Overview
Opportunity Description
AguaClara Cornell is a multi-disciplinary program founded at Cornell University that invents and designs sustainable water treatment systems. The Cornell next-generation technologies currently provide clean water to over 80,000 people in Honduras and Nicaragua. This trip is part of a broad effort to both improve these technologies and spread climate friendly technologies globally including to the United States.
Application Deadline: October 15, 2019
The annual Engineering in Context trip to Honduras provides an opportunity for team members to learn about the context of drinking water infrastructure in Honduras. Although each community is a new context, there are many similarities between communities in Honduras and other resource poor communities in both Latin America and North America. The trip provides an opportunity to hear the passion and dreams of community members, to see the common infrastructure failure modes associated with traditional engineering approaches, and to see the impact of designing for sustainability. The lessons learned are applicable to resilient infrastructure design regardless of the context. The role of feedback in systematically improving the design of infrastructure is a key insight from the visits to both traditional and AguaClara water treatment plants.
The second major goal of the trip is to transfer new knowledge from the Cornell team to our partners in Honduras. This varies by year, but typically includes new fabrication techniques, new unit processes or new scales of processes.
The trip to Honduras costs approximately $2400 to $2700 per person for lodging, food, and transport round trip starting from Ithaca (or Newark airport in NYC).
2020 Program Dates: January 4th - January 18th
Faculty Supervisor: Monroe Weber-Shirk
AguaClara Cornell
Civil and Environmental Engineering
Cornell University
Hollister Hall 220
(607) 216-8445
