Engineering Physics undergraduate T. Patrick Walsh has won one of eight College of Engineering Harold and Ruth Hayward Scholarships for 2006/07. The scholarships are awarded for academic achievement, leadership, service, and initiative.
The scholarships are made possible by a generous bequest from the estates of Harold and Ruth Hayward to the Illinois chapter of the Tau Beta Pi association. Hap Howard was a longtime member of the Electrical Engineering faculty and served as the director of the measurements program in the Engineering Experiment Station at the University of Illinois.
Walsh, who was cited for his involvement in the Illinois chapter of Engineers Without Borders, spent the summer of 2005 bringing electricity and hope to a village in rural India far from the country's power grid.
A junior from Riverside, Illinois, Walsh is working on a double major in engineering physics and economics. He originally decided to study physics out of philosophical curiosity. “I always figured that searching for enlightenment through physics was more of a symbolic gesture than a practical one, but I like physics. Lately I’ve been looking towards less theoretical and more human-oriented applications, so it’s nice to have the ‘engineering’ already in my degree."
His experience in India taught Walsh that the problem of energy production and distribution in the developing world must be addressed in a much bigger way. “I’m now interested, first, in long-term development of technologies that will increase global energy production by orders of magnitude, and second, in short-term development of technologies that will directly benefit the world’s poor.” He is currently trying to organize a project to raise some investment capital to mass produce solar-charged, battery-operated LED lanterns to replace some of the >1 billion inefficient kerosene lamps used now in the developing world. He just wrote a proposal to the US Environmental Protection Agency for seed-funding for the project.
