Outreach & Volunteering

Science Olympiad

I recently volunteered to supervise the Wind Power event for both the 2023-24 Brown Science Olympiad Invitationals and the 2024 RI State Regional Competition at Rhode Island College. For this event, middle- and high-school teams compete by taking a written exam (on wind power and the power grid) and experimentally testing a wind turbine that they designed, constructed, and pre-tested. My responsibilities included writing the exam (for the Brown Invitationals) and bringing the turbine-tester. I meticulously crafted a 20-page written test that could be used not only at the invitational but also as a study guide for subsequent competitions. I included a broad range of questions, some challenging even for engineering graduate students. I re-engineered a turbine-tester, making it repositionable from a safe distance with a counterbalanced arm, and supplanting the multimeter with an Arduino / Python script to precisely measure the maximum voltage.

This is me supervising one team’s turbine test the day of the RI Regional (photo credit: Aysha Siddika Asha, co-supervisor). Everyone had fun, or at least I hope they did.

In the past, I have also supervised Simple and Compound Machines from 2019-2021 and Disease Detectives from 2018-2019 for the Brown Science Olympiad Invitational.

Scribing at Clinica Esperanza

In order to keep up my clinical acumen while I complete my PhD in Environmental Science, I have been volunteering a few times each month as a scribe for Clinica Esperanza in Providence, a free health center devoted to the uninsured. I have worked under two cardiologists, Dr. Pamela Harrop and Dr. Jay Schachne, and one internal medicine hospitalist, Dr. Michael Brabeck.

Hope’s Harvest

Since I was a little boy I loved going to visit relatives’ farms to baling hay and gardening in my backyard. Hope’s Harvest Rhode Island provides a means for me to go out and work with my hands dirty by gleaning fruits and vegetables for the local food bank. It feels great to help a relatively small band of volunteers harvest several tons of produce (kale, corn, squash, or apples) in a single morning, especially knowing this work will help prevent others from going hungry.