In this episode, we meet Dr. Evan Thomas, a professor of Civil, Environmental and Architectural Engineering and Aerospace Engineering Sciences, and director of the Mortenson Center in Global Engineering. Dr. Thomas shares how his family’s interests in journalism, engineering and entrepreneurship, as well as his experiences with Engineering Without Borders, inspired him to tackle global poverty through his work and teaching.
Terri Fiez
Hello science fans, creative thinkers, and lifelong learners, and welcome to Buff Innovator Insights. I'm your host, Terri Fiez, Vice Chancellor for Research and Innovation at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Buff Innovator Insights is a behind-the-curtain look at some of the most innovative, groundbreaking ideas in the world. Even better, it's an up-close and personal introduction to the people behind the innovations, how they got their start, how they became world changers, and how they are making tomorrow better for all of us. Today, I'll introduce you to Evan Thomas, a professor of civil, environmental, and architectural engineering and aerospace engineering sciences. He's also the director of the Mortenson Center in Global Engineering, which envisions a world where everyone has safe water, sanitation, energy, food, shelter, and infrastructure. Evan's technical background is in water and air testing and treatment applied in developing communities and remote sensing and internet of things technologies for water monitoring, sanitation, and energy resources. His research has been funded by NASA, the World Bank, the Gates Foundation, and others.
Evan also founded a company Sweet Sense Incorporated, which is supported by USAID and NSF, the National Science Foundation, to develop and apply satellite-connected sensors monitoring drinking water services. Each day, sweet Sense is monitoring millions of people's water supplies across East Africa.
In this episode, we'll learn about how Evan's family's combined interest in journalism, engineering, and entrepreneurship influenced his education and lifelong work, how his experiences with Engineering Without Borders help focus his unique combination of technical skills and his desire to have global impact, and how his teaching and leadership are cultivating a new generation of engineers that can better understand and address the root problems of global poverty, not just the symptoms. Let's meet Dr. Evan Thomas.
Thank you for joining me, Evan, for this discussion today. I'm really looking forward to the conversation.
Evan Thomas
Thanks, Terri. It's great to be here with you and to continue to build our CU community, even though we've all been virtual for pretty much a year now.
Terri Fiez
So let's go ahead and get started. You were born in Canada and your parents immigrated to the United States to Marin County when you were four for them to be entrepreneurs. Can you tell us about your parents and the influence that they had on you?
Evan Thomas
Yeah. Both my parents were journalists in Canada and I was born in Montreal when they were both bureau chiefs of their respective news organizations. And when I was a kid, they started what was one of the first commercial email companies in the world in the early '80s. And they moved us to San Francisco and to the Bay Area, and they scaled that company. It's called Media Telematics. And so I ended up growing up in California and I didn't become an American citizen until I was a senior at CU.
Terri Fiez
Your grandparents also had an important influence on you. What'd you learn from them?
Evan Thomas
So I'm an engineer and my parents are journalists. And most engineers have a close family member who is an engineer. So usually a mom or a dad who's an engineer and introduces them to engineering. In my case, it was my grandparents, my grandfathers, actually. On my mom's side, my grandfather was a professor of entomology. So studied insects at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. And he was a pretty accomplished guy. He got his PhD at Trinity College in Dublin at the age of 21. And my grandfather on my dad's side never went to college, but he was a stowaway on merchant marine ships and the P&O steamship line before World War II. And then he was conscripted into the British merchant marine during World War II and rose through the ranks from stowaway to chief engineer on these ships. And he was sunk, I think twice by German U-boats. And so he was a self-taught engineer while my other grandfather was an academic. And I think I got from them this interest both in being part of the university and in inventorship and in engineering.
Terri Fiez
What a legacy that is. That's really interesting. What were your favorite subjects in school and some of the outside activities you participated in?
Evan Thomas
In high school, I really enjoyed physics, and that's when I really got a sense that maybe I could be good at this. Math was challenging for me because it was abstract. And even in undergrad, Calc III almost killed me and DiffEq. But it was always the applied math, like physics and thermodynamics and aerodynamics that I excelled at. And so in high school, when I realized I was good at physics, that's when I thought maybe that I could be in a technical field in college. Because my parents were journalists and they weren't engineers, I didn't really know a lot about engineering. I wanted to be an inventor like Tesla or Thomas Edison. And it was when I was visiting colleges that I realized, "Okay, well, a pathway for that could be engineering."
Terri Fiez
Now you say that you didn't have a role model from your parents to be an engineer, but you, in many ways, followed in your parents' footsteps. You were editor of your high school newspaper, and this led you to two interesting trips internationally. Can you share how this came about?
Evan Thomas
Yeah. Because of my parents, I was always interested in journalism, in particular, investigative journalism. And we always had family dinner talking about politics and current events and history. And so when I was in high school, I was the editor in chief in my senior year of a high school newspaper. And we got to travel. In my junior year, we developed a program to go to Cuba as journalists. We got a license from the Treasury Department to fly on a charter airplane out of Miami to Havana back in 1999.
And Terri, you might remember this. In 1999, there was a crisis between Cuba and the United States. There's a little boy, a little five-year-old boy named Elian Gonzalez who had left Cuba with his mom. And she drowned on a raft, and he was rescued and taken in by extended family in Miami. And it was a big international controversy because his dad who was back in Cuba wanted him back and his extended family wanted him to stay in Miami. And we as student journalists happened to be in Cuba in Havana while Elian Gonzalez was in the United States. So that was a really formative experience and seeing firsthand how these international relationships play out outside of the United States.
And then when I was a senior in high school, I organized a trip for our newspaper to Vietnam. And this was also formative to again see what these countries were like from outside of the United States.
Terri Fiez
So how did these two trips influence your future, do you think?
Evan Thomas
When I came to see you, I enrolled in both broadcast journalism and in aerospace engineering. I wanted to be a journalist like my parents, but I also wanted to be an engineer. And I chose aerospace engineering because during my campus visit to see you, I learned that 17 astronauts had graduated from CU. And I thought that seemed like a pretty great job, pretty amazing career path. And so like those astronauts and many thousands of alum of CU, I enrolled in aerospace. But I was also able to continue this interest in journalism.
And for me, these came together during my freshman year when professor Bernard [Amadei] in the Civil Engineering Department founded Engineers Without Borders USA. We were the first chapter anywhere in the world of EWB. It's now about 200 chapters across the country. And one of the things that I was attracted to with the idea of Engineers Without Borders was, of course, the adventure of travel and seeing new places, but not being a tourist, actually trying to make a contribution. And of course, I was a young undergrad. I was pretty impressionable. And the following summer in 2002, a couple of us as undergrads traveled to Nepal during a civil war. There was a ceasefire at the time, but it was still during the civil war between the Maoists and the government. And we spent about a month up in the Himalayas installing these computers and internet access and encyclopedias and training for this community. And that launched me into my career today, which is a direct outgrowth of being introduced to Engineers Without Borders here at CU.
Terri Fiez
Very interesting. As you mentioned earlier, you double majored in aerospace and broadcast journalism. And I know that it's very common for a lot of our students to want to combine very different areas together. How have these two complemented each other in your career?
Evan Thomas
I've found it very useful to have training as a journalist or at least have a degree in journalism. It's helped with communication. It's helped with my writing. It's helped with being able to work with people from diverse backgrounds and diverse professional experience and help with communicating across those backgrounds. And importantly, communicating our work and sharing what it is that engineers do every day to try to improve health and livelihood around the world.
Terri Fiez
That's great. So you began working with Engineers Without Borders as an undergrad, and then into your master's degree. Tell us about the project that you worked on and what came out of it.
Evan Thomas
In my junior year, Bernard Amadei got an email from a nurse that worked at the American embassy in Kigali, Rwanda, who was originally from Denver. And she told Bernard, who she had actually just read in the Denver Post about the formation of EWB. And she got in touch and told Bernard about a community in Western Rwanda that had health issues associated with dirty water and sanitation and indoor air pollution, and asked if Engineers Without Borders would come take a look.
And so Bernard forwarded me this email and we started a project in 2003 in Rwanda. And over the past what's now been 18 years, I've been involved in Rwanda, growing a project that was an undergraduate student-led project, where we had money from literally bake sales and car washes as well as the Engineering Excellence Fund and the Boulder Rotary Club into several national-scale programs that we continue to run in Rwanda.
So we started working in a village on basic access to water and clean cooking fuels and clean cookstoves. And in the past few years, we've scaled that now to a national program reaching about 2 million people with household water filters and household cookstoves. We've invested about $35 million in Rwanda. So that grew from a $5,000 student project to a $35 million nationwide health campaign all out of EWB.
Terri Fiez
That's really impressive. Now, after you received your master's degree, I know you went to work for NASA, which was really your dream. As you said, you wanted to be an astronaut. What was it like working at NASA, and then how did you continue pursuing your international work while you were there?
Evan Thomas
I finished my master's degree here in 2006, but I actually started at NASA in 2004 as a co-op, a cooperative education employee. So my first co-op rotation was in public affairs at the Johnson Space Center. And then I transferred into engineering, and I was an engineering co-op where you're actually a civil servant. You're an employee of the federal government while still a student.
And so I did several co-op rotations in the life support and habitability systems branch, working on technologies for water recycling and air quality for the space shuttle and the space station and the lunar outpost. And after I finished my masters in 2006, I started working full-time at NASA. And in that same time period, I brought Engineers Without Borders to NASA. I started the Engineers Without Borders Johnson Space Center chapter. And so my day job was as an entry-level aerospace engineer. And during lunch hours on Wednesdays and on evenings and weekends, I was running an EWB chapter, still working in Rwanda.
And over the next few years, I was doing a couple of things simultaneously, running Engineers Without Borders, I also started a company in 2007 that was an outgrowth of our work with EWB. It was called Manna Energy Limited. It was co-founded with a NASA astronaut, Ron Garan. and Ron and I came together to take the work we were doing in Rwanda and combine it with the United Nations carbon credit program so that we could actually have a revenue stream, a sustainable social business tied to drinking water treatment in Rwanda. And I was pursuing my PhD at the same time. So I was still a full-time CU student working with my advisor, Dave Klaus, in the aerospace department, and my PhD research was on my day job at NASA.
Terri Fiez
So how did you manage all of these things and keep all the balls in the air?
Evan Thomas
It was challenging, of course. I remember vividly, we would have meetings with the United Nations while again, I was holding down my day job. So there would be times where I would leave my desk at NASA and go hide in the vacuum chamber, these vacuum chambers that NASA built in the '50s and '60s for space suit testing. And I would hide in the vacuum chamber to take a conference call with the United Nations, or I would have my astronaut friends have to watch my cat and keep her alive while I was in Rwanda for a couple of weeks on vacation.
Terri Fiez
So let's jump ahead and talk about when things came full circle. You did this startup company. You reentered into the academic world at the same time. And in 2018, you returned to CU Boulder to lead the Mortenson Center. So it really started with your freshman year at CU Boulder. And now you're back as the director for the center. How does that feel to be director? And what do you want to achieve in this role?
Evan Thomas
The Mortenson Center in Global Engineering is both an academic program and a research center. So we have about 70 graduate students earning a graduate certificate in global engineering or a professional master's in global engineering. Those students do practicums in about 20 countries around the world every year, except of course, during COVID. A lot of those practicums have been virtual the past two summers. And then our research program is supported by USAID, the World Bank, the National Science Foundation, Autodesk Foundation, to work in about a dozen countries around the world actively with full-time staff and partners, working on projects such as water and sanitation on household and community levels or applying remote sensing to forecast drought. And for me, one of the most gratifying projects we have is support from NASA. We are 10 years after leaving NASA. NASA is now directly sponsoring our research to apply remote sensing data to drought forecasting in East Africa. It's a program that NASA and USAID co-run called SERVIR.
Terri Fiez
That's really exciting. What is it that you hope to achieve in your role as director over the next decade?
Evan Thomas
Here in the Mortenson Center, we're trying to contribute to the conversation around what it means for an engineer to contribute to global prosperity and poverty reduction. There are still 1 billion people in the world who don't have clean water. There are 2 billion people who don't have safe sanitation. And almost half the world's population still uses firewood every day to cook and stay warm. And these environmental issues contribute to the leading causes of illness and death globally, which include respiratory disease and diarrhea still today in 2021.
Global engineering as practiced by the Mortenson Center is a complementary field to global health and to development economics. But we go even further. We also like to look at the causes of poverty. So we train our students in things like history and development economics and global health. And we talk about the legacies of everything from colonialism all the way through to climate change. So our goal as the Mortenson Center along with a community of universities and government agencies and foundations and industry partners is to try to elevate that role of engineers to studying and offering solutions to the root causes of poverty, not just the symptoms.
Terri Fiez
That's excellent. So I know you're passionate about teaching. What do you teach and what is your favorite part of working with the students?
Evan Thomas
Our academic program in the Mortenson Center starts with a freshman-level class that we teach in our Global Engineering Residential Academic Program called Introduction to Global Engineering. And I had about 80 students in that course last fall. And at our graduate level, we have many students that also progress from a BS into a master's degree with us. I teach courses on things like data analytics for development or global health for engineers or impact evaluation, which are both breadth, exposing engineers to the concepts of global health, as well as technical skill development, like how you design an impact evaluation to generate evidence of what works, and equally importantly, what doesn't work in global development.
And this trains our students to be researchers as well as practitioners. Our alumni go on to work for the State Department or for USAID or found and run nonprofits like Bridges to Prosperity, which is run by two alumni of CU, Avery Bang and Christina Barstow. And that's what is most exciting about our students. Our graduate program as well as our PhD programs train CU engineers to go out and make a difference globally.
Terri Fiez
So I know there've been some changes over the last year with COVID. We're almost to our one-year anniversary. And what has COVID taught you about doing international work when you can't travel?
Evan Thomas
I used to travel about four to six months a year where certain meetings would be ones that I would fly into, into Kigali or into Nairobi to take meetings with USAID or a ministry of health, for example. Well, as soon as COVID hit, couldn't travel anymore. And our partners who are from Rwanda or from Kenya or from Ethiopia took those meetings instead. And you know what? Guess what? They did the meetings better, more cost-effectively, were able to sustain the relationships we're regularly then me flying all over the place, and we've learned to, as Obama said, lead from behind and offer a supporting role to the leadership by our partners who live full-time and are from the countries and communities where our research has focused.
Terri Fiez
That's really neat. So our final question. As you think forward to the next decade or two, what are you optimistic about and what is your hope for the future in your field and the breakthroughs that will be found?
Evan Thomas
Over the past 20 years, we've been thinking about what it really means to be an engineer working globally. And often, it's not necessarily about travel or about actually doing interventions. It's more about looking at what the science and engineering can tell us about how we can make sustained, lasting differences. In recent years, all of our partners and our funders and our own academic program have started to elevate our thinking to looking at the entire system behind access to basic services and trying to look at the causes of poverty and not just those downstream symptoms.
So as an example, two of our associate directors, Karl Linden and Amy Javernick-Will, for the past five years have been leading a $15 million project called sustainable wash systems. And Karl and Amy's project is looking beyond a water pumper, beyond a water filter, and looking at the political and social economy behind sustaining those services.
And so I'm optimistic that we're going to continue to see a recognition by practitioners and funders and other partners that we have to make the long-term investments in reducing poverty and providing access to safe and reliable services, which has been a problem forever. I mean, we still have 1 billion people who don't have clean water today. But it's getting harder because of climate change, which means that we're going to have to make even deeper investments and commitments. And as an international community, we need to start taking responsibility for the benefits that we've had from our use of energy, but also the consequences of that use of energy that is being felt in places that are the least responsible for climate change and are the most susceptible to climate change.
So there are major challenges, but I'm at least optimistic that we're starting to recognize this responsibility. And I think the international community is starting to recognize this. And hopefully over the next 20 years, we make the investments necessary to mitigate these impacts.
Terri Fiez
Well, thank you, Evan. This has been very enlightening and very inspiring to see what you've been doing for a long time. And I'm sure that this work will have really significant impact and already has. So thank you for your time today.
Evan Thomas
Thanks Terri. CU has always been the place to do this work because we have such a globally-minded community and such incredible students and faculty who want to take the technical skills that we can develop here in Boulder and apply them globally.
Terri Fiez
We've been talking with Dr. Evan Thomas, a professor of civil, environmental, and architectural engineering and aerospace engineering sciences, and director of the Mortenson Center in Global Engineering. You can learn more about Dr. Thomas and the Mortenson Center at colorado.edu/center/mortenson. For more Buff Innovator Insights episodes and to join our email list, visit colorado.edu/rio/podcast. I'm your host and Vice Chancellor for Research and Innovation at CU Boulder, Terri Fiez. It's been a pleasure. Innovation is for everyone. We can all make the world a more interesting and better place. Sometimes it just takes a spark. See you next time.
