Lehigh U. Appoints a Vice Provost for Creative Inquiry

Elevated Learning

As he prepares to move from one position with an unusual, opaque title, to another, Khanjan Mehta says both jobs boil down to teaching students to apply theory and knowledge to solve problems out in the world.

Both, he says, also involve helping students attain such skills as being able to think independently and learn from failures.

As founding director of the humanitarian- engineering and social-entrepreneurship program at Pennsylvania State University at University Park, Mr. Mehta, an assistant professor of engineering design, has encouraged students to develop engineering solutions to development challenges around the world.

At the end of this year, he will become the inaugural vice provost for creative inquiry at Lehigh University, which is also in Pennsylvania. There, he will direct Lehigh’s Mountaintop Initiative, which for three years has assisted undergraduate students to form teams to work on projects of their own devising.

During each of the initiative’s semesters — so far, held in summers only — about 35 teams of between two and 10 students have worked on projects in such areas as employing modern technologies to assist the elderly, promoting racial and ethnic equity in education, and using the arts and humanities to foster civic engagement.

Lehigh’s initiative got under way thanks to a 2013 gift of $20 million from Scott A. Belair, an alumnus and a co-founder of Urban Outfitters. The gift enabled Lehigh to repurpose two former Bethlehem Steel research facilities to be devoted to interdisciplinary, problem-based learning. Nowadays, says Mr. Mehta, “every university worth its salt has something similar.” What drew him to Lehigh’s approach was its broad scope and its commitment to fostering students’ own imaginative ideas for projects.

Mr. Mehta says his challenges in taking on the new vice provostship at Lehigh, an institution of some 7,000 students, include scaling up the initiative, possibly by making it year-round, so more students can take part and so it is sustainable. To date, Lehigh has lured students to the program with stipends, to offset their loss of summer income.

At Penn State, where he has worked for 12 years, Mr. Mehta has brought together students from every school at the university to study, design, field test, and start up technology-based enterprises in low- and middle-income countries. About one half of enrollees have been engineering students, most of them juniors or seniors, but the range has been from first-year undergraduates to fourth-year doctoral candidates.

Working in teams, students have figured out how to run an anaerobic composter in rural Kenya and have created business models for telemedicine systems in sub-Saharan Africa. After initial disorientation and often stress, students typically end up learning far more than they would in regular, disciplinary courses, says Mr. Mehta, whose own research and development specializations include studies of food security and global health.

Penn State students work with the goal of starting businesses that local residents can scale up commercially, he says. “There’s such an intrinsic motivation that students do whatever it takes to advance their venture.”

The approach reflects his growing up in India, before moving to the United States to attend Penn State, where he earned a master’s degree in electrical engineering in 2003. In his youth, he not only tackled regimented school and university curricula, but also applied his book learning in competitions for poetry-writing, embroidery, and much else. It is in outside-the-classroom contexts like those, and in efforts like the Mountaintop Initiative, “where you really learn,” he says, because “you really work across disciplines and cultures and ways of life.” — Peter Monaghan

Obituary: Trailblazing Biologist

Ruth Hubbard, a professor emerita of biology at Harvard University and an antiwar activist and feminist, died on September 1. She was 92.

A native of Vienna, Ms. Hubbard emigrated to Brookline, Mass., with her family in 1938 to escape the Nazi regime. She earned a bachelor’s degree in biochemical sciences and later a Ph.D. at Radcliffe College. In 1950, she began working as a research fellow at Harvard, where in 1973 she became the first woman to receive tenure in the biology department.

At Harvard, she worked in the laboratory of George Wald, who became her second husband, on research in the biochemistry and photochemistry of vision.

She has published numerous books and articles on biology, politics in science, and women’s issues, including The Politics of Women’s Biology and Women Look at Biology Looking at Women, a collection of essays that she edited with Mary Sue Henifin and Barbara Fried.
— Anais Strickland

Read more about people in Gazette or on Twitter at @ruthehammond. Submit news releases and contributions for What I’m Reading to people@chronicle.com.