Communicating Change

by Alake Pilgrim

What does the science of light have to do with your phone? And what enabled the choice of providers (and rates) you now enjoy? The answers to these questions intersect in the life of Dr. Kim Mallalieu, Senior Lecturer in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at The University of the West Indies’ St. Augustine Campus.

Dr. Mallalieu is a woman with a decisive walk and sudden, illuminating smile, who switches from intense work-mode to fully attentive interviewee with the help of a strong cup of tea and sincere apologies for her busyness. Once refocused, she is able to move, within seconds, from personal revelation to a startlingly clear explanation (with diagram) of the unique characteristics of light. Surrounded by pictures of her husband and three boys, she begins by sharing the story of her unconventional childhood.

Her father was an Electrical Engineer and her mother, a teacher from Guyana. At 13, she moved with her family to her father’s home country of St. Kitts where she attended public school. There, despite a serious lack of teachers and other basic resources, she encountered a “Physics teacher [who] was a member of the British Voluntary Service Overseas (VSO); a brilliant guy, a good human being. He gave me a lot of encouragement in a context where goats walked through our classroom…!”

In the midst of this largely unstructured, “free-floating” adolescence, Dr. Mallalieu made the first of several key decisions she has made at turning points throughout her life. “At 15 or 16 years old, I decided to work toward the O-Level Exams on my own.” Undaunted by the lack of a Math teacher in Forms 4 and 5, she approached the teacher at the Convent’s private school - Mike, a white rasta. “Every night he had an army of people at his flat and they would smoke pot and listen to Bob Marley whole night. I asked him if I could come and do the Past Papers at his house in the evening. He said, “Yeah, no problem.” So my parents would drop me off and when I needed to know something, I would interrupt him and he would look up red-eyed and explain it to me…I got an A in Math.”

In fact, she did very well in O-Levels and after spending a year in Sixth Form in St. Kitts, had the opportunity to attend a private school in the United States. It was at the prompting of the school’s guidance counselor that she applied to do undergraduate studies at MIT, Yale and Brown along with (at her own insistence) a number of second and third-tiered schools. To her immense surprise, she was accepted into all three universities. After accepting Yale’s offer, she made the choice to once again “take my life into my own hands” and, based on intuition and a bad dream, switched her acceptance to MIT. One night, at a party in her freshman year, a final-year student Richelieu (“Richie”) Hemphill, introduced her to his research into Optics - the physics of light - which, at MIT, was an area of focus within Electrical Engineering. She was immediately fascinated by the field.

Optical studies, Dr. Mallalieu explains, cover an enormous range, from research into the fundamental nature of light to the design of optical systems such as fibre optic transmission systems. Fibre optics is used in a diverse and important set of applications, including downhole measurement in oil wells, car navigation, surgery, re-routing light in buildings and yes, transatlantic telephone cables. According to www.wikipedia.org, a bundle of optical fibers that can be held in one hand could have sufficient bandwidth capacity to carry the current data transmission needs of the entire planet. In the same way that optical systems are part of the larger telephone network, Dr. Mallalieu’s work has moved from highly specialized studies of optical phenomena, to investigations of the wider ICT systems of which they are a part.

At first, after completing her PhD, she had no intention of returning to the Caribbean for more than a year. She began teaching at UWI St. Augustine in 1987 and “at the end of the year, as you can guess,” she says, laughing, “I really loved it here.” Ironically, despite her subsequent awards for teaching, Dr. Mallalieu describes her early pedagogical abilities, with characteristic frankness, as “horrible” and “terrible”. Having spent many years outside of the region and in a theoretical PhD programme, “I had to work harder than everybody else to understand the context of Caribbean teaching. So I went about the process, which by now I was very familiar with, of teaching myself in the absence of an institutional framework and listening, listening to the feedback from students.” When the Instructional Development Unit (IDU) was formed, she was the very first person to enroll in their training programmes.

Almost immediately, however, there was a tension between her research interests and her desire to be relevant to the place she had made home. “We are a regional university with a mandate, I think, to real, practical application…[When] my current Head of Department Dr. Brian Copeland came on board, I found a kindred spirit.” They drafted the first Mission Statement for the Department and began systematically reviewing the curriculum.

In light of this, Dr. Mallalieu decided to “re-engineer myself to fit purpose”, looking for an area that was both relevant to the region at the time (mid-90’s), and close to her background in Optics. Telecommunications fit the bill. So she designed a Communications Systems programme that was as successful as it was in demand; attracting 80% of departmental student subscription. In keeping with the programme’s practical focus, she developed a “Lucent Cooperative Programme” where Master’s students spent a year abroad with the Lucent Wireless Networks Group. At the same time, in response to Dr. Copeland’s request, she devised a plan for revitalizing a commercial unit of the Department called the “Real Time Systems Group”, explicitly linking the unit’s initiatives and revenue-generating activities, to the Communications Systems teaching programme.

As with her teaching, Dr. Mallalieu set out to listen to her stakeholders, scouting forums such as the Caribbean Telecommunications Union (CTU) and Caribbean Association of National Telecommunications Organisations (CANTO) to learn how the University could best serve regional needs. What emerged was the need for a roadmap for the liberalisation of the telecoms industry, and this response provided the impetus for the ground-breaking Master’s in Telecommunications Regulation and Policy.

With a passion that she describes as “dotish”, but which others might call visionary, Dr. Mallalieu began looking for funds to enable the University to take a leading role in this massive undertaking. The Cable and Wireless Virtual Academy agreed to give US $1 million over seven years and the MRP (Telecommunications) got underway. Given that UWI had no “institutional history” in either the subject matter or online teaching (needed to reach an international, working constituency), it was decided that the first cohort, entering in September 2003, would be awarded scholarships to study abroad.

Then, one day, lightning struck. She received a letter from the Virtual Academy saying that they had been forced to close down and were therefore terminating all of their worldwide obligations, with immediate effect. This was particularly problematic given that the University did not (and does not) subsidise the MRP, and that the second cohort of students was also predominantly on scholarship. Dr. Mallalieu felt strongly that “My obligation was to the students…I got on the phone right away with the CEO of the Virtual Academy and negotiated a parting gift.” In her view, the ensuing demands of financial autonomy have been “good for us - baptism by fire…And our balance sheet is good, it’s green.” They decided to proceed with three cohorts, rather than the four which would have been serviced by the former seven-year commitment. The final class entered in January 2006 and the first MRP students graduated in November of that year.

The programme itself comprises eight online courses and three credits derived from seminars, offered through a mix of face-to-face and online instruction. The response to the face-to-face seminars, she says, has been amazing; with attendance by virtually all of the MRP students from over 31 developing countries, including Papua New Guinea, Tunisia, the Seychelles, Nepal and many West and South African countries.

Regarding the MRP’s future, Dr. Mallalieu is in discussions with the CTU on how the programme’s work can feed into the Centre of Excellence they are currently developing, to ensure continued servicing of the industry’s changing human resource needs. In the same vein, Dr. Mallalieu’s current research brings together two recurring themes in her life – personal and social transformation, and the process of fitting usefully into wider systems. She has been invited by a research network in Africa and in Asia to participate in a gap analysis of telecommunications policy and regulation human resource needs in Africa, the Pacific and the Caribbean, to be completed by April 2007. This study will feed directly into post-MRP regional human resource planning.

Since 2004, she has also been one of two West Indian members of a Latin American and Caribbean research network, Diálogo Regional sobre la Sociedad de la Información, DIRSI (Regional Dialogue on the Information Society). The immediate focus of their research is the reduction of poverty through technology, policy and regulatory intervention strategies. They have funding up to 2008, but are “hoping that it will endure.”

So Dr. Mallalieu is, once more, “cutting her teeth” on something new - gaining an understanding of how sociological research is executed and studying Spanish at the Centre for Language Learning on campus. As with all growth, the journey is challenging at times, but she is driven by the same goal that inspires her like-minded colleagues at UWI - “Research with a regional focus that has tangible benefits” - a mandate in the process of fulfillment.