Students participating in the Tanzania Immersion Experience

"What you do makes a difference, and you have to decide what kind of difference you want to make." 

– Jane Goodall

Global and Community Engagement Conference 2022

The Global and Community Engagement Conference was held on Saturday, October 29, 2022, from 9am-3pm in the Memorial Union Ballroom and lunch was provided to all attendees. The conference was open to anyone interested in the development, design, and discovery of people and communities! 2022's theme was "Re-energizing Our Communities Through Service".

The conference featured keynote speaker Dr. Kurt Paterson.  Paterson is responsible for organizing the first D80 conference at Michigan Tech back in 2007 while he was an Adjunct Associate Professor in Civil and Environmental Engineering. 

Conference Keynote Speaker - Dr. Kurt Paterson

Headshot of Kurt Paterson

Kurt Paterson is a first-generation college graduate who grew up in a fairly humble Iowa neighborhood but managed to wander into a life of global engagement. Currently, he is a professor of engineering at James Madison University, where he was Head of Engineering for seven years. He is also serving the U.S. Department of State as Senior Sustainability Advisor and was recently named a Jefferson Science Fellow of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. In these capacities, he has championed the development of climate-sensitive operations to parallel the Department’s international climate diplomacy.

Prior to these efforts, Kurt was on Michigan Tech’s environmental engineering faculty and partnered with countless faculty, staff, students and communities on global engagement programs and projects in more than 40 countries. Inspired by these successes at Tech, Kurt helped launch a nationwide community of practice through the American Society of Engineering Education, the Community Engagement Division.

In January 2023, to take engagement to a new scale, Kurt will become Director of The Polytechnic School at Arizona State University’s Fulton Schools of Engineering. Kurt currently lives in Washington, D.C. with his wife, two daughters, and Covid rescue puppy, the latter of which also started life in humble circumstances and is good at wandering.


Check out the 2022 Global and Community Engagement Conference list of sessions: