Africa Table: Summer Fellow Reflections

Is this Art or Engineering? 

Evaluating and Scaling Technical Expertise Support While Emphasizing Artistry for Next Generation Product Developers in Ghana

Abisola Kusimo is a PhD candidate in the School of Mechanical Engineering, and a Ph.D. Minor in Management Science and Engineering seeking to broaden scholarly understanding of culturally-relevant techniques for scaling ​industrialization and high-precision manufacturing in West Africa. She holds a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering, with Minors in Rhetoric Communication, Engineering Leadership, and technology Entrepreneurship, from the ​University of Maryland College Park. She is a Diversifying Academia and Recruiting Excellence 2019 Fellow, a GLO Community Associate, and spearheads an initiative promoting inclusive spaces and professional development for underrepresented womxn of color in engineering.

The Roles of Boundary Spanning in East African Professional Design Teams  

Eric Brubaker is a Ph.D. Candidate in the School of Mechanical Engineering researching design, manufacturing, and organizational behavior and learning. His work is situated in the activities and contexts of hardware product development teams in California, Kenya, and Tanzania. From 2010 to 2016, Eric worked at MIT D-Lab where he taught design courses, managed the D-Lab Scale-Ups program, and worked extensively in Zambia. Previously, he helped launch Zimba Water, was an engineer at Battelle Memorial Institute and researcher at the New England Complex Systems Institute. A proud Buckeye, he is a graduate of Ohio State University (2009) and a NSF Graduate Research Fellow (2016).