suggested topics: deep-soil mixing, environmental remediation, in-situ bioremediation… or maybe even unconfined compression strength.
Clearly, this is a man who loves what he does and what he does is specialize in cleaning up former manufactured gas plants, working as an environmental engineer for Natural Resource Technology Inc. in Milwaukee. ASCE has selected Bareither as one of the 2016...
She didn’t know it at the time, but Yung Koprowski’s engineering career started when her parents, Arlan and Koo Carroll, moved out to the country.
“My father was an electrical engineer,” Koprowski said. “He essentially bought our house, gutted it, and rebuilt it. So we had a lot of home projects we worked on over the years. I was always impressed with how he could...
It wasn’t Rajan Jha’s finest moment.
“I hadn’t performed that great, I’m just being honest with you,” Jha remembers.
Report card day at Delhi Public School in Korba, India.
Jha’s literature teacher, Sreekala Madhavan, had left a hand-written note in the margin:
“‘You don’t even know how much potential you have,’” Jha remembers.
It was as if his academic career was struck by lightning.
“Those lines made me think, ‘You...
Ariful Hasnat, Aff.M.ASCE, used to travel with his family from their Noakhali home in Bangladesh to the capitol city of Dhaka.
Hasnat was only 7, but even then he wondered why it would take as many as seven hours to cross three kilometers by ferry.
“My father answered, ‘If you can build bridges over these rivers, then you can pass it in 10 minutes,’” Hasnat wrote....
Education has been a journey for Ange Therese Akono – both figuratively and literally.
Her studies started in her home country of Cameroon, took her to the leading engineering school in France, and then to a doctorate program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
One of ASCE’s 2016 class of New Faces of Civil Engineering Professionals, Akono now is a tenure-track assistant professor at the University...
The 2016 class of ASCE New Faces of Civil Engineering – Professional is ripe with diversity and difference.
They hail from completely different regions of the Americas, different parts of the world. They speak different languages, practice different specialties. Some work in the field; some educate. Each path to engineering excellence is unique.
But the common thread running through each story is that of service. Each...
