“You don’t really think about infrastructure unless you’re put into a situation where you do have to think about it,” says Audrey Gozali ’18. She started thinking about it in eighth grade while traveling with her family in Indonesia. She was 13 and watched her brother get sick after swallowing pool water.
Her cousin got sick, too—from ice cubes in a soda. The problem? The water, infrastructure so basic many take it for granted. As a civil engineering student, Gozali earned recognition for her work on water problems. She was named one of the Ten New Faces of Civil Engineering by the American Society of Civil Engineers for her academics and commitment to others. That sense of service took her to Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 2015 on a Jean Donovan Summer Fellowship through SCU’s Ignatian Center for Jesuit Education. Gozali worked with nongovernmental organizations, designing a swimming pool with water filtered by plants. For her senior design project, Gozali helped design and implement a rainwater attachment and purification system for a village in Tanzania. The ten-day project produces a lasting good. With regular maintenance, the system should last for approximately 50 years, she says.