Harvard students participated in a project at UTEC

By: Lucia Solis

Dennis Zhang and Bryant Huggins, Mechanical Engineering students from Harvard University, arrived in Lima a month and a half ago to join Plants R Us, the winning project of the UTEC- Harvard Collaboration Program, in which students from the two institutions made a joint effort to propose solutions to the pollution generated by illegal mining in the Peruvian amazon basin, specifically in the Madre de Dios region.

Along with six UTEC students, Bryant and Dennis work on what will be the testing of the project prototype: a tool that improves the level of agriculture in affected areas; for which they had intense weeks of work focused on the design and development of this device, which measures the concentration of different chemical substances in the soil. This will be complemented by a campaign of awareness and relevant information for farmers. 

Dennis points out that the objective at this stage of the project, led by professors Carlos Ríos (UTEC) and Joost Vlassak (Harvard) is to provide the locals with the means to implement profitable agriculture instead of illegal mining, which has contributed greatly to pollution and deforestation.

Plants R Us will be presented in August at Harvard, in the final stage of this program which has already five editions; the latter with the support of the 100,000k Strong in the Americas fund, an initiative of the United States Department of State that promotes partnerships between universities for the development of student mobility programs based on innovative and sustainable proposals.

"Interacting with people, being part of their culture and learning the language have been invaluable opportunities ..." says Dennis, about his first time in Peru. For Bryant, "Working on this project and with UTEC students has been inspiring to continue preparing for engineering at a higher level".

By: Lucía Solis.