Jin Wang
About Me: I'm a 22-year-old undergraduate student studying Applied Math with a minor in Economics at Columbia University's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences in New York. I moved with my parents from China when I was two years old to live in the U.S. Our first few years here were tougher than the lives of average Americans. We lived in a poor neighborhood in Atlanta, which meant that schools in the neighborhood weren't very good and both parents had worked long hours to make ends meet. In a small way, these early years shaped my decision to tailor my studies to fight poverty.
Past projects: At Columbia, I joined the Uganda team of the Engineers Without Borders (EWB Uganda). Through Matt Bassinger's research, we got connected to Pilgrim, an NGO working in Soroti Uganda. Pilgrim mentioned that there was strong business potential in providing food processing engines for the community. Our club applied for and won a $10,000 grant from the United States Environmental Protection Agency to purchase these engines. In addition to modifying the engines so they'd run on jatropha fuel instead of diesel or gasoline, we won another $75,000 grant to grow and process jatropha seeds as fuels for the engines of our food processors.
What I did last summer: I got to visit Mbola, a village in Tanzania, where the Millenium Villages Project is currently working on introducing stoves that use less firewood than traditional three-stone stoves. Most of the women I met in Mbola cooked indoors. This meant that they were constantly inhaling harmful gases and burnt particles from the stoves. My research focused on comparing the traditional stove to three other stoves in order to determine which stove was fastest and used the least amount of wood.
Why this matters: In Uganda, where deforestation is a growing problem, I heard some people say they skipped meals because they hadn't found enough firewood with which to cook but this is not yet the case in Mbola. Fuel efficient stoves will use the same amount of wood for a longer period of time and will allow people to spend their productive hours doing something besides fetching firewood. And though most of the people I surveyed would rather keep their three-stone stoves than spend hard-earned money on sophisticated firewood stoves, I hope this research in some way oils the machine of Mbola's economic development.
Past projects: At Columbia, I joined the Uganda team of the Engineers Without Borders (EWB Uganda). Through Matt Bassinger's research, we got connected to Pilgrim, an NGO working in Soroti Uganda. Pilgrim mentioned that there was strong business potential in providing food processing engines for the community. Our club applied for and won a $10,000 grant from the United States Environmental Protection Agency to purchase these engines. In addition to modifying the engines so they'd run on jatropha fuel instead of diesel or gasoline, we won another $75,000 grant to grow and process jatropha seeds as fuels for the engines of our food processors.
What I did last summer: I got to visit Mbola, a village in Tanzania, where the Millenium Villages Project is currently working on introducing stoves that use less firewood than traditional three-stone stoves. Most of the women I met in Mbola cooked indoors. This meant that they were constantly inhaling harmful gases and burnt particles from the stoves. My research focused on comparing the traditional stove to three other stoves in order to determine which stove was fastest and used the least amount of wood.
Why this matters: In Uganda, where deforestation is a growing problem, I heard some people say they skipped meals because they hadn't found enough firewood with which to cook but this is not yet the case in Mbola. Fuel efficient stoves will use the same amount of wood for a longer period of time and will allow people to spend their productive hours doing something besides fetching firewood. And though most of the people I surveyed would rather keep their three-stone stoves than spend hard-earned money on sophisticated firewood stoves, I hope this research in some way oils the machine of Mbola's economic development.