Richard and Mary Ann Peugeot are more interested in building people than constructing buildings
Lead donors for engineering missions mark $1 million in contributions to the Peugeot Center for Engineering Service to Developing Communities.
By janel Shoun-Smith | 615-335-6273 |
The May 2026 Peugeot Center mission team, including center co-namesake Mary Ann Peugeot, outside of the Predisan health clinic in Honduras, where the engineering team installed new oxygen lines for critical are patient beds.
Richard (Dick) and Mary Ann Peugeot have a knack for seeing the potential in people.
They exercised that skill when Dick saw the potential in Nuria Rosa Varnau (BS ’09)—then a teen-age interpreter for a Lipscomb mission team in Honduras. The couple sponsored her education at Lipscomb and now she is a medical doctor in Indianapolis.
They used their sixth sense for potential again in 2014, when they became the founding members and lead donors for the Peugeot Center for Engineering Service to Developing Communities, a hub for the Raymond B. Jones College of Engineering’s mission work around the globe.
Mary Ann Peugeot helping a student prepare to install oxygen lines in the Predisan clinic .
But not even the Peugeots could foresee how the Peugeot Center would end up impacting tens of thousands of lives in its first 12 years of existence.
The center coordinates hundreds of students to implement up to eight international and domestic engineering projects annually including bridges, solar installations, water distribution and wastewater management systems in various countries spanning from Central America to Africa to Nashville.
The center’s work, impacting communities in seven nations, has been praised by two international presidents. The center’s faculty and staff have hosted a national conference on engineering Christian missions, carried out federally-funded research on the impact of humanitarian missions, established a mission-focused academic minor and have begun exploring leading a national effort to create a professional network for college-led humanitarian engineering programs.
The Peugeots, who reside in Nashville, have remained personally involved with the center throughout the years, with Dick Peugeot participating in several mission trips and Mary Ann hosting the teams for celebration dinners after the trips in their home and attending her first trip to Honduras this year.
In 2026, however, the center reached a particularly exciting financial milestone as the Peugeots’ contributions to the center have now exceeded the $1 million mark. In addition, Mary Ann’s first Peugeot mission trip this past May was with a team that traveled to Catacamas, Honduras, to carry out a first-time project for the center: to install an oxygen distribution system to 21 critical patient beds at a health facility operated by Predisan, a Christ-centered, nonprofit healthcare organization.
Working with students on this 2006 trip to install a radio tower for Predisan in Honduras inspired Dick Peugeot (center) and his wife Mary Ann to fund a missions center.
The project was a full circle moment for the center as the engineering college’s first mission trip in 2004 was a partnership with Predisan, and Dick Peugeot’s first participation was with a Predisan project.
“What I have observed is a priceless demonstration of love, teamwork, talent and selfless contributions of energy to provide something to a medical facility and staff who thought this project was beyond their reach,” said Mary Ann. “As for myself, I am intensely grateful for this opportunity to travel with this group and be a part of something that is much bigger than we can imagine.”
A couple on a mission
Dick, an engineer himself who worked at the Y-12 facility in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and later started his own company in Atlanta to build X-ray inspection systems, was a member of Lipscomb’s Board of Trustees for 17 years, and two of his three children graduated from Lipscomb.
During his time on the board, Lipscomb’s engineering programs were established and steadily grew. After another international mission opportunity to build houses fell through for the two of them, Dick was invited to participate in a Lipscomb engineering mission trip to install a radio repeater tower in Honduras to enhance Predisan’s communication with their clinics located in the Honduran mountains.
“Dick used his expertise to lead the design, construction and installation of the repeater and radio communication system that provided crucial communications to Predisan workers across the region and truly life-saving possibilities to the people of Honduras who lived in those mountains,” said David Elrod, dean of the Raymond B. Jones College of Engineering.
It was on that mission trip that Dick met Varnau and heard her talk about her dream to go to a Christian college in America—Lipscomb in particular. . She would become like the couple’s own children, a Lipscomb alum and now a board member with Predisan.
During construction of this bridge in San Estaben, Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernandez, the president of Honduras, visited the work site and expressed his gratitude for the project.
The Peugeots’ participation and interest continued over the years. Then when the engineering faculty approached them with an idea to make their impact bigger, better and more sustainable in the long-term through a formalized structure, the two of them decided it was a great opportunity to construct more than just a building. The Peugeot Center was born with their foundational gift.
“What we wanted to do was build something, and building people is more our joy in life than just bricks and mortar,” said Mary Ann. “We could never have foreseen what it has developed into. It started as a mission trip but now there are partnerships with professionals and organizations outside of our nation who know us and believe in the mission. It has gone way further than we thought, but of course, God is behind it, so we shouldn’t be surprised.”
“I am very interested in being the hands and feet of Jesus and ways to spread the word of the Gospel,” echoed Dick. “This concept of the engineering mission trip has developed legs of its own and has grown far beyond what we could have imagined. It shows the power of God.”
“What we have seen from the students and all the people involved over the years has just been a joy, because they are learning they can serve with the talents God gave them,” said Mary Ann. “Their lives have been changed, our lives have been changed.
“As soon as they get back from a mission trip, we have them all over to our house so we can hear all their stories, and they are just amazing. Their lives change, and the other people’s lives change, but we have the joy of seeing it all happen,” she said.
“At Lipscomb, the dream for engineering missions started with students wanting to use what they were learning for the advancement of God’s Kingdom through serving others,” said Steve Sherman, director of the Peugeot Center. “This desire was blessed by the engineering faculty, but it took
Mary Ann Peugeot looking over the oxygen delivery tanks at the Predisan health clinic in Honduras on the May mission trip.
Dick and Mary Ann Peugeot’s enthusiasm and financial support to make it a reality! I believe it was a God thing, putting so many passionate believers together in a timely fashion to help so many around the world,” he said.
On the May mission trip that Mary Ann participated in, the team extended the existing medical oxygen system that only served the operating room area by adding three new trunk lines and 21 new wall-mounted outlets to deliver oxygen to 21 critical patient beds. Previously, these patients had to have k-bottles wheeled next to them for oxygen, which can be a dangerous and labor-intensive situation.
Students were able to install a new control panel with pressure gauges, relief valves, and control valves and conduct leak, pressure and flow rate tests of the system before handing it off to Predisan staff. Among the challenges was ensuring all copper pipe, valves, and gauges used in the system were cleaned to the stringent standard required for medical grade oxygen delivery, said Elrod.
“At this stage in our life if it wasn’t for the [Peugeot] center, what would be our thing?” said Dick, now 88-years-old. “It captivates and interests both of us. Mary Ann is really interested, especially in the young people. I don’t know who it serves more: those who are served or those who do the serving. I think I could argue it is those who are serving. Their lives are changed. I think those students will live a life of service, because they have seen it in action.”
A Peugeot Center engineering mission team of students installing solar panels on the Blessings Hospital in Malawi.
A completed water distribution system in Guatemala.
The dream team for engineering missions
The Peugeots have contributed to several other programs at Lipscomb, but the Peugeot Center has become a joint passion because of the students they have come to know personally, the incredible faculty of the engineering college and the important infrastructure work the students and professionals are doing to make lives better across the world, they said.
The Peugeots give much of the credit to the work and support of Lipscomb’s three college deans over the years and engineering faculty “who believed in the vision long before the center was launched. Their trips before 2014 led the college to search for new ways to make engineering missions a reality,” said Mary Ann Peugeot. “We credit them for the incredible success achieved in bringing water, power and hope to so many in the world.”
“God could not have sent a more godly, more hands-on focused dean than Dean Elrod,” said Dick Peugeot. “He is the kind of dean who simulates the project on his farm and tests it before we ever hit the mission field. I give him so much credit for the center.”
The Peugeots’ involvement over 22 years has become a very personal statement of their belief in the students’ potential and their commitment to service, they say.
“Because of the way God has blessed the center with excellent leadership and students over the years, other Lipscomb colleges have called on us to share the wealth of knowledge and experience," said Mary Ann Peugeot. The center staff has advised on medical mission trips by the College of Health & Human Sciences and the work of chemistry faculty in Ghana, among others. "Many times students from other colleges join our engineers, and I love how their thinking outside the box leads to appreciation of the talents of others," she said.
As Mary Ann says, “This may be the best investment we have ever made.”