myUface Blog

When you spend every day working with U.S. universities and international students on  gritty details like applications, tuition and financial aid, it’s easy sometimes to lose sight of the big picture.  The big picture is this:  universities in the U.S. are amazing communities of learning that empower students to do research that will have a real impact.

Take this Pakistani graduate student – he’s come up with a controversial and difficult subject for his graduate research.  He wants to create a computer model of how suicide bombs explode.

Usmani’s aim is to save lives by helping everyone from emergency workers to investigators predict — or re-create — in painstaking detail all that happens when a terrorist’s bomb bursts in a crowded place.

Can you imagine the controversy this topic has caused?

At seminars, some scholars appeared incredulous and suspicious. This spring, one stormed out of Usmani’s presentation at an engineering symposium in Nashville.

It’s a very unconventional subject, but one that could produce life-saving research.

He built a computer simulation that looks at crowd formations, the bomber’s location and the type of explosives. The model could be used to minimize deaths and injuries by influencing crowd control. It could aid emergency workers seeking victims by showing where they’re most likely to be amid the rubble. Or it could be used by investigators who reconstruct attacks to solve mysteries, a method seen in television shows such as “CSI” on CBS.

Daniel Kirk, the 34-year-old rocket propulsion engineer who is Usmani’s doctoral adviser at Florida Tech, overcame his surprise about the topic by understanding the goal of saving lives. The two men got to know each other, sometimes meeting into the wee hours of the day.

“When you peel away all the issues as to why he wants to study this, what seems to be at the core is a very altruistic question: How can I use this computer simulation to help save lives and minimize injuries?”

These are the sorts of innovative – if controversial – learning projects that happen all the time at U.S. universities.  Forget what you think about Usmani’s research – just consider what it means that he was able to conduct it in the first place.  My hope is that this very freedom, which the U.S. university system gives freely to all of its students, at almost any level, will produce the kind of innovations that make real impacts in the everyday lives of people around the planet.