This was the first project I conceptualized, scoped, and executed as the lead investigator. It's a project close to my heart, in part because of the backstory: 

During my undergraduate career at Purdue, I worked with a service-learning course called "Water Supply in Developing Countries," which focused primarily on community-scale water supply in the rural Dominican Republic. The project originated from a collaboration between Rotary International and Purdue University, connecting the course advisors with a local Rotary Club in Santiago de los Caballeros and schools in several nearby rural communities. Over the course of my three-year involvement with the project, we designed and built systems at three schools (and a fourth system which I helped design was deployed soon after I left the project). Towards the end of my tenure with the project, I began to wonder whether we were approaching the project the right way. Despite years of effort, a number of weeks spent in-country working with local folks to build and maintain the systems, and considerable financial investment from Purdue and Rotary International, the project was, at best, a partial success. In each school, a solar energy system was making access to electricity more reliable and more climate-friendly - an unqualified success. However, only two of the schools used the water system everyday, and none of them shared water with the broader community - what happened to our visions of a community-scale water system? I began to wonder - where did we go wrong? 

In spring 2017, I went to a couple friends and colleagues with this question, and I proposed to go hunting in the literature for our first clues at answers. We quickly figured out that there wasn't much there - there was no guidebook (though in 2018, Hartman et al. would publish just such a book). We started out searching for best practices in this loosely defined field of global service-learning, but we decided that the field was too vague and terms used too inconsistently to get us where we wanted to go. Instead, I devised a systematic review strategy that would integrate the different dimensions of global service-learning: international development and service-learning. It took four years, but we eventually executed a systematic review and synthesis of best practices in both fields, developing a set of guiding principles for global service-learning that were positioned to complement Hartman et al.'s extensive assessment of their own experience and of the global service-learning literature. 

Right: Solar panels and water treatment systems installed at three rural schools near Santiago de los Caballeros, DR.