Noah Link

While at Mines, he participated in numerous humanitarian engineering adjacent project such as water distribution projects in Nicaragua and Bolivia which he oversaw as a technical committee lead in Mines Without Borders. Moreover, Noah engaged deeply through humanitarian engineering coursework including the Humanitarian Engineering & Science practicum where he carried out a meta-analysis of the Delphi study methodology in the context of Humanitarian Engineering contexts and literature. 

Similarly, Noah engaged deeply in research while at Mines. His first exposure to research was with Professor Estelle Smith where he utilized computational social science techniques to understand spiritual care in online support communities. Focusing on the Reddit platform, he helped design research instruments to retrieve pertinent posts and train transformer-based neural networks. This work laid the foundation for understanding the ways in which users on various subreddits engage in spiritual practices to support each other or find support through difficult crises of meaning.

Likewise, Noah worked extensively with Professor Lucena in the context of recyclers of Medellín, Colombia. For some context, countries like Colombia have a different waste management systems than the United States where individual recycleers go throughout the streets to gather important materials to make a living. While recyclers are sustainability champions by keeping the city envrionmentally clean, they are oftentimes marginalized due to the imagery of subsiting on trash. 

  Within this context, Noah engaged deeply with recyclers to empower them throughout their work. Firstly, through the class Engineering for Sustainable Community Development (EDNS 477), Noah co-designed solutions for molds for tiles composed of Construction & Demolition Waste (C&DW) with students at Mines and recyclers through virtual meetings and an in-person prototyping trip. This then lead to a summer research trip funded by the NSF IRES program where he worked alongside Mines, Southern Methodist University, and Universidad Nacional de Colombia students to carry out ethnographic methodologies to understand the realities that recyclers face. He continued working with these actors through a Delphi study to understand how to integrate recyclers of C&DW into the larger circular economy. Additionaly, Noah returned for the second year of the IRES program to mentor students, aid them through their prototyping projects, and present findings from the Delphi Study at the 2026 Corvallis-Medellín Workshops in Sustainable Construction.

Noah worked extensively with Professor Lucena through research translation of findings to US academic settings. Alongside fellow student Shelby Gilson and Dr. Lucena's mentorship, Noah presented about the important work of recyclers in settings such as the Mines Undergraduate Research Symposium, IEEE Global Humanitarian Technologies Conference, and the Futures class at Mines. Moreover, Noah helped mentor teams in the Cornerstone Design class to design solutions at the service of recyclers through the role as a Subject Matter Expert. Finally, he mentored students in EDNS 477, which he took a year prior with Dr. Lucena, to guide them through their own co-design projects. 

Through these numerous experiences, Noah has become passionate about transforming academia into an institution that is responsive to the needs of  communities through deep engagement throughout the research process through participatory methods.