News — September 15, 2025
Engaged Scholars: Patrick Sours
September 2025
Engaged Scholars is a series highlighting Ohio State faculty who have made an impact in our communities through their community-engaged research and teaching.
Patrick Sours
Assistant Professor of Professional Practice - Faculty Lead of The Humanitarian Engineering Program
College of Food, Agricultural and Environmental Science
I am the faculty lead of the Humanitarian Engineering Program, which aims to teach engineers how to address and understand complex societal challenges. Students in courses such as the Global Capstone Design Sequence work with local and global community partners to develop and implement community impact projects focused on areas like water treatment, access to clean water and small-scale agricultural efforts. My research interests focus on understanding and balancing outcomes between student learning and community impacts, particularly through a global competency lens.
Why is it important to engage the community in your research and teaching?
In Humanitarian Engineering, we aim to educate engineers and scientists to address complex societal challenges. To fully grasp these intricacies, the voices and perspectives of those impacted must be heard, and their values must be considered throughout the design process. Without engaging communities, our designs would be developed in a vacuum, detached from the realities they are meant to address.
What led you to the path of engaged scholarship? How did you get started?
As an undergraduate student, I was accepted into the Humanitarian Engineering Scholars Program, which showed me the ways engineers could meaningfully engage with and positively impact communities. As I continued in this space, I observed that many technical projects failed because implementers took a techno-centric approach to design. I became interested in understanding how we can seek a balance between student learning and ensuring positive outcomes for our community partners.
How has your scholarship benefited from engaging with community partners?
Community engagement has enhanced student learning by exposing students to different lived experiences and types of knowledge. It has helped engineering students realize that addressing challenges often requires more than purely technical solutions it demands a holistic understanding of the context in which the challenge exists.
What has been a highlight of your community engagement experience?
One highlight has been our Engineering in Context Honduras course. The program allows students to visit gravity-powered water treatment plants and engage with local communities. After building this partnership and program since 2018, we finally launched it in spring 2024. Watching the excitement of our students as they explored the treatment facility for the first time after years of studying and learning about it was a wonderful moment.
Another highlight came after months of collaborating on a rainwater harvesting initiative in Tanzania. When we visited the community, a teacher shared during an interview that, for the first time ever, all students at the school passed the government exam. The teacher attributed this milestone to the school's ability to provide lunch, which was made possible because students no longer needed to bring water to school every day.
What advice would you give to faculty and students who are interested in engaging the community in their scholarship?
Recognize that there are many forms of community engagement and be prepared to navigate stakeholder dynamics that may arise. Focus on building strong, trusting partnerships that allow for open and honest feedback. Enter into these partnerships with humility and maintain a commitment to continuous learning.
Sample Engaged Scholarship
Global Capstone Design Sequence
Engineering in Context - Honduras Course