I am excited to join the Mortenson Center in Engineering for Developing Communities and work with our incredible team of students, faculty, and staff to maximize the University of Colorado Boulder's positive impact in the world.

Over the coming months, the MCEDC team will be refreshing our mission and vision, and restructuring the Center to align our teaching and research activities with measurable global impact. As a team of engineers, we work in service of global health and in partnership with other researchers, technology developers, implementers, and policymakers.

As a researcher and practitioner in global health and development engineering, I am confident that we can make a positive difference and leverage the tremendous resources of the University of Colorado for the benefit of our partner communities around the world.

I remember first accosting Professor Bernard Amadei in the hallway of the Engineering Center with a proposal for an Engineers Without Borders-USA project in Nepal back in 2002 and being a guinea pig for the first EDC courses Bernard offered. I am personally and professionally indebted to his leadership, and I am committed to continuing to scale our impact.

Evan Thomas, PhD, PE, MPH

Associate Professor; Dept. of Civil, Environmental and Architectural Engineering

Mortenson Chair in Global Engineering

Director, Mortenson Center in Engineering for Developing Communities

University of Colorado Boulder

MCEDC was a co-organizer of a side event at the third annual Multi-stakeholder Forum on Science, Technology and Innovation (STI) for the Sustainable Development Goals.  EDC student Kimmy Pugel represented both the Mortenson Center and the UN Major Group for Children and Youth at the event held on June 5, 2018. The STI forum is a place where member states, major groups, and other stakeholders can influence the review and evaluation of the SDGs. The objective of this side-event was, in part, to focus specifically on the water and energy development sector and discuss how local knowledge is often disregarded in favor of external (i.e. scientific and professional) knowledge. Key recommendations for action included, "Valuing indigenous knowledge as another kind of knowledge, and not a lesser knowledge," and "Local community participation in decision making processes and technology design can provide a sense of ownership."