Bridging a gap yields research award.

Byline: Jacqueline Reis

WORCESTER - Worcester Polytechnic Institute students Ryan W. Eley, Timothy C. Grant, Alexandra V. Kulinkina and Alexandra M. Sanseverino went to Thailand knowing they wanted to go someplace different from Worcester, but they didn't know their work there would win them national recognition at home.

The students, who are from Connecticut, New Jersey and Newbury, traveled early this year to rural Mae Moh in northern Thailand, home to 42 villages, a 22.5-square-mile open-pit coal mine, a coal-burning power plant and a golf course built on a former mine. The trip happened as other WPI juniors were scattering all over the world for required projects about technology and society that the college calls "interactive qualifying projects."

In this quartet's case, they would try to improve communication between the Electricity Generating Authority of Thailand and Mae Moh residents. The students figured they had the basic story down before they left: "Huge corporation killing hundreds of people" through polluted air, water and crops, Ms. Sanseverino said.

They found something different. The power company, which had polluted disastrously at times and sometimes acknowledged it only after the fact, had improved and was providing jobs, the students said. It was also planning 27 years into the future, when it estimated the coal in Mae Moh would be gone.

But residents who had suffered through polluted air, water and crops didn't trust EGAT, and they had other things on their minds, like wanting to be relocated, find a job or get more money, Ms. Kulinkina said.

EGAT employees, for their part, didn't entirely trust the residents. The company would send updates for a local bulletin board about air quality, for example, but residents stopped posting them, the students said. Those postings probably weren't decipherable to the residents, many of whom were illiterate and most of whom didn't have an easy way of knowing how many parts per million of sulfur dioxide would be harmful. In some cases, residents didn't acknowledge that other things besides the mine and power plant - such as a neighbor's burning forestland or smoking - might be damaging their health, the students said.

After four weeks in which the students talked to residents through an interpreter, spoke with EGAT employees in English and toured EGAT facilities, the students made recommendations ranging from bringing residents to the plant for tours to making updates easier to understand, including comparing decibels of mine noise to everyday sounds, Ms. Kulinkina said. They don't know whether the power company will use the recommendations but hope a professor they worked with from Thammasat University will prod EGAT into doing so.

Some also hope that the next generation of Mae Moh residents, taught in part from an EGAT curriculum, will grow up understanding the company better.

Once home, the students applied for an undergraduate research award from the Pennsylvania-based Forum on Education Abroad, and they learned this fall that they had become the first WPI team to win one. Professors Richard F. Vaz, Thomas B. Robertson and Chrysanthe Demetry were their advisers.

The other Forum Undergraduate Award winners were Jeremy Bittlingmaier Martin of Middlebury College and Reynolds Whalen of Washington University in St. Louis. The winners will present their research at a luncheon in Oregon in February.

Contact Jacqueline Reis at [e-mail].

ART: PHOTO

PHOTOG: T&G Staff/TOM RETTIG

CUTLINE: WPI students, from left, Alexandra V. Kulinkina, Timothy C. Grant, Alexandra M. Sanseverino and Ryan W. Eley recently won a national research award for their work in Thailand helping improve communication between an electrical company and residents.