MIT D-Lab Book (Chapters) Launch-n-Lunch

Libby Hsu graduated from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and received master's degrees in structural engineering and building technology from MIT. She became involved with MIT D-Lab by taking the D-Lab: Schools class and traveling to Cambodia to work on alternative concretes.

Now she leads D-Lab's academic program by managing its teaching team, creating and promoting a coherent strategy for D-Lab's academic offerings at MIT, aligning D-Lab's educational mission with its research and practice work around the world, and building instructors' capacity to provide transformative educational experiences to their students.

Libby is also an educator who teaches D-Lab: Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene and D-Lab: Development; coordinates D-Lab's student work in many countries including Mexico, Colombia, and the Dominican Republic; and trains D-Lab trip leaders who are taking students to the field. She has worked with dozens of students on projects related to sanitation, water quality, education, and participatory design; and is also a first-year adviser.

She speaks German and Spanish, has training as a technical editor, and is an avid knitter, as well as a certified Wilderness First Responder. Libby and her husband are the Heads of House at MIT's Random Hall.

Susan Murcott, an environmental engineer with a focus on water, is a Lecturer in D-Lab where she teaches Thermal Energy Networks for Decarbonization of Campuses, Neighborhoods, and Cities, D-Lab: Water, Climate Change, and Health, and D-Lab-Water, Sanitation, Hygiene, She has also co-taught D-Lab: Earth.

Murcott has led MIT student teams in over 25 countries spanning five continents. In 2014-2015, she led the water filter evaluation of the Comprehensive Initiative on Technology Evaluation (CITE), a five-year USAID-funded project, to evaluate technologies for the poor. From 2005 to the present, she founded and helped establish the non-profit organization, Pure Home Water, with Ghanaian partners, which has built a ceramic pot filter factory to provide safe drinking water in northern Ghana.

From 2002 to the present, she has been the principal investigator of a team, in partnership with the Environment and Public Health Organization in Kathmandu, Nepal, that invented and has widely disseminated the KanchanTM Arsenic Filter, as well as being involved in MIT-funded emergency relief following the 2015 Nepal earthquake. Current related project: Manufacturing and Marketing E. coli Test Kits to Promote Safely Managed Drinking Water and Improved Public Health in Nepal.

Murcott is the author of over 50 professional papers as well as the book Arsenic in the World: an International Sourcebook (IWA, 2012-Link).