BY Maya Bell
PHOTOS BY Andrew Innerarity

For more than 40 years, Miller School of
Medicine students have been bringing
free health care screenings to
people across South Florida who otherwise
might never see a doctor. Now, a film series
and national training effort are ensuring
that the legacy and impact of these
vital DOCS fairs will continue to grow.

First-year medical student
Hannah Palin measures
a patient’s eye pressure for
the glaucoma screening.

On a spring Friday afternoon, third-year student Kevin Fu backs the moving truck into the Miller School of Medicine’s loading dock, and second-year student Allison Silverstein, B.S. ’13, lifts a pair of folding tables inside, setting in motion the carefully choreographed drill she and her team have planned for more than five months.        “Exam tables.” Check. “Gurney.” Check. “Power cords.” Check. “Centrifuges.” Check. “Female and derm lamps.” Check. “Bone density machine.” Check. “Pap smears.” Check. “Venipuncture and glucose.” Check. “Mental health.” Check. “Old charts.” Check. “Blank charts.” Check.        With clipboard and inventory list in hand, Olivia Bosshardt, a second-year student, counts and cross-checks dozens of labeled boxes, bins, and loose items that fellow students wrestle into the back of the rental truck with clockwork efficiency. In less than 20 minutes, the vehicle is loaded, locked, and ready to head to the Belafonte TACOLCY Center in Liberty City, where Silverstein and her team will oversee the ninth and final Mitchell Wolfson Sr. Department of Community Service (DOCS) health fair of the 2013-14 academic year.

The trip to one of Miami’s most disadvantaged and underserved neighborhoods is a mere three miles away. But as Bosshardt gets behind the wheel and maneuvers the truck past the housing projects, meat markets, pawn shops, and convenience stores that dot the area, she is not only bridging a cultural divide but carrying on the Miller School’s most valued and admired tradition. That tradition began in 1971, when a handful of University of Miami medical students organized a free health fair in the Florida Keys.

“This is a huge reason why I wanted to go to medical school here,” says Bosshardt, who was in charge of logistics for the Liberty City health fair, but like her fellow DOCS teammates, pitched in with every aspect of its organization. “If you let it, medical school can be a selfish time. You study so hard, you don’t have time for much else. But DOCS gives us a chance to use our time to benefit others, to get real hands-on experience, to get to know real people, learn their stories, understand their walks of life. It reminds us why we went to medical school in the first place.”

Establishing an extracurricular program that would become ingrained in the Miller School’s culture was not on Iris Kiem’s mind 43 years ago, when the late professor of epidemiology invited students, supervised by their medical school professors, to offer basic health screenings at a church on Big Pine Key. A resident of the Keys, Kiem, B.S. ’48, was simply dismayed by the lack of medical care available to many of the area’s low-income residents who had no health insurance.

To this day, the annual Big Pine Key health fair is still flourishing in the same church, still providing one of its original patients, now 92 years old, her annual physical, and scores of others of all ages their only access to preventive medical care and referrals for follow-up services. But over the past four decades and under the guidance of Mark T. O’Connell, the Miller School’s senior associate dean for educational development and DOCS’s longtime faculty leader, that single fair has evolved into one of the largest, most comprehensive, and most admired student-run community health initiatives in the nation—one that is now the subject of a nine-part documentary series introduced by the late poet Maya Angelou, and an annual retreat devoted to helping other medical schools around the United States establish similar programs.

Students, who vie for one of DOCS’s more than 120 leadership positions (53 of which are held by first-years), organize and staff nine annual health fairs in nine diverse communities, including four in the Keys, four in Miami-Dade County, and one in Broward County. Supervised by about 50 medical school faculty and residents from Jackson Memorial Hospital who likewise volunteer their time, these students screen about 2,000 patients annually for South Florida’s most prevalent diseases, including hypertension, diabetes, high cholesterol, vision loss, obesity, and depression, as well as breast, cervical, and skin cancers.

DOCS students also operate two free weekly clinics that offer ongoing primary care and subspecialty services, including cardiology, neurology, gynecology, rheumatology, urology, and psychiatry, in two of Greater Miami’s most underserved neighborhoods. Once a year, they recruit patients identified at two health fairs as being at-risk for colon cancer for free flexible sigmoidoscopy screenings provided by a UM gastroenterologist and a Miller School alumnus who also volunteer their time.

More recently, 64 students were trained as certified application counselors to help patients at DOCS fairs and other events navigate the federal marketplace exchange and enroll in one of the new health insurance plans mandated by the Affordable Care Act.

Rimsky Denis, M.B.A. ’13, M.D. ’14, immediate past executive director of DOCS, who attended his first fair while earning his Master of Public Health in 2008, remembers being “blown away” by the scope of services and hands-on opportunities for first-year students. “As an M.P.H. student, I had been to a lot of health fairs, and I thought it’d be the same,” the recent Miller School graduate says. “Maybe there’d be a blood pressure cuff, maybe a quick glucose test, but mainly passing out pamphlets and educating the public. Instead, I saw students who had the capacity to literally save lives with very limited resources. I knew then I wanted to go to the University of Miami for medical school.”

He would quickly learn what every DOCS executive director before him learned: The DOCS model is not static. It cannot rest on its laurels, or operate in isolation. Team leaders can’t just dust off the exhaustive check lists, spreadsheets, timelines, and briefing reports handed down by their predecessors. They can’t just drop in once a year. They must keep the pulse of the communities they serve. They must figure out how to improve everything they do.

That lesson hit home when Denis was project manager for the 2010 fair in Little Haiti, Miami’s longest-running and most popular DOCS fair, largely because it has been hosted for 20 years at the venerable Center for Haitian Studies, Health & Human Services. That fair, which took place about eight months after the catastrophic 2010 earthquake in Haiti, turned out to be inadequately staffed to address the overwhelming number of patients who turned up in need of mental health and employment services.

To this day, Denis, who was born at Jackson to Haitian-American parents, feels responsible for not anticipating that scenario. “We should have known the community had a particular need, and if we couldn’t provide that service, we should have found a community partner who could,” he says. “We didn’t know because we would show up once a year and then not come back until the next year.”

His solution? As executive director, Denis created advisory boards of key stakeholders in each community DOCS serves to gather and report valuable information on emerging needs.

Had such a board existed when DOCS launched its newest fair in Liberty City six years ago, it may not have had such a bumpy start. Few people returned to the fair its second year because, DOCS executives would learn, the public’s faith in the community host agency had been displaced by mistrust.

But in March 2014, that is not the case. More than 100 Miller School student volunteers—led by project manager Silverstein and supervised by 20 faculty—bring the health fair back to DOCS’s community partner TACOLCY (The Advisory Committee for Liberty City Youth) for the fourth straight year. Two hours before the doors open at 10 a.m., two dozen people are already waiting patiently in the shrinking shade. One woman holds a small child on her lap; another asks in Spanish whether it’s really true she can get a Pap test for free. Nearly 30, she has never undergone the simple swab that, for generations, has caught or prevented cervical cancer in women.

Gabbing like old friends, Yvette Phillips, 53, and Frederica Dawson, 54, who had arrived independently well before the sun came up, are holding down the front of the line. Phillips is making her second visit to the fair, Dawson her first. Neither has health insurance, and both look forward to undergoing a battery of primary health screenings in one fell swoop.

“I love it. You get more done and it helps them (become good doctors) and it helps me,” says Phillips, a tax specialist who was at the height of tax season. “I took the bus to get here at 6 a.m. My aim is to get in and out quickly and let me enjoy my Saturday.”

That’s Emeka Albert’s aim, too. As one of dozens of students sitting side by side at long tables in the registration area—usually TACOLCY’s multipurpose meeting and classroom area—the first-year M.D./M.P.H. student reviews Phillips’s chart while she inquires about Albert’s future plans. “What’s going to be your field?’’ she asks. “I don’t know yet,” he answers. “I like pediatrics.”

“Good choice,” Phillips says, giving a thumbs up before signing her consent-to-treat form, and getting underway. “You have to have patience.”

Patience comes in handy while maneuvering through the maze of DOCS options. Xeroxed signs in the courtyard between TACOLCY’S buildings, which are adorned with striking murals, point the way to a dozen different screening stations. Eye, glucose, and bone density exams to the left. Vitals, male exams, and venipuncture (blood tests) to the right. Mental health, female exams, and pediatrics up the stairs. Skin exams behind registration. More discreet is the sign for HIV/AIDS testing, but at nearly every station, people stand in line holding their own charts, studying maps to plot their next move.

“It’s beautiful,” says Edreton Flash, 59, a trim man who learned about the fair from a flier posted at the library. “The kids are very energetic, positive, and knowledgeable.”

Other stations provide information on everything from legal issues to heart attack risks in women to signing up for federally mandated health insurance—much to the delight of Barbara Riggins. “Unbelievable,” says the 37-year-old, who leaves the fair with her first insurance policy—for $22 a month—thanks to help from a DOCS application counselor.

“This is awesome,” agrees Horace Roberts, TACOLCY’s interim director, surveying the controlled chaos. “We can provide the space, but someone has to provide the services. I don’t see this happening anywhere else. Maybe a kiosk with a blood pressure machine, but here you got it all.”

As the hours pass, the lines dwindle, and the registration area slowly converts to the check-out area, O’Connell, a professor of medicine and senior advisor to Miller School Dean Pascal J. Goldschmidt, takes a moment to marvel at how far DOCS has come.

“I never dreamed it would be such a huge part of the student experience and informal curriculum,” he says. “Now almost every student who comes to the Miller School participates in at least one DOCS fair, and many of them in dozens before they graduate. It has become an essential part of their training, professional development, and cultural competence. I think it’s what makes Miller School students special. Their community service stamps them for the future.”

O’Connell has left his own indelible mark on the organization. In the years between the first fair on Big Pine Key in 1971 and DOCS’s establishment in 2000, a number of different student groups started their own health fairs and began serving at area clinics. When O’Connell, who joined the Miller School faculty in 1981, was promoted to senior associate dean for medical education in 1999, he urged the various groups to consolidate their budgets, train students for their volunteer duties, and standardize paperwork, patient records, and supplies.

The next year, the various groups united under the DOCS umbrella, enabling the organization to begin standardizing and improving its services. The Mitchell Wolfson Sr. Foundation hastened that process in 2006, making a generous grant that allowed DOCS to link up with more community partners to provide additional needed services.

Now, DOCS is spreading its considerable reach even wider—across the nation and onto the silver screen. In February, for the fourth year in a row, DOCS students invited student leaders from other medical schools to a four-day retreat to learn about their respective community service models. Beginning in Miami, the retreat ended in the Keys, where visitors from 17 universities had the opportunity to work at the Big Pine Key fair, or the two others held simultaneously in Marathon and Key West. Like DOCS itself, the annual DOCS retreat has evolved considerably from its inaugural gathering in 2011. The one constant over the years, says Danielle Neuman, a senior on the retreat’s executive board, is that the visiting students always leave “in shock and awe at all we do.”

Next year, they may be doubly wowed. That’s when DOCSumentary, the nine-part short film series directed by Ali Habashi, M.S.M.E.T. ’98, a faculty member in the School of Communication’s Cinema and Interactive Media Department, and supported by an additional grant from the Wolfson Foundation, is slated for completion. Narrated by O’Connell and designed to educate medical students and other audiences about the cultural influences that affect health, each DOCSumentary episode centers on a single DOCS fair and the prevalent health issues facing the people it serves.

For example, the segment on the Big Pine Key fair zeroes in on skin cancer. It features 92-year-old Gilberte Baldridge, a sun lover who began attending in 1976, and Captain Eddie Webb, a consummate Keys character who claims membership in the Conch Republic. A newcomer to the fair, Webb is grateful to the students who discovered his skin cancer and arranged for its removal.

The episode on the Liberty City fair centers on hypertension, which disproportionately affects African-Americans, often because of a lack of access to healthy foods.

Nearly two and a half hours after registering, Yvette Phillips makes her way to the check-out station, happy to report her blood pressure is just fine. She leaves pleased and grateful, promising to be back next year. Not far behind her is her early-morning mate, Frederica Dawson, who doesn’t have good news. Her blood pressure is alarmingly high. The ophthalmologist who checked her vision could tell as soon as he looked into her eyes.

“He escorted me to the blood pressure station, and waited while they took my pressure again and again,” recalled Dawson, who would leave the fair with a referral for follow-up care after a thorough consultation with a resident. “I was shocked—shocked he would know that by looking in my eyes, and shocked he would show so much concern.”

For more information about DOCS, click here or call 305-243-4898.

Whenever Meera Nagarsheth’s father calls her, his first question is, “What have you done for the world today?”It’s a big question, but Nagarsheth, who grew up steeped in her family’s strong dedication to service, embraces it.“The world is our community,” says the University of Miami junior. “A lot of times kids get caught up in the study grind—I have to get a degree, I have to have a 4.0—and they forget there are other things in college, outside of the academic setting, that they’re never going to get the opportunity to learn again.”Robin Bachin, the Charlton W. Tebeau Associate Professor of History in the College of Arts and Sciences, agrees. She thinks the question Mr. Nagarsheth regularly asks his daughter is one all students should consider. Bachin directs the University’s Office of Civic and Community Engagement, which was launched in the summer of 2011 to help UM undergraduates find meaningful ways to integrate academic experience and service learning.The office “is the kind of pedagogical model educational reformers like John Dewey developed,” explains Bachin. “It’s based on the idea that there should not be a disconnect between learning and living, between theory and practical application, that all learning should be experiential, and that we should know how to apply what we learn to real-world settings.”

In her own quest, Nagarsheth, an aspiring physician studying microbiology and immunology, completed a year-long internship through Neighborhood Housing Services of South Florida in Brownsville, a Miami neighborhood where the majority of residents live below the poverty line.

Almost immediately she learned an invaluable lesson in community-based research. “We went in with really high hopes on how we were going to raise the standard of health—from changing bus routes to make fresh food more accessible to starting summer camps for kids. Then we realized our first task would be getting the community to trust us,” she recalls. “So for six months we just talked to people. We realized there’s no point in doing any of these things unless you’re addressing the needs of the community itself from the beginning.”

Nagarsheth and a fellow premed student walked door to door to meet residents of all ages, learned about Brownsville’s rich cultural heritage, and took part in existing community improvement efforts. Gradually they were able to help develop a sports program to keep kids off the street and a public health assessment questionnaire to help evaluate residents’ well-being.

“It really changed my view on medicine,” says Nagarsheth, who was named a 2012 Campus Compact Newman Civic Fellow for her community leadership efforts. “You can’t learn empathy in a classroom.”

She says Bachin’s office provided important insights via “complex conversations about service that helped shape who I am.”As an urban historian, Bachin views cities as laboratories. She says that now, more than ever, students must be civically engaged because higher education is under scrutiny by those who question whether current classroom teachings can be adapted to real-world experiences.

While such opportunities abound at the U, “There was never a central place where, if you were a student and wanted to take a course that had a community-based component, you could find out about it,” explains Bachin.

Toward that end, the Office of Civic and Community Engagement serves as both a clearinghouse and an incubator for service-learning and community-University partnerships. Students can simply search for course listings with the “civic” tag in the University’s database, visit the office’s website at www.miami.edu/index.php/civic, or consult directly with Bachin and her small staff.

Bachin estimates that around 230 courses with a strong community component are offered in the UM curriculum. Among them is Donn Tilson’s PR Campaigns class, where students get to develop and implement a public relations campaign for a local charity. In 2011, the project’s first year, 30 nonprofit agencies received assistance from 300 student, faculty, and staff volunteers, notes Tilson, A.B. ’72, M.A. ’86, an associate professor at the School of Communication.

Professor Donald Spivey, one of Bachin’s colleagues in the Department of History, gives students in most of his courses the option of writing a research paper or devoting 40 hours of their time to a service-learning project at a local organization. “I went back to what is really an old idea,” Spivey says, referring to his undergraduate years at the University of Illinois, when he tutored elementary school students in American history. “All of us should be involved in some kind of way, whatever skills you can bring, whether teaching kids history or helping them with science.”

Associate professor of religious studies Michelle Gonzalez Maldonado took her class on Guatemalan religion and culture to San Lucas Toliman, where they helped with rebuilding efforts after flash floods and mudslides from Tropical Storm Agatha devastated the impoverished town. The experience, Maldonado says, “reinforced the notion that the classroom is not the only place for knowledge.”

Citing national reports that state the city of Miami’s civic well-being lags far behind that of other U.S. municipalities as measured by volunteerism, voting, and other engagement factors, Bachin says the Office of Civic and Community Engagement has an important role to play in reversing this trend.

The ultimate goal, she explains, is to unite faculty and students with community organizations and leverage the University’s intellectual and academic resources “to collaboratively shape solutions for improving civic life and addressing community concerns.”

She and her team work closely with the Butler Center for Volunteer Service and Leadership Development, the UM Citizens Board, and multiple schools and colleges to strengthen relationships between the University and the South Florida community. They also encourage engagement by selecting UM Civic Scholars and Engaged Faculty Fellows, developing programming, and spearheading research initiatives.

For the inaugural year’s strategic focus on affordable housing in 2011, the office presented noted scholars, policy makers, and housing practitioners while highlighting related local agencies such as Carrfour Supportive Housing and its groundbreaking Verde Gardens project, a transitional housing facility that offers agricultural training opportunities for residents and a farmers’ market.

This year’s research emphasis is on urban and environmental sustainability. Bachin says future initiatives may address poverty, children’s health, aging, and immigration.

UM schools and colleges such as architecture, communication, education and human development, law, and medicine already have clinics and centers addressing these issues, but their efforts primarily involve graduate and professional students. The Office of Civic and Community Engagement targets undergraduate education.

Daniella Levine is president and CEO of the advocacy organization Catalyst Miami, which has long partnered with the School of Education and Human Development and Miami Law. She praises the Office of Civic and Community Engagement’s strategic focus areas, its alignment of faculty and students University-wide, and its aim of linking service with public policy and research, saying it is in a unique position to make a significant impact at the community level.

Levine’s group is one of many already allied with the office. In addition to human service agencies, its community partners and task force members include city and county governments, the Miami-Dade County School System, and private partners such as JPMorgan Chase, which recently announced a $75,000 planning grant to support the office’s affordable housing initiative.

Says Bachin: “We want to be not just part of a trend, but a leader.”

SERVICE CLOSE-UPS

“Civic engagement is part of my everyday life. Seeing the positive impact my engagement has on the quality of people’s lives in our community is unlike any other experience.”
—Brett Abess, ’13, business management and ecosystem science and policy
Abess created an award-winning proposal for The Edible School Bus, a mobile farmers’ market designed to support sustainable agriculture locally and convey healthy, affordable food to underserved communities. He volunteers with various community groups.

“Service doesn’t mean you have to plant trees, and it doesn’t have to be something huge. It means coming from a loving and kind part of yourself, thinking of others before yourself, and thinking about how others will be affected by the things you do.”
—Christine Job, School of Law third-year student
Job is president of the school’s Student Bar Association and winner of the Joseph H. Bogosian Student Leadership Award. She counsels budding entrepreneurs at The Launch Pad at UM and is involved in the Mindfulness in Law Joint Task Force of South Florida. She hopes to launch a “mega” day of service at Miami Law in collaboration with other law schools.

“Engagement means getting to know the needs of different communities and sub-populations and then working with them to address their needs and eliminate existing disparities.”
—Stefania Prendes-Alvarez, M.P.H. ’12, M.D. candidate
Prendes-Alvarez is executive director of the Mitchell Wolfson Sr. Department of Community Service, which coordinates the Miller School of Medicine’s major community outreach efforts and health fairs. In 2009 she founded Let’s Talk About It, a month-long mental-health educational curriculum for eighth-graders to combat the stigma associated with mental illness. The program has been adopted by 17 area schools and incorporated as a service-learning component of a Miller School M.D./M.P.H. course.

“Engagement means being an aware and active citizen—figuring out what issues you are most passionate about and how you can be directly involved in solving them.”
—Christopher Stampar, ’14, international relations, computer science, and geo-spatial technology
Stampar, a Dickinson Scholar in the College of Arts and Sciences, is director of international partnership development for the youth-led organization IDEAS For Us (Intellectual Decisions on Environmental Awareness Solutions) and coordinates a sustainable agriculture initiative called nourish9billion.org. In the past year he has been to Sweden for the Stockholm Conference on the Environment, Brazil for the Rio 20 Earth Summit, and New York City for a meeting on happiness and well-being at the United Nations.

More than just a place to rest your head, home should be a safe haven. But these days, we worry whether the paint on our picket fence is toxic. We fear that our dream house may be spewing waste or simply wasting resources. In need of a little green-spiration, we found four diverse dwellings to highlight. Each of these eco-friendly abodes addresses environmental concerns with elegant, innovative, and livable solutions, proving that sustainability, like charity, can indeed begin at home.

Presidential Preserve

Its eye-catching interior includes a light fixture assembled of discarded plumbing pipes, a backsplash fashioned from recycled cans, wallpaper made of Sunday funnies, and floors crafted from Florida sand and seashells.Ibis House, the University of Miami president’s new home, is green down to its last detail. Completed in August 2012, it recently earned LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) certification from the U.S. Green Building Council.Low-E glass windows block solar heat, a white roof and walls reduce heat load, and roof-installed solar panels heat water. High-efficiency water fixtures, safer paint coatings, nontoxic pest-control products, and green cleaning agents are among its many other eco-friendly features.A few new custom pieces, such as a striking Odegard rug, have been mixed with furnishings recycled from the president’s previous home to conserve University resources.

Ibis House is the final green jewel in the 32-acre crown of Smathers Four Fillies Farm, a sustainably built community for University faculty and administrators located in Miami-Dade County’s Village of Pinecrest. The 31 single-family homes sit on land bequeathed to UM by philanthropist, horticulturist, and longtime UM trustee Frank Smathers Jr., J.D. ’34. He and his wife bought the lush estate in 1967 and named it in honor of their four daughters (thus the “four fillies”).

Four Fillies’ mango grove is “the single most important mango collection in the world,” notes Bruce Greer, chairman of the board of Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden, which has partnered with UM to maintain and preserve the property’s more than 21 acres of fruit groves and natural hammock.

The community—built on 11 acres, with two-thirds of the parcel left intact—earned the Urban Land Institute’s Woolbright Dream Green Reality Award, which recognizes projects that reduce environmental impact through energy and water efficiency, use of green building materials, and clean indoor air quality.

Keeping Up with the Joneses

Although this one-story may look similar to others in the neighborhood, life is definitely greener on the Jones side of the fence.In 2009, Richard K. Jones, B.Arch. ’91, M.B.A. ’01, and his wife, Dawn Jones, B.B.A. ’90, completed an extensive remodeling project that earned a Platinum rating—the highest obtainable—under the Green Building Council’s LEED certification system. The upgrades also earned the family a tax break from Uncle Sam.

Jones, the associate vice president for facilities design and construction at UM, incorporated into his South Miami residence some of the basic sustainability strategies he’s used in spearheading green facilities at UM such as the LEED-certified Clinical Research Building on the Miller School of Medicine campus.“We looked at almost every aspect of our home, from the air-conditioning system and insulation to the landscaping and finishes,” Jones says.

Improvements included a reflective white roof to keep the house cooler, countertops made of recycled paper, solar tubes, LED lights, drought-resistant landscaping, and much more.

The renovation added 1,100 square feet to the 1,200-square-foot mid-century-style house the couple had purchased 11 years earlier—before their three children were born. Even with nearly twice the living space, says Jones, the family’s annual energy consumption has dropped 73 percent. He estimates that, compared with a traditionally built house of similar size, they save $3,500 a year in energy costs.

Ian McKeown, A.B. ’07, M.S. ’09, sustainability coordinator in UM’s Office of Environmental Health and Safety, applauds the platinum standard Jones has set by taking his work home with him. “He’s willing to make a commitment not only to helping the University be more sustainable, but to his own home and lifestyle,” McKeown says. “Anyone can learn a lesson from this.”

Grid Relief

If James Englehardt has anything to do with it, treated wastewater will be coming soon to a tap near you.But first the environmental engineering professor is perfecting an experimental water treatment process on campus.

Backed by a $2 million National Science Foundation grant, Englehardt is leading an interdisciplinary effort to develop and demonstrate a low-energy, low-emission system for recycling residential wastewater in one of the University Village apartments.

The “Design for Autonomous Net-Zero Water Buildings,” known more informally as the “Zero Water Project,” went online this semester. Currently four students reside in this historic home laboratory. Their apartment’s novel system collects used water from sinks, laundry, showers, the dishwasher, and toilets, and treats it to above drinking water standards with calcium carbonate, natural ozone, hydrogen peroxide, and ethanol. Tested three times daily, the treated water returns to the test community’s taps for all uses but cooking and drinking. A rainwater cistern and city source supply those needs.

The project team includes students and faculty from the College of Engineering, School of Architecture, College of Arts and Sciences, and Abess Center for Ecosystem Science and Policy.

Englehardt’s co-principal investigator, Kamal Premaratne, professor of electrical and computer engineering, is developing smart technology to detect risk to the system in real-time.

UM cultural anthropologist Kenny Broad, along with a psychologist and two architects, is assessing potential motivations for adopting this kind of technology. “We’re learning how to explain and present these systems to the public so they can be accepted,” says Englehardt.

Though not yet completely “off the water grid,” this preliminary demo is intended to point the way toward a global model for conserving energy, saving water, and reducing burden on our natural resources.

According to Englehardt, South Florida’s treated wastewater currently meets 87 of the 93 numerical drinking water requirements, but instead of entering a direct potable reuse system like the one in University Village, it gets pumped into the ocean or deep saltwater aquifers. That means it has to be treated again and reconveyed to users at great energy expenditure and expense. Water flowing to and from centralized treatment plants uses about 3 percent of this nation’s total electricity, he notes.

Those resources could be better spent getting rid of pharmaceuticals and chemicals in our water supplies, he contends, adding, “We can learn from ecosystems by treating waste as a resource.”

Eco Park

In 2005 a one-two punch from Hurricanes Katrina and Wilma damaged a 107-room hotel and 12 cottages in Everglades National Park so severely that officials decided to demolish what was left of them. Ever since, visitors have had to pitch tents or use an RV to camp at the park’s southernmost Flamingo section on the bay.

But demand for permanent sleeping facilities remained, says Park Superintendent Dan B. Kimball. “What we heard loud and clear was that there were family traditions based on staying overnight, and people wanted us to return to that tradition,” he adds.

The park took a giant step toward meeting those demands this past Decem-ber, when it unveiled a 200-square-foot eco-tent designed and built by University of Miami architecture students.

The furnished dwelling, which had a waiting list of 80 by its first day, sleeps four comfortably for $16 per night. It boasts bamboo and recycled-plastic flooring; screening that captures breezes yet keeps mosquitoes out; and a roof fashioned from a durable hand-sewn fabric.

Rocco Ceo, the School of Architecture professor who co-teaches the semester-long Design Build Studio, says the idea was to give the park “something that would minimally impact the landscape while supporting the park’s mission and promoting environmental awareness.”

One of the materials used, for example, is heat-treated pine, which lasts longer than its chemically treated counterpart.

Throughout the 2012 spring semester, 11 fifth-year students designed, constructed, and tested the eco-tent on UM’s Coral Gables campus. They disassembled the finished product for transportation to Everglades National Park. A generous grant from the South Florida National Parks Trust funded the project.

Violet Battat, B.Arch. ’12, who took the lead finding a suitable roof fabric, decided on a strong solution-dyed polymer yarn material intended to withstand water, mildew, and even vultures. Michael Galea, B.Arch. ’12, made sure the custom hardware connected the eco-tent’s poles properly. “The biggest challenge was measuring 50 times and cutting once because we had one chance to get everything correct,” he says.

Pleased with UM’s prototype, park officials would like to build 20 more. Says Kimball: “To team up with the University of Miami and young students who came up with something that’s innovative and functional and also beautiful is fabulous for the park.”

The eco-tent is open from mid-November to mid-April.