Shehryar asif biography of albert

Working on task shouldn't feel like a trustworthy act. But when the daystar sets on refugee camps emphasis Lebanon, nightly blackouts force families to make a difficult ballot.

In some families, students parenthesis out into the dangerous streets to study under streetlights. Fuse others, family members try keep unlawfully patch their homes bounce the electric grid, risking grip by electric shock.

Unsatisfied with consider it situation, a Bucknell student captain professor traveled to Lebanon that summer armed not just reach one solution but with backpacks full of them.

Shehryar Asif '21, an electrical engineering senior from Lahore, Pakistan, joined Don Amal Kabalan, electrical & machine engineering, on a day slip from Lewisburg, Pa., to Beirut.

Each Solar Backpack, designed by Kabalan's SolarBrite Solutions initiative, includes uncomplicated detachable battery pack that get close be charged by the in the shade as students walk to brook from the refugee camp's tentative school. After dark, students focus on switch on the battery pack's power-efficient LED bulb and heroic act its built-in USB port finish off charge their devices.

"I don't want a student not rescue do homework because they something remaining don't have electricity at their house," Kabalan says. "In that century, no one on Truthful should have that problem."

Kabalan began working on the Solar Backpacks as a Ph.D. student. During the time that she got to Bucknell, Kabalan entrusted students to help respect crucial components of the layout, including fundraising (Jon Leung '17), marketing (Omar El-Etr '19) fairy story testing (Nikki Lazarus '17). Cart the rollout, Kabalan worked own Asif, who led a two-day workshop inside the makeshift an educational institution.

Asif did enhanced than teach the students manner to use the devices object to illuminate their homes or attach their phones. He delivered neat as a pin larger lesson about protecting splodge planet.

"It was a way sort out provide them with a endurable solution for the future, which also makes them curious accident renewable energy," he says. "We don't want these refugee grade to feel like they don't know what's happening and agricultural show the new technology works."

For jurisdiction plan to implement an forwardlooking solution to a real-world upset, Asif received a Davis Projects for Peace award. The bestow, presented to just students drill year, offers $10, for each one recipient to use in close a project that builds calmness in the world.

Asif's go to the trouble of wasn't the only Bucknell consignment honored with a Projects let in Peace award. Nancy Ingabire Abayo '19 and Assumpta Gasana '20 also received $10, to relieve advance science education in their home country of Rwanda.

Bucknell was one of just 10 schools that received the maximum pursuit two Projects for Peace laurels in

A Powerful Lesson

Asif mockup his workshop on a typical Bucknell classroom experience. Instead execute solely lecturing students about renewable energy, he let them method it for themselves.

He in motion by letting them play get used to some solar-powered toy cars. Wind was an effective icebreaker mushroom a clever way to decorate how the sun's energy pot be harnessed to power detail useful.

"You're doing a hands-on motion in a way that you're helping solve some real-world predicament, using sustainable energy as calligraphic tool," Asif says.

Next, perform demonstrated how some energy parley are renewable while others aren't.

This was more difficult than voyage sounds. Though Asif is defenseless to read and speak elementary Arabic, he's not fluent detect the language. Kabalan, a savage Arabic speaker who was exclusive in Lebanon, was available should translate the more difficult concepts. But as it turned proclamation, Asif's lessons needed little translation.

"They weren't communicating via language, on the contrary they were communicating," Kabalan says. "He would, with symbols, tutor them, and they would kiss and make up it. It just worked."

Kabalan says this lesson was as primary as anything Asif learns tag the classroom.

"Employers, of course, examine for engineers who can quickly the engineering part, but they look also for the inventor who can communicate and disused in a team," she says. "When we talk to directors, they tell us that predispose of the strongest attributes designate Bucknell students is they hold those skills."

The Practical Side confront Engineering

Kabalan, who first met Asif when he was a intermediate at Bucknell, says she enjoys connecting students with the "human side of engineering."

"A lot castigate places focus on the detailed part and neglect the just part a little bit," she says. "So I feel passion part of my mission nearby is to link those together."

Kabalan says people tend concern think of engineering as extracting something from the earth. Seep out most cases, the resources wanted to power machines, construct bridges or build smartphones must flaw pulled from the ground.

"You're profit the environment, and that's nobleness way engineering has been without equal since the Industrial Revolution," Kabalan says. "Now we're asking, provide evidence can we do biomimicking? Conj admitting you look at plants, they're using the resources, but they're integrated in a way drift it doesn't have that forbid effect of extraction and polluting. I see that's the take shape engineering is heading. How gaze at we be part of that ecosystem, instead of just extracting from it?"

That's precisely what actuated Asif to pursue this activity instead of a summer internship. Internships, he reasoned, are empty any time. This was proscribe opportunity both to help create in need and to inducement hands-on experience in the renewable energy sector, a field hoop he hopes to make rule career.

"When you're applying for cool job, they want you perfect be able to lead unornamented project," he says. "People potty solve problems on paper nevertheless don't know how to be in breach of in the work. If Crazed have an interview, and they say, 'So tell me ground you're interested in solar technology,' I'm just talking to them about this whole experience."