Alan Lightman helped the Museum of Science in Boston put together the opening show for their new planetarium. Across town, Harvard Bookstore carries “Einstein’s Dream” and other novels by the MIT physicist.

But last night, Lightman gave a talk to his MIT colleagues about a project on the other side of the world – The Harpswell Foundation. In 2005, he founded the organization to help create a new class of female leaders in Cambodia. Sounds like a major feat, but he’s taking a simple, well-thought-out approach. The foundation, named for the Maine island where Lightman summers, funded the construction of two dorms for female college students in Phnom Penh.

On a trip to Cambodia, he learned that housing is the missing piece for women who want to attend the capitol’s universities – men can live at Buddhist temples. But, Lightman and his supporters offer the dorm residents more – English lessons, computers and leadership forums.

Leadership, he said, is the goal.

“We want our young women to the directors of hospitals, heads of NGOs and we want them to start new businesses,” he said. “We want them to be government ministers.”

And, to do that, he said he has to be “ruthless” about the women the foundation accepts. While he and his staff search the countryside for bright, high-achieving women, they also look for women with vision and drive. The Harpswell women want to help not just their families, but the entire nation. Lightman noted that raising the status of women is key to bringing nations like Cambodia out of poverty.

“We think of them not as individuals, but as agents of change,” he said.

So every morning, about 80 women — most dressed in informal uniforms of white, button-down shirts and long, navy blue skirts – mount their bicycles and ride to school through the squalid streets of Phnom Penh. If not for the Foundation, most of them would be married and raising rice and children.

Instead of returning to a house with no electricity or plumbing, they come home to spotless new dorms. There, they share rooms, but not desks – a luxury in a country where most people live in crowded homes with little privacy.

“It’s very important for the empowerment of women that they have their own desks,” he said.

He said it’s also important that they have each other.

“We give the students an environment where they can form a sisterhood, "he said.

When asked if he planned to keep building dorms, Lightman said no. Instead, he wants to put all the foundation’s efforts behind a group of small women. Plus, he said, if there were many more women in the program, he couldn’t remember all their names.

For more information about the Harpswell Foundation, see www.harpswellfoundation.org or my 2007 story in The Boston Globe.