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As he grew up in Bogotá, Colombia, Mateo Dulce Rubio would hear a familiar news story every few days—someone had stepped on another landmine. The explosion had killed or injured them. Though the capital city was far from the country's war-torn areas, these accidents stayed in the back of his mind.

Colombia has been embroiled in conflict with armed rebel groups for roughly six decades. The guerrilla fighters have buried thousands of landmines in rural areas, putting hundreds of thousands of people at risk of death, dismemberment and displacement. Recent efforts to remove the explosives have reduced casualties, but the reported victims increasingly have been civilians.

Dulce Rubio is now a fifth-year doctoral student at Carnegie Mellon University, where he studies public policy at the Heinz College of Information Systems and Public Policy and statistics at the Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences.

According to Dulce Rubio, people in the U.S. lack awareness of the dangers of landmines in countries like Colombia. "It mostly affects third-world countries, developing countries. But in those countries, it's a very, very important problem," he said.

That's why, about three years ago, Dulce Rubio began leading a team of classmates and faculty in developing a three-pronged system for more accurately identifying landmine contamination. They've since collaborated with the United Nations Mine Action Service (UNMAS) to refine the system, called RELand. A humanitarian organization in Colombia has been field testing it in two municipalities for more than a year.

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