Rebecca Alcock, a PhD student in the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, is among the 12 University of Wisconsin-Madison faculty, staff and students to be named a 2021-22 Morgridge Fellow through the Morgridge Center for Public Service.
The yearlong program is designed to further institutionalize and support community-engaged scholarship through sessions focused on developing and sustaining mutually beneficial community-university partnerships for community-based learning courses and research.
A member of Assistant Professor Justin Boutilier’s lab, Alcock served as international COVID-19 engagement coordinator for the UW-Madison International Projects Office, coordinating a partnership between UW-Madison, the United Nations Development Programme and Engineers Without Borders on capacity-building and livelihood initiatives for communities in low- and middle-income countries.
Alcock, who also holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in biomedical engineering from UW-Madison as well as certificates in entrepreneurship and international engineering, says her mission is to combine her current training in optimization and machine learning with her background in product design to address pressing global health and planetary health challenges.
She has ongoing projects in the areas of health clinic electrification, democratization of clean energy, emergency food systems and disease prediction. She’s creating a renewable energy and transportation system, featuring solar panels and electric bicycles, that healthcare clinics in low-resource settings could use.
Edmond Ramly, an assistant professor in the Department of Family Medicine and Community Health and an affiliate faculty member in the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, is also among the 2021-22 Morgridge Fellows.