Interdisciplinary Curriculum

Interdisciplinary studies allow scholars to expand their horizon, experience new perspectives, and provide additional rigor to their work. My academic work with both the Humanitarian Engineering and Social Entrepreneurship (HESE) and Information Sciences and Technology (IST) departments have drawn on those strengths.

HESE team - Makeni, Sierra Leone

    1. HESE courses Fall 2013 – Present
      Since I began my graduate studies in Fall 2013, I have been participating in HESE classes including the Spring semester project class in 2014, 2015, and 2016, as well as the Fall semester research dissemination class in 2013, 2014, 2015, and 2016. During the project classes I have acted as a mentor for several different teams and helped them to develop their projects for deployment during field research trips abroad. In the research dissemination class, I have worked on several publications and participated in group discussions while sharing some of my experiences living and working abroad. While working on the Mashavu mHealth venture, I was able to expand my knowledge about healthcare systems in developing countries and gain a better understanding of how data collection and other technologies fit into healthcare workflows. Other Mashavu experiences allowed me to learn more about Community Health Worker programs and how they could be augmented and improved. The GRO greenhouse project presented an opportunity to continue work on data collection, this time from the perspective of an emerging social enterprise. Finally, another HESE project related to micronutrition required me to delve into the literature on micronutrition and agriculture, two topics I would not have experienced without taking interdisciplinary HESE classes.


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    2. Graduate courses in Information Sciences and Technology
      The Information Sciences and Technology (IST) field is, by its nature, interdisciplinary. IST brings together scholars from Computer Science, Psychology, Sociology, and other fields, all with the common goal of studying people, technology, and information. The focus of my PhD in IST is on the use of technology in developing countries. I have taken courses in multiple different departments in order to gain knowledge about conducting research to these ends. This includes IST courses in data mining, social network analysis, and social theories of technology; a rural sociology course about conducting research in rural communities, and a geography course about interpersonal relationships in geographic space. I have also been conducting research with IST professors about some of these topics including community informatics, education and technology, social network analysis, and health data collection.


      kLab - a Rwanda incubator I will be working with

      kLab – a Rwanda incubator I will be working with

    3. Fulbright Scholarship – Study of Startup Incubators – Kigali, Rwanda
      In 2016, I was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship in order to spend ~9 months in Kigali, Rwanda conducting a study about startup incubators and entrepreneurship. As a small, landlocked country with few natural resources, Rwanda has decided to turn to Information Technology as a way to drive economic development. One focus of this strategy is promoting and enabling private IT enterprises to exist in the country. I will be studying the high-tech IT entrepreneurship aspects of this strategy by working with startup incubators (organizations that work with startups to grow their ventures) and conducting interviews with entrepreneurs, incubator staff, local experts, and venture capitalists to better understand the role of incubators. This work will also allow me the opportunity to work with Carnegie Mellon – Rwanda student and will be published as my PhD dissertation.
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