HMA is excited to announce that we’ve secured a grant for the design, purchase and installation of solar water heating infrastructure for two of HMA’s dorms! This will take care of 100% of the water heating needs for both these buildings, helping to integrate sustainable living into everyday dorm life at HMA.

Our thanks go out to the Resnick Family Social Impact Program, which, in partnership with the Institute for Sustainability and Energy at Northwestern University (ISEN), supports student projects that address significant local and global challenges in sustainability and energy, and is funding this project.

A group of six Northwestern University engineering students with varied research backgrounds, together with faculty advisor, ISEN co-director and HMA Board member Prof. Sossina Haile, applied for and won the grant. 

In their grant application, the students outlined two important goals in service of sustainability and education. First, the group proposed that it would research available technology and identify and install the most appropriate sustainable system for the HMA dorms considering factors such as the solar power density in Debre Birhan, specific community needs, and budgetary constraints. Second, the group proposed design elements that will make the technology they install a physics teaching tool by making the system “visible”. They will do this by, for example, incorporating physical displays that show the carbon footprint offset associated with each panel, and also by collaborating with HMA physics faculty to design a teaching curriculum about solar power that faculty will include in HMA’s standard physics course.  

As Dr. Haile notes, “The technology we will deploy at HMA through the support of the Resnick Family Foundation and ISEN has the potential to be truly transformative by demonstrating the power that students have for implementing change, and by showing just how easy it is to include solar energy in new building construction. I am thrilled to be part of this.” 

HMA is committed to both modeling and teaching sustainability, and we are honored that these enterprising students selected our campus as the site for the realization of their ideas. We are also grateful to Dr. Haile, whose research focuses on energy issues, and whose expertise as an advisor to the student group was instrumental in achieving this outcome. 

We look forward to working with the student group—Eden Aklile, Lawan A. F. Aladefa, Brendan Badia, Elise Goldfine, Austin Plymill, and Louis Wang—on this important project. We hope they will document their "design thinking" process so we can share it as a permanent display for students to learn from for years to come. We feel certain that the example of these young leaders will spark innovation and inspire future student work in the field of sustainability.