Tech Graduate Student Awarded Second Mondialogo Award

For the second time, Sustainable Futures IGERT graduate student Helen Muga has received the prestigious Mondialogo Award, sponsored by Daimler and the United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), recognizes innovative sustainable development. Muga, along with three students from Papua New Guinea University of Technology, was honored with the competition’s continuation award for a sustainable wastewater treatment project at the awards ceremony, held Dec. 10 in Mumbai, India. Over 809 teams competed, with 3,200 participants from 89 countries, but only 31 were selected to receive funding. The Mondialogo’s Continuation Award acknowledges a link between Muga’s original 2005 team of Sustainable Futures Institute students and their partnering universities who were able to see their sustainable construction materials project to fruition with the awarded seed funding. Water storage tanks for harvesting rainwater in rural Philippine communities were implemented by Dan Nover, who was based at Partido State University as part of Michigan Tech’s Peace Corps Master’s International Program in Environmental Engineering.

The project addresses two of UN's eight Millennium Development Goals. The first is “to eradicate extreme poverty and hunger.” The other goal, “to ensure environmental sustainability,” aims to “reduce by half the proportion of people without access to safe drinking water” by 2015. Muga was sole presenter for her project. She had only seven minutes to pitch her project to an audience including Daimler employees and UNESCO officials. “It’s a very select group of schools within the United States and globally,” said Professor James Mihelcic (CEE). “To be a winner two times is quite an accomplishment.” Mihelcic and Assistant Professor Amlan Mukherjee are Muga's coadvisors. See Tech Topics article by Karina Jousma from January 25 for complete story. Also see the attached photo of Helen accepting the 2008 Mondialogo Award from Hans d'Orville, Assistant Director-General for Strategic Planning UNESCO.

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