Sep 26, 2008 - Claremont, Calif. - Professor of Chemistry and Global Clinic Director Shenda Baker will be a featured speaker at the 11th Annual Colloquium on International Engineering Education in Newport, R.I., Nov. 6-9, 2008.

Sponsored by the University of Rhode Island, the colloquium will focus on its theme of “Building Parterships for Global Education.” Baker will discuss how Harvey Mudd College (HMC) expanded its innovative Clinic Program to include global partnerships.

According to Baker, “Global Clinic is an extraordinary experience for students. It is, however, more demanding of resources than the ‘domestic’ Clinic program, and logistical challenges arise. As the program develops at additional sites and gains additional sponsors, it promises to enrich the educational experience of our students and add a vitally important international dimension to the science and engineering curriculum at Harvey Mudd College.”

The Clinic Program, an internationally recognized hallmark of Harvey Mudd College, engages juniors and seniors in the solution of real-world, technical problems for industrial clients. Founded as an innovation in engineering education in 1963, this program has been expanded to other HMC academic departments and copied by institutions worldwide.

Since the Clinic Program’s inception, more than 1,150 projects have been completed for corporate, national laboratory and agency sponsors. Companies retain all intellectual property rights that arise out of the project, and it is not uncommon for HMC students to be named on patents. Typically, Clinic sponsors file numerous patent disclosures at the end of their projects.

Students must take responsibility for team organization, project management, budgeting and producing real results on schedule. Originally conceived as the Engineering Clinic, and still a required capstone project for engineers, the program now includes students majoring in computer science, mathematics and physics.

Recognizing that the world is becoming increasingly “flat,” HMC’s Department of Engineering began the Global Clinic Program in 2005 to prepare students for the future challenges of functioning as innovative engineers and scientists in a global context. Global Clinic plans to support long-term sponsored engineering and science projects in which teams of Harvey Mudd College students collaborate with teams of students from partnering schools in Central and South America, Asia and Europe.

The Global Clinic Program incorporates intensive language instruction and immersion in the culture of the region during an extended visit to the partner school. During a one-month visit to each partner school, the student teams work on developing the project plan and collaborate with faculty advisors and company members of the team. HMC students and their international collaborators stay fully engaged during the academic year, participating in weekly video/audio conferences, collaborative presentations and design reviews at the sponsors’ facilities.

In 2007-08 the partner institution was the National University of Singapore (NUS) and the sponsor was Applied Biosystems (Foster City, Calif.). For 2008-09 the Singapore connection has expanded to include Nanyang Technological University (NTU) with a project sponsored by the Lien Institute for the Environment, a Singapore-based philanthropy. The HMC-NUS team will continue last year’s work on the design of a low-cost real-time PCR instrument. The HMC-NTU team will travel to Vietnam to begin assessing the feasibility of designing a household-level arsenic treatment system.

More information can be found at the Global Clinic web page.