Day: April 26, 2022

Daniel Fletcher, Blum Center Associate Director of Research, CellScope inventor, and Berkeley bioengineering faculty since 2002, has been named the new Faculty Director for the Blum Center for Developing Economies at UC Berkeley. The position will start on July 1.

Since 2018, Dan has served as Associate Director of the Blum Center, leading an expansive research portfolio and supporting the Big Ideas program, the premier social impact ecosystem for students at UC Berkeley. Dan is also the Founder and Director of the Health Tech CoLab, a new multidisciplinary collaboration space in Blum Hall working to increase access to healthcare by accelerating the development of health technologies. The CoLab is the “first pillar” of the College of Engineering’s “Engineering Better Health” Initiative, for which he serves as special advisor to the college.

Dan is the Chatterjee Professor of Bioengineering and Biophysics and a faculty member of the Bioengineering Department, an affiliated faculty of the Molecular and Cell Biology Department, and a Visiting Investigator of the Gladstone Institutes at UCSF. He is also a Chan-Zuckerberg Biohub Investigator, Faculty Scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, member of QB3 Berkeley, and Co-director of the Physiology course at the Marine Biological Laboratory. 

He and his research laboratory develop new technologies to study the role of mechanics in biology and detect diseases in low-resource settings. Their cell biological work is identifying how molecular-scale forces drive spatial organization and movement of immune cells and pathogens, and their diagnostic work is introducing new mobile tools to fight infectious diseases with collaborators around the world. 

He received a DPhil from Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar, a PhD from Stanford University, where he was an NSF Graduate Research Fellow, and a BS from Princeton University. His research has received an NSF CAREER Award, a National Inventors Hall of Fame Collegiate Award, and was designated “Best of What’s New” by Popular Science magazine, among other awards. He has been a Miller Professor, a Bakar Fellow, a Hellman Fellow, and served as a White House Fellow during the Obama administration.

“My work at the Blum Center is inspired by the Center’s mission to spur innovation, scholarship, and entrepreneurship to improve lives,” said Fletcher, “I am honored and eager to take on the challenges of directing the Center’s efforts to further expand our impact.”

Development Engineering Prof. Amy Pickering, Blum Center Distinguished Chair in Global Poverty and Practice at UC Berkeley, and Dr. Katya Cherukumilli, a postdoctoral scholar in Pickering’s lab, have won a $1.9 million award to increase access to clean and safe water in low-income urban communities around the world. The Open Philanthropy grant will go toward scaling up and deploying the Venturi, the in-line (passive) chlorinator device that was originally designed by local engineers in Bangladesh, Kenya, and the U.S.

Pickering, Cherukumilli, and their team will collaborate with field-implementation partners CARE and Davis and Shirtliff in Kenya, as well as Prof. Jenna Davis at Stanford University, to test the device in new settings including healthcare facilities and schools. The team has also been working with product design and engineering graduate students on campus to “assess the performance of the Venturi using liquid chlorine produced via electrochlorination and to lay the groundwork for using passive chlorinators at handpumps in the future,” says Cherukumilli.

Water can get contaminated on its way through inadequate piping, sewage, and drainage systems — an issue exacerbated by growing populations and increased reliance on intermittent water supplies. The Venturi works at the spot where people collect water, such as taps, and automatically adds a precise dose of liquid chlorine to the water that disinfects it while remaining undetectable to users — all without requiring electricity, moving parts, or frequent input on the part of users. 

The possibilities are huge. The Joint Monitoring Program has estimated that over 2 billion people don’t have access to clean water, including a quarter of the world’s healthcare facilities. The consequences can be staggering, including 300,000 or so children who die before the age of five each year due to diarrheal disease. Not only is the Venturi easy to operate and maintain, but diluted bleach needed to make the liquid chlorine is easily found in low-resource settings, and each unit of the device is expected to cost only $35 at scale. The team’s field testing has already shown that this approach to water purification could reduce child diarrhea cases by about 23 percent.

“We are excited about setting up manufacturing of the Venturi in Kenya and working with our partners on viable implementation models for increasing access to safe water in schools and health care facilities,” says Pickering.