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Caroline Baillie
ASEE Prism, Mar 2008 by Loftus, Margaret
An engineer fights on two fronts: against poverty in Argentina, old-style teaching at home.
MANY VISITORS are drawn to Buenos Aires for the nightlife, the cafés, or the tango. But it was trash that lured materials engineer Caroline Baillie back to Argentina's capital last summer. During a 2005 visit, she had been struck by a distinct legacy of the nation's crippling economic crisis: great numbers of impoverished trash pickers collecting and sorting discarded plastic and cardboard to sell to recyclers. "If you're out at 5 p.m., they're all in the streets scavenging," she says.
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Based on her work with women's cooperatives in Lesotho, Baillie knew it was possible for such groups to boost their meager earnings by turning recyclable materials into products. She felt a similar model could be applied to help the cartoneros, as the jobless Argentinian rubbish collectors are known. So when Baillie took a sabbatical from teaching and research at Canada's Queen's University, she and her partner Eric Feinblatt headed south to launch Waste-for-Life Buenos Aires. Their aim was to develop a hot-press prototype for cartonero cooperatives that would turn the rubbish into furniture or composite building materials, such as ceiling tiles. The products could be sold to contractors or used in cartoneros' own homes.
For the next six months, the couple strove to understand the complex Buenos Aires trash-disposal world and overcome a series of obstacles: They weren't fluent in Spanish, which made it hard to gain the cartoneros's trust. They also couldn't get outside funding, and so had to find a way that their hot-press, once perfected, could be manufactured cheaply. But by the time they left, a plan had taken shape for a self-sustaining commercial operation.
"We were really bloody-minded about it," says Baillie.
FIERCE SENSE OF EQUITY
CALL IT BLOODY-MINDEDNESS, perseverance, or plain old pluck, this British-reared educator seems to have more than her fair share of it. Waste-for-Life is just one example. Caroline Baillie has also helped transform the way Queen's University's engineering students learn, recreated historical engineering feats for the BBC documentary series Building the Impossible, and directed a ground-breaking theater company that addresses the ethical complexities involved in science.
All the while, Baillie has been a tireless champion of fostering social justice through engineering, challenging her colleagues and students to make ethics a core concern in their work.
Baillie doesn't know what exactly inspired her fierce sense of equity. She just remembers that when she was a girl, "whatever the issue was, the marginalized person was going to get my support." Growing up in Dorset, England, she had a friend who owned only one dress and another who had "everything." "When you live with discrepancies like that and you can see them all around you, you begin to ask questions," she says.
Besides a zest for action-she rides a Suzuki 1300 Hayabusa motorcycle and flies small single-engine aircraft as a hobbyBaillie has always had a knack for science. A high school career counselor piqued her interest in materials and engineering by giving her a copy of The New Science of Strong Materials: Why You Don't Fall Through the Floor by James Edward Gordon. "I thought that studying materials science would help sort out questions I had about the world," she recalls.
Early on, she was convinced that science and activism went hand in hand. "It seemed to me I couldn't save the world unless I knew how it worked," she says. "I don't think anybody can contribute to a better world without understanding the technical issues."
Yet Baillie's undergraduate experience at the University of Surrey left her cold: "It was a bunch of men telling me a bunch of boring facts about the world, instead of me finding out about it for myself. What was really missing for me was the context." Still, she went on to earn a Ph.D. in composites engineering at Surrey in 1991. After taking a job teaching mechanical engineering at the University of Sydney, she was on the verge of dropping out of the field when a friend urged her to reconsider her approach to science. After that, "I started thinking how I could apply engineering to make the world a better place, particularly for the poor and marginalized, rather than helping others get rich."
Baillie began work on a design for natural fiber composites that would cause less environmental damage than plastics. She also went on to earn a second degree in 1995 this time a master's in higher education from the University of New South Wales-writing her thesis on gender inclusivity in engineering education. "When I started to work on the context of things I truly believed in, I suddenly loved it so much more."
A DIFFERENT KIND OF TEACHING
BAILLIE'S EPIPHANY led her back to England, where, from 1996 to 2000, she held a joint appointment at Imperial College in the education and materials science departments. After a three-year stint as deputy director of the U.K. Center for Materials Education at Liverpool University, Baillie was approached by three professors from Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario. They were seeking an instructor who could also explore the engineering education process, developing learning initiatives and promoting integration with other curricula. The result was Baillie's appointment as DuPont Chair in Engineering Education Research and Development and as head of Queen's Integrated Learning Center. She is currently cross-appointed in the departments of chemical engineering, sociology, and women's studies.
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