UofM Wins 2020 Mexico-U.S. Innovation Competition

ITESO-Memphis Engineering Exchange

Mrs. Rebecca Afua Van Dyck-Laumann, JD, executive director of International Education Services, and Dr. Claudio Meier, associate professor of Civil Engineering, working together with partners at ITESO and ISEP (a non-profit international exchange network of which both universities are members), recently obtained a grant to increase collaboration between ITESO and the University of Memphis.  

The “ITESO-Memphis Engineering Exchange” proposal won a “2020 Mexico-U.S. Innovation Fund Competition” award through the “100,000 Strong in the Americas” innovation fund, established by a public-private partnership between the Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs at the U.S. Department of State and Partners for the Americas, a not-for-profit development agency, together with the Mary Street Jenkins Foundation, the Coca-Cola Mexico Foundation, and Sempra Energy. Partners of the Americas was founded in 1964, inspired by President Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress.  

As so many academic collaborations, the ITESO-UofM relationship started from a personal contact: Mrs. Zinnia Ron-Ferguson, a Guadalajara native who graduated from ITESO with a bachelor’s degree in Environmental Engineering, came to UofM to obtain her master’s in City and Regional Planning. As a graduate assistant at CAESER (then named the Center for Partnerships in GIS), she and her husband Nate Ron-Ferguson built the initial links with Dr. Hugo de Alba, a faculty member in the Department of Environmental Engineering at ITESO, the Jesuit University of Guadalajara, founded in 1957. Since 2015, four faculty and staff from UofM have taught summer courses at ITESO’s International Summer Program, including Dr. Meier, who visited and taught in Guadalajara in 2018 and 2019. Moreover, Dr. de Alba did a two-month exchange to Memphis, and five ITESO Environmental Engineering graduates have come to UofM to get their master’s in civil engineering, working with Dr. Brian Waldron and colleagues at CAESER. One of these graduates, Mr. Rodrigo Villalpando-Vizcaíno, currently works as a water project assistant for CAESER.

The awarded project is called “ITESO-Memphis Engineering Exchange (IMEE),” and seeks to establish a sustainable program of intercultural exchange and practical engineering learning for both Mexican and US undergraduate students. The IMEE program will allow ITESO and the University of Memphis to participate in an exchange partnership that lowers the barriers of coursework and cost for engineering students, offering participating students a unique opportunity to learn from both Mexican and US experts on hydrology and environmental engineering. 

The hybrid virtual-in person program will focus on a 2-week in-person program attached to ITESO’s International Summer school with a second 2-week component delivered at the University of Memphis, with 4 weeks of COIL (collaborative online international learning) components for all participants prior to arrival. The COIL component in the Environmental Engineering course at both institutions will be taught by Dr. Maryam Salehi (Dept. of Civil Engineering, UofM) and Prof. Daniel de Obeso (Dept. of Environmental Engineering, ITESO). The engineering summer course offered within ITESO’s Summer program, titled Hydrology and Limnology, will be co-taught by Drs. de Alba and Meier. In addition, there will be a two-week add-on option for Memphis students to enroll in Spanish-as-a-second-language courses at ITESO. 

ITESO students coming to Memphis will be offered research experiences for undergraduates in the Civil Engineering Department labs of Salehi, Jazaei, and Meier, collaborating with their numerous graduate students. Specifically, Salehi will lead ITESO students in research on lead in drinking water in homes and schools, Meier will support students in lab experiments on surface water-groundwater interactions, with field work in Mississippi River tributaries, while Dr. Jazaei will supervise students in lab experiments on contaminants in ground water and microplastics in agricultural soils. These research experiences will increase ITESO student’s expertise in lab and field research on water, with the added bonus of an international perspective on water research, fostering their interest in pursuing graduate studies. 

Students will earn college credit from their home institutions for participation in the programs. In addition, University of Memphis Students going to Guadalajara will be able to use the Spanish course for their non-engineering courses university requirements. Perhaps more importantly, they will have the opportunity to do impactful field studies on hydrology with their local counterparts in Mexico, building meaningful professional and academic relationships across international borders while contributing to the local community. They will conduct this field work under the auspices of multiple organizations, such as the Mexican Institute for Community Development and the Dirección de Planeación, Ordenamiento Territorial y Gestión Urbana (the local agency in charge of land and city planning). 

Della Burke and Van Dyck-Laumann, the Study Abroad Officers at ITESO and Memphis, respectively, will provide logistical support for the program. Dr. Michael Alijewicz at ISEP will be responsible for the grant’s implementation and reporting. Faculty members at ITESO and UofM (Meier, Salehi, Jazaei, de Alba, and de Obeso) will provide faculty support at both institutions. Meier is also the project’s director.

The University of Memphis looks forward to taking their established relationship with ITESO to new levels of collaboration! 

For more information on this grant or project, contact Meier at cimeier@memphis.edu.