“The solution was always inside us”: Life lessons from an engineer’s career in global development
Field work in Haiti (2016). Photo credit: Alexandros Taflanidis, University of Notre Dame
Prof. Tracy Kijewski-Correa shares her experiences and insight on the important role that academic engineers can play in addressing poverty and the needs of at-risk populations across the globe.
By Tracy Kijewski-Correa with Patricia A. Maurice and Janet G. Hering
18 March 2025, DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.14986758
Tracy Kijewski-Correa [1] is Professor of Civil Engineering and Global Affairs and the William J. Pulte Director of the Pulte Institute for Global Development [2] at the University of Notre Dame (IN, USA). Trained as a structural engineer, she and her team members have spent decades serving the international community, from building bridges in Central America to designing resilient homes in Haiti to assessing coastal risk and developing mitigation strategies. She is also a devoted mother to a highly accomplished son who is now a college freshman.
Prof. Kijewski-Correa’s approach to field work is exemplified by the photo above, taken in the aftermath of Hurricane Matthew in 2016. Here, she is asking “pou ki sa?” – why? in Haitian Creole – to understand the recovery challenges faced by coastal communities along the south coast of Haiti.
How did you become involved in international service and leadership projects?
Much of the call to become a civil engineer is rooted in the desire to literally build more flourishing communities. So, while it is in the DNA of many civil engineers, it is still very easy to solely focus on Global North or upper income countries both in our research and teaching. As I grew up on the extended southside of Chicago, I personally recognized the challenges of poverty and vulnerability. The international dimensions of that calling were cemented in my childhood as I watched the efforts to extract survivors from collapsed buildings in the 1985 earthquake in Mexico City. My child’s mind wondered, “If we could build the skyscrapers of Chicago, why couldn't we keep those communities in Mexico safe?” It was a question that haunted me for the rest of my life. My technical training answered only parts of that question; there were many factors beyond the technical that I would learn over the course of my career. My call to action was the Boxing Day Tsunami in 2004 – the scale of the devastation spurred us to bring faculty and students together to study its drivers and effects from an interdisciplinary perspective. My life was never the same after that.
Which of your accomplishments to date are you most proud of?
I am exceptionally proud of the Structural Engineering Extreme Events Reconnaissance (StEER) Network [2], funded by the US National Science Foundation. We founded this global network of volunteer engineers – building their capacity and mobilizing them to assess damage after disasters and synthesize those learnings. This is essential to guide us in building back better and, in general, building better before the next disaster. Our teams are ad hoc, spinning up on demand after disasters. The teams have to produce standardized knowledge products quickly and collect a variety of time-sensitive data that the research community can use to direct research into more effective risk mitigation strategies and interventions. Learning from disasters is stressful work. Although it may seem crazy to do this with teams of individuals with whom you have no prior relationship, we built the systems and protocols to make it work. Together we have assessed over 50 disasters globally.
The most amazing example is the over 12,000 buildings we assessed after the 2021 Haiti earthquake when security issues prevented our teams from traveling to Haiti. We adapted our approach to mimic citizen science, quickly mobilizing non-expert Haitian citizens to capture data using mobile apps on their smartphones. We would feed that raw data to our engineers working remotely to assess the damage. This demonstrated the power of localizing efforts and blending local knowledge with engineering expertise to reach isolated areas challenging for international actors to access. Our data ultimately spurred studies and knowledge products for the World Bank and the US Geological Survey. It was amazing to see how a few dozen passionate Haitian citizens, with the support of our equally passionate students and collaborators, could generate a valuable dataset in such a challenging time.
What has been the most enjoyable and/or rewarding aspect of your Global Development work?
For me, the chance to broaden participation in the research process has been so rewarding. I remember when we were running our Innovation Incubators in Haiti. The idea was simple: welcome the most innovative minds in the community to work on a problem with our research teams. We did not seek the formally educated or the politically powerful. We created an open marketplace for ideas that would help us identify citizens who could best help us iterate solutions to the housing crisis. We developed a human-centered design process that trained these “budding innovators” to collaboratively scope solutions. The response within the community was remarkable. The days spent in our incubators were long but exciting as the community members grappled with different ideas and constraints. One night as I walked home with Onel, one of our facilitators, he told me that his mother asked him where he was learning all of these things. He paused and told her, “the solution was always inside us, but no one bothered to show us.” That remained with me and even after our incubators concluded, the participants continued to meet and eventually formed larger Innovation Clubs seeking out new problems to solve in their community. I never envisioned that cross-over effect. I just thought it was the best way to get the best minds around our problem. That moment reminded me that those closest to the problem have the solution if we are only willing to invite them into our research.
What key challenges have you faced in your various Global Development projects?
Obviously controlled research is safer research. If you could sit alone writing your papers or books, without the need to collaborate, without the need to go to the field, or without the need to grow coalitions or secure funding, you are less vulnerable to risks, shocks and stresses. Global Development inherently forces you to work across disciplines, cultures, and time zones with geographically dispersed teams. You often put in more time and effort for the same results. You will go into the field internationally, where constraints are often higher than domestic fieldwork, and logistics are more challenging and possibly costly. Projects can be stalled for reasons beyond your control; you may need to pivot at a moment’s notice; you may need to evacuate; or you may struggle working constantly through translators. I have faced all those challenges. Security issues. Political instability. Large-scale disasters. Misunderstandings with local partners. Loss of funding. All the reasons a nation is still developing are all the same reasons it is difficult to do business or conduct research in those settings. More critically, there often is a lack of valuation of such work within academia. There can be a misconception about the value of interdisciplinary research or belief that our work is not research but “service learning” or translational research at best. While these challenges are all legitimate, the more universities value this work and even de-risk faculty engagement, the more we can attract some of our best minds to tackle our world’s most pressing problems in its most challenging environments.
What advice would you give to junior or mid-career engineers interested in getting involved and/or leading Global Development projects?
Pragmatically, junior faculty may need to tread with caution if the tenure requirements will not properly value contribution in this space. One potentially safer entry point is in experiential learning opportunities. By being a faculty mentor, or even offering electives or co-curricular opportunities by partnering with Engineers in Action [4] or Engineers without Borders [5], a faculty member can engage through a well-established, partner-led platform and in a way that simultaneously satisfies teaching or service expectations. If that is not possible, engineers can also volunteer with these organizations or others curated at Engineering for Change [6], helping mentor students or joining communities of practice. I found that even attending webinars, watching podcasts and expanding my leisure reading list helped me discover potential pathways for my research to pivot into this space, well before I did so formally, and in ways that counted in my annual merit review.
With tenure, there is greater latitude for risk and exploration. Engaging with campus institutes that work in global development or international studies, attending their seminars or events, can help you build a network of potential collaborators and expand your understanding of the issues and opportunities for engineering to contribute. Some institutes, like my own Pulte Institute, were designed to attract externally funded research opportunities that faculty can plug into. Tapping into an institute with such research infrastructure and experience building teams in response to emerging opportunities can lower the barriers to entry and even de-risk moving into this space.
What advice can you offer for working effectively with at-risk communities?
Enter those spaces with respect and a genuine desire to learn. Academics have great knowledge and endless ideas. We can talk too much and assume we have answers for everything. My favorite phrases, in whatever local language, are “show me” and “teach me.” If I am willing to ask thoughtful questions and then listen, with deep engagement, to the answers, I always learn something. And if I use my other tactic – asking why 5 times – I am able to trace down to the root drivers of a problem with genuine curiosity. Once you get down to the root, 5 whys below, you have a chance to create lasting solutions. This can take time and requires building trust, but it is remarkable to me how even in a short period of time, I can still learn a great deal when I humble myself to walk beside another as an eager listener, even if only for a few moments.
How have you balanced being a mother with your Global Development work and academic leadership?
Honestly, I stopped using the phrase work-life balance. I don’t see work and life as two distinct things to be balanced. I just have one life, and it is messy and complicated sometimes. As a single mom to a child on the Autism spectrum, I decided to never apologize for being a mom, for sitting my son in the first row of class to fidget while I lectured or having a little feverish body on the futon during office hours because he couldn't go to daycare. I just blended him into research meetings, took him to conferences, and trekked with him in the field. He lived in rural Nicaragua with me as we built bridges and was on my back as we climbed through tsunami debris in Thailand. I wanted to signal that you didn’t need a nanny or even a husband, you just needed to be unapologetically you and invite others into your messy and unpredictable world. I know my son benefited tremendously from being so integrated into my academic life, and I hope that those students, who watched the line between parent and professor blur, learned something too!
What are some of your plans or goals for the future?
It's a very challenging time for global development – US federal assistance is withdrawing globally in the first 100-days of the second Trump Administration. Our future will thus depend on how much we can reduce our dependence on federal funding to advance global development research. Even more importantly, we need to reimagine how higher education can lead in this moment. Make no mistake, there is important work to be done. Our world needs universities perhaps now more than ever. I would love to demonstrate how universities can lead at this moment. I would love us to elevate local voices and connect them with academic researchers in ways that will help us ask the right questions, discover the right solutions, and scale those solutions for impact, together. I know that is not the way scholarly research normally unfolds, but it's my goal to change that.
Conclusion and questions for further thought
As editors of this blog, we (Janet and Patricia) are struck by some of your observations that have implications not only for work in global development but well beyond this field. As science and engineering educators, one of our main goals must be to teach students how to discover solutions from within themselves, building upon the progress of past practitioners but innovating based on their own experience and imagination. Patricia wrote a recent post titled “How becoming a mother made me a better professor” [7] but completely missed the need to keep asking ‘why’ over and over again, which children teach their parents. Your observation that “Our world needs universities perhaps now more than ever” is timely and very well stated. It echoes points made by Roberta Hawkins and Leslie Kern in their book Higher Expectations [8], about which they recently wrote a guest post [9] in this blog series. Thank you for sharing your experiences and for your many words of wisdom.
Questions for further thought
· How can you bring local voice into your research and tap into the knowledge and potential innovations in frontline communities?
· How can higher education better rise to the pressing challenges of our world, particularly the challenges affecting the most vulnerable?
· Do you make it a practice to keep asking why and to remind your students to keep doing the same?
References and links
[1] https://engineering.nd.edu/faculty/tracy-kijewski-correa/, https://www.linkedin.com/in/tracy-kijewski-correa-b4314aa/
[3] https://www.steer.network/
[4] https://www.engineersinaction.org/
[5] https://www.ewb-international.org/
[6] https://www.engineeringforchange.org/
[7] https://www.epistimi.org/blog/how-becoming-a-mother-made-me-a-better-professor
[8] Hawkins, R. and Kern, L. (2024) Higher Expectations: How to Survive Academia, Make it Better for Others, and Transform the University, Toronto: Between the Lines, 267 pp.