Category: Big Ideas

By Sam Goldman

Earlier this fall, UC Berkeley debuted a webpage spotlighting the breadth and depth of its most innovative alumni and the resources available on campus to support the next generation of game-changing entrepreneurs, along with a series of deep-dive stories highlighting Cal founders and their impacts on society. 

The timing couldn’t have been better: Pitchbook recently ranked Berkeley No. 1 for number of venture-backed startup companies, ahead of the likes of Stanford, Harvard, Penn, and MIT. Berkeley innovators like Jennifer Doudna and Kevin Chou generate international headlines. Campus is home to an ever-growing number of entrepreneurship, innovation, and tech-minded organizations and resources.

But — for the aspiring student innovator with a rapidly germinating new idea — where do they start? Where can they access resources and support to help transform their ideas into reality? Where can they find teammates ready to go all-in?

On November 7, that place was Innovators@Cal — UC Berkeley’s annual flagship entrepreneurship event, which brought together aspiring student innovators, students curious about joining early-stage ventures, and an inspirational keynote speaker tackling the “world’s dumbest problem.” 

Students from a wide range of disciplines and departments across the UC Berkeley campus took turns offering two-minute pitches to a standing room–only crowd in Banatao Auditorium. They highlighted a wide range of innovations, including an app detecting stroke symptoms, an electrical grid–monitoring technology, and simple new methods for improving the availability of menstrual products. Immediately after, speakers and listeners alike gathered in Blum Hall for a lively networking and brainstorming session where students used whiteboards to sketch out their ideas, solicit feedback, and find teammates. 

One of those blueprints was for the startup Materri, which generates recommendations for the best materials to use in footwear designers’ products, saving those producers time and money in consulting fees. Materri attended Innovators@Cal hoping to recruit software engineers.

“We’re not software engineers, and we’re building a software platform,” said co-founder Kira Erickson. “So that’s been our main hurdle in becoming a successful startup: just finding engineering talent, so we’re hoping to find some talented people to work with us.”

Across the room was Kerisha Burke, who, after researching why Black people hold a disproportionately low percentage of STEM jobs, found that part of the problem was rooted in student opportunities. “Students from underrepresented backgrounds continue to face challenges in pursuing careers in the STEM industry,” she had told the audience, “particularly due to the lack of access to resources that could help them to succeed.” Many of these resources exist outside the classroom — STEM conferences key among them. But these events are expensive to attend and time-consuming to apply for. 

Enter Burke’s Scholarly Loop, an AI-powered platform consolidating all manner of resources to support underrepresented students throughout the entire conference process, from a list of conferences to travel scholarships to tools that facilitate the paperwork side.

“I’ve been looking for an opportunity to pitch,” she said. “And I thought this was an opportunity for me to be vulnerable, open, and to just take a risk. Hopefully this is the first step in me doing that, then going out there and pitching and just getting more comfortable with sharing my ideas with others.”

The event was sponsored by a host of on-campus organizations, including many student-run, spanning the innovation and entrepreneurial pipeline: Sutardja Center for Entrepreneurship & Technology, AI Entrepreneurs at Berkeley, CITRIS and the Banatao Institute, Berkeley Venture Capital, Entrepreneurs@Berkeley, Entrepreneurship@BerkeleyHaas, NSF I-Corps, the Student Entrepreneurship Program, and the Big Ideas Contest, Berkeley’s flagship social-innovation competition (pre-proposals applications are due December 6).

The night’s guest of honor was keynote speaker Komal Ahmad, founder of Copia, a logistics technology platform for managing food waste. Ahmad, winner of the 2012 Big Ideas Contest, studied international health and global development as well as Global Poverty and Practice at UC Berkeley, before her work solving hunger earned her an avalanche of accolades, including landing on Forbes’ 30 Under 30 list. Copia redirects leftover food and meals (including from the Super Bowl and the Oscars) to organizations and people who need it now. The company has saved over 6.5 million tons of food, delivered over 5.4 million meals, generated over $21 million in savings for businesses and nonprofits, and operates in 40 states.

The story behind those eye-popping numbers is a single meal that an undergraduate Ahmad, then studying to be a doctor, hadn’t intended to have. 

Walking down Telegraph Avenue, she encountered a homeless man asking for food, and she invited him to join her for lunch. As he wolfed down his meal, he shared his story: His name was John and he had returned from his second tour in Iraq to find that his military benefits hadn’t kicked in. He hadn’t eaten in three days. And yet, “right across the street,” Ahmad said, “Berkeley’s dining hall was throwing away thousands of pounds of perfectly edible food.” 

Hunger was not a problem of insufficient food, she realized, but a logistics and distribution problem. 

“Solving the world’s dumbest problem became my life’s mission and Copia’s purpose,” she said. “Had I never reached out to that homeless veteran, had I never looked up from my phone, Copia would not exist. That day I fed one man. Because of his story, Copia will feed 8 million people” this year.

Yet the journey from one to 8 million was anything but linear.

Ahmad’s first attempt to find new stomachs for 500 leftover sandwiches on short notice had hardly any takers. Fast forward to subsequent efforts where she recruited her own volunteer drivers to ferry food from A to B, then tapped into the existing infrastructure of Doordash and Postmates to scale her endeavor. But after three years, Copia had yet to make much of a splash locally, and Ahmad felt depleted. “I lost my passion,” she said. “I lost my fire.” 

She took a job at Google, listening to the complaints of angry customers for six months before getting fired. She had hit “rock bottom.” 

But her dismissal was the “best thing that ever happened to me.” The intensity of failure, she told students, provides one with a new clarity, allows one’s strengths to shine through, and one’s “genuine self emerges.”

Ahmad returned to her passion, first volunteering at a Silicon Valley food pantry and then recruiting more volunteers. She built the technology and logistical systems to connect all manner of businesses and nonprofits so that leftover meals can find recipients who need them now. Copia joined the prestigious Y Combinator accelerator and became a multimillion-dollar startup.

“It’s not an overnight transformation,” she said. “It’s taking this step over and over — to take the risk, chase the dream, and follow your heart.”

“Whatever comes your way,” she advised, “keep moving forward.”

That, in a nutshell, is one of the key attributes of a successful entrepreneur, and a life view that UC Berkeley inspires, teaches, and supports. So remember to get your Big Ideas proposal in by December 6 — take a cue from Komal and take that risk. We are here to support you!

By K.J. Bannan

By Alisha Dalvi

When we think about our socio-economic future, endless possibilities come to mind. You may be concerned about the changing climate or advancements in technology or how various social groups interact with each other. Or maybe you’re thinking on a smaller scale, interested in how your community will be affected. Ilana Lipsett explores all of these facets. As a senior program manager at Institute for the Future, a non-profit encouraging individuals and organizations to plan for the long-term, Lipsett looks at the world-to-come through a collaborative lens. But her dedication to innovative futures transcends her office. As a judge and mentor of the Big Ideas Contest, housed at the Blum Center for Developing Economies, Lipsett has become a key piece of the program and an exemplar for students who too hope to redesign how we approach forthcoming generations.     

Lipsett is a Bay Area native, born and raised in the East Bay, and frequented UC Berkeley for summer school growing up. She attended college across the state at UC San Diego, studying History, French Literature, and Music. Her unique educational focuses led her down a long and windy road of various disciplines: She started off in Washington, D.C. at the intersection of labor and politics, working on everything from political campaigns to advocacy work for displaced workers. Ten years later, she returned to the Bay Area to get her M.B.A. in Sustainable Management at Presidio Graduate School. During and after grad school, Lipsett worked for the City of San Francisco at the Mayor’s Office of Economic and Workforce Development. This kickstarted her work in urban development with an emphasis in community engagement; her advocacy for creating accessible and inclusive public spaces and public-facing activities translated across different domains: from the City of San Francisco, to a private real estate developer, to her own business, and even at an international scale, supporting community spaces in refugee camps. 

Now, Lipsett advances her brand of public engagement and participatory design at the Institute for the Future (IFTF). Her work has a civic-futures focus, entwining sustainable community solutions into everything from political systems to real estate. One of her many ongoing projects works to expand a predominantly POC housing co-op in San Francisco by creating an accessible STEM center and Performing Arts Center in unoccupied buildings. But Lipsett also values impact through education. At IFTF, Lipsett teaches public classes to an international audience on design futures and foresight essentials. “I really want to give people the tools to think about how the future can be different,” she says. “Then encourage them to get creative and make the changes so they can move towards their preferred future.” Lipsett certainly practices what she preaches: As a singer and songwriter for “The Seastars,” a girl band that uses music to advocate for a climate sustainable future, Lipsett taps into her creative side to encourage others to change their behavior in favor of our environment.

When she is not busy changing the future and using music to empower the world, Lipsett carries teams to victory in the annual Big Ideas competition. Lipsett first heard about Big Ideas in 2018 through her friend, Dani Bicknell, a program manager for Big Ideas at the time. Bicknell told her about the competition and asked if she wanted to be a part of it. “I always love to be involved in the local community, but Big Ideas especially felt like a great fit with the skills I have to offer and how I want to be connecting with others,” Lipsett says. So, on whim, she said yes, but just as a one-time commitment. But that one time, where she served as both a judge and a mentor to a team, was such an incredible experience that she immediately knew that it wouldn’t be her last. “It was such an amazing opportunity to see students see potential in something new,” she says. 

As a judge, Lipsett reads and judges student entrants’ social innovations’ pre-proposals based on a specific scorecard, deciding whether it should move on to the final round. There are four factors on which pre-proposals are measured: viability, originality, team, and quality. “Saying no is probably the hardest part,” she admits. “Every proposal is so interesting and creative.” After the finalists have been determined, Lipsett is matched with a team of students to act as their mentor. Lipsett highlights how perfectly aligned she was with teams she was matched with. For example, one project she mentored, Doin’ Good, aimed to provide vocational education to Syrian refugees in Lebanon by creating mobile maker spaces and education centers out of a van. Conveniently, Lipsett had just come back from Bangladesh, creating maker spaces at refugee camps there. And Lipsett’s expertise certainly paid off — Doin’ Good won first in the Workforce Development track in 2019 and was a Grand Prize finalist! 

As a mentor, Lipsett meets with her mentees every week, setting a timeline of work to be done and anticipating and preemptively addressing potential challenges or gaps. From providing connections to people working in the field to helping with the budget, Lipsett was the go-to person whenever her team was stuck. But Lipsett believes it’s the students’ drive that allows the project to flourish. One team Lipsett mentored, Send Help, proposed an AI chatbot that connects citizens with police alternatives during non-emergencies. Essentially, they wanted to make calling non-police first responders as easy as calling 911. Lipsett suggested to the team that the proposal needed an endorsement from public officials, and the next thing she knew, the team had met with the Berkeley City Council and got letters of approval from policymakers. 

Lipsett is certainly not short of accolades in her own endeavors for innovative change. In 2013, the White House awarded the Champion of Change Award to her and her team for creating [freespace], a movement dedicated to activating vacant spaces as temporary community, cultural, and art hubs. [freespace] (written with the brackets) was part of the National Day of Civic Hacking, created by the Obama White House, encouraging everyday citizens to get involved in addressing civic issues in their neighborhood. Lipsett, with her team, came up with an idea: “What if we create a community space as a platform instead of focusing on one specific issue?” So, they found a 14,000-square-foot warehouse on the market for $25,000 a month and convinced the landlord to rent it to them for $1. This was the birth of [freespace]. The project had two rules: everything had to be free, and everything had to be participatory. 

“It opened up as an experiment, we didn’t have goals or expectations, we didn’t know where it would go,” Lipsett recalls. But the success was hard to believe. “People would come for one thing and stay for another.” There were paella cooking lessons while artists were making sculptures during a class for programming LED Lights. At one workshop, facilitators encouraged kids from the local Boys and Girls Club to create their own superheroes. Then, costume designers turned their visions into reality, working with the kids to create personalized superhero costumes. This likely would not have happened if not for the random human collision which [freespace] cultivated; the workshop idea came to the costume designers after spending time in [freespace], often surrounded by children. Seeing the benefits of giving the community a space with an open invitation to do and create anything inspired a whole [freespace] movement: While the space in San Francisco was always meant to be temporary, 26 different locations opened across 18 countries around the world. 

This year, Lipsett mentored yet another Big Ideas team. She values investing time to enhance and encourage students’ social innovations. And while she has decades of experience and serves as a mentor, Lipsett still feels she has a lot to learn from others, whether it’s kids with superhero dreams or grad students providing safer alternatives to police calls. “Working with such determined students is so energizing, the whole process is definitely mutually beneficial,” she says. 

Following months of designing, workshopping, mentoring and pitching, High Tide, a student team working to produce a bio-based coating for compostability and recyclability, took home top honors at the 2023 Grand Prize Pitch Day and Awards Celebration, the Rudd Family Foundation Big Ideas’ annual finale. Judges gave High Tide, one of 23 finalists to appear at the May 3 event at UC Berkeley’s Blum Hall, the $10,000 Grand Prize.

High Tide, led by Ivan Jayapurna, a PhD candidate in Applied Science & Technology focusing on biodegradable plastics and Kira Erickson, MBA candidate, is dedicated to ending the use of plastic-coated paper in single-use containers unable to be composted or recycled. Their solution prioritizes structure over chemicals, using renewable resources to create a water repellent bio-based coating that will harmlessly degrade in natural ecosystems and can safely fall into green and blue waste bins. 

“The past few months have been hectic but fun and definitely educational. We got to talk to a lot of experts and I personally learned a lot about the packaging industry and on developing new materials from a commercial perspective. Today was really cool to see it all come together, as well as seeing all the other really cool projects,” said Jayapurna. “Hopefully this big idea can be a small part in helping us achieve a waste free future.”

“The concept behind High Tide was born out of a realization that the majority of our paper products are destined for landfill, despite paper being a compostable and recyclable material,” added Erickson. “It’s an extremely pervasive, yet less widely known issue. The potential for systemic impact is massive if addressed properly. I hope it’s a challenge High Tide can help solve with our nature-inspired solution.”

This year, the Rudd Family Foundation Big Ideas received 160 applications from UC Berkeley students and 30 applications from its partner campus in the UK, the University of Sussex — representing  more than 600 students, 60 disciplines, and 15 countries — all aimed at addressing pressing social issues from food insecurity to workforce development to maternal healthcare. Of the final-round teams, over half of the projects were led by women. During the pre-proposal application period, Big Ideas provided students with a wide variety of resources including entrepreneurship skills workshops, team-building development, networking opportunities, and startup advising. Twenty-three finalists emerged from the 190 applications after a review by over 150 experts from academia, industry, and the venture community. These 23 teams continued to receive support and even more personalized mentorship as they prepared a final application. In addition to participating in today’s poster session, 5 of the 23 finalists were also chosen to pitch their innovations to three judges.

“These finalists are the best of the best of social innovation,” said Jill Finlayson, Managing Director of the CITRIS Innovation Hub and a Big Ideas judge for the last decade. “They could all easily go out in industry and make the next step. But Big Ideas is about making that big leap, pushing boundaries into reality. And that’s where we felt the winning team stood out.”

“It was such a thrill to bring the idea to life with Ivan and with support from our mentors, Tony [Kingsbury], Mathieu [Aguesse], Karenna [Rehorn], and Phillip [Denny],” Erickson said. “We got to meet and learn from many more people along the way as well who inspired us with their dedication to sustainability and generosity with their time.”

The other headliner of the night was 2ndWind, winner of the Lab for Inclusive FinTech (LIFT) “FinTech for Social Good” Initiative, a parallel Big Ideas track focused on advancing innovations that can unlock the potential of digital financial technologies to benefit underserved populations around the world. The FinTech for Social Good contest is made possible by Binance Charity and Ripple Impact.  2ndWind aims to help small and medium businesses continue even when the owners retire. The project creates an efficient platform to facilitate small and medium businesses in this time of transition, allowing owners to achieve their retirement’s goals, while preventing the layoffs often associated with small business closures.

Another highlight of the evening was when two undergraduate teams were recognized by Rich Lyons, Vice Chancellor of Innovation and Entrepreneurship. Blackprint Technologies and the Potion Project each won the Berkeley Changemaker award.

By Anehita Okojie

Farhiya Ali joined Blackbook University as a development intern in 2019 after Ibrahim Baldé, one of digital platform’s founders, reached out to the Black campus community seeking women in STEM to be a part of the organization, which equips Black students with relevant information, opportunities, and a network to connect with their peers. Ali’s passion for accessibility and using technology for social good drew her in. Through her involvement with the 2020-21 Big Ideas winner, the first-generation college student and child of Somali immigrants bolstered her service to — and helped bring together — the Black community while developing her technological skills.

Ali, a senior born and raised in the Bay Area, describes Blackbook University as “a diversity, equity, and inclusion solution to empower Black students and enable peer-to-peer connection, academic enrichment, and professional development.” Currently, the platform connects students with on-campus organizations and alumni through its mobile application. Blackbook hopes to create connections between Black students on campus while utilizing its alumni network to create opportunities for current Cal students. 

During her internship, Ali analyzed the enrollment trends of Black students going back to the 1990s, helped create the initial mobile application, and directed social media content. While working on the application, she tested prototypes, worked on the user interface, and conducted user interviews about how to improve the mobile app. She learned how to connect each page of the mobile application so they were easily accessible. 

Ali says Baldé consistently encouraged her and the rest of the Blackbook team to take ownership of their work. “You had his full support to explore different areas of the company and take ownership,” she recalls. “Or, if you saw that someone was working with some really cool data sets that you want to work with, you have full support to go work on that and explore that area.” 

During her sophomore and junior years, Ali moved up to a product marketing role within Blackbook and is currently its user design/experience expert, where she continues working on the mobile Blackbook University application, available for download on the App Store and Google Play Store. 

“We want [the app] to be a space where alumni can reach out and provide students with opportunities,” Ali says. (The team is currently building toward securing angel funding.) 

In addition to benefiting her peers, Ali’s tenure at Blackbook has developed her own professional repertoire in, among other things, software development, product management, and creating social campaigns — and all while exploring different disciplines through her projects and team members, whose majors range from data science to legal studies, business administration to media studies. She’s utilized platforms like Excel, Asana, and Trello, though some of the most important skills she says she learned were interpersonal skills, like “how to communicate differences professionally and how to maintain a level of respect, accountability, and transparency within a team.” 

All of these skills and experiences came in handy during her fast-paced internship last summer at Kinestry, an innovation studio that helps clients develop meaningful brand experiences through technology and specializes in non-fungible tokens (NFTs). One of her projects at Kinstry was Metaverse Fashion Week, a completely virtual fashion week that allows designers to showcase their work digitally. Thanks to her Blackbook experience, she was able, in her collaboration with clients, to make sure artists felt their projects were feasible and their work valued. Her experience with user interfaces and interviews at Blackbook helped her as a Kinestry product manager to gain insight into how to best assist clients in meeting their goals as well as staying organized in her own work.

Ali, however, has actively supported Berkeley’s Black student community beyond Blackbook. She’s been involved with the Black Engineering and Science Student Association since her sophomore year, when she started as BESSA’s pre-collegiate outreach chair. Founded in 1968, BESSA’s mission is “to increase the number of culturally responsible Black engineers and scientists who excel academically, succeed professionally, and positively impact the community.” Now, as president, Ali leads a team of 12 other board members whose programming focuses on K-12 outreach in the Bay Area, study jams, tutoring, and corporate-sponsored events for current UC Berkeley students. As president, she launched a paid, peer-to-peer tutoring program for Black STEM students as a form of academic retention and supports fundraising to sponsor students’ trips to national conferences. 

Ali also credited a change in major to opening up opportunities to serve her peers. She started out in electrical engineering and computer science (EECS), but that changed in spring 2022 when she took a gap semester to take community college classes and network to expand her professional opportunities. During the break from Cal, she spoke with friends and people in her network and learned more about the Interdisciplinary Studies Field major, “what it did for them, and what doors it opened.” These conversations inspired her to switch from EECS to ISF, with a focus on human-computer interaction, in order to further serve the Black community on campus and pursue internship opportunities — the latest being a technical project management internship at Dolby Laboratories. The lighter load of the ISF major allowed her to both earn a fulfilling degree while having enough time to devote herself to other opportunities outside of academics and serve her community. 

Throughout her time in university, Ali has had mentorship from other students and alumni, from Baldé to her BESSA predecessors. Now an upperclassman herself, she’s taken up the role of giving back to underclassmen. “You should move forward,” she says, “but always give back to the community that helped you get where you are.”

By Anehita Okojie

In 2018, the USC Race and Equity Center released a report that measured postsecondary access and student success for Black undergraduates at public colleges and universities across the United States. In this report, the University of California, Berkeley received a C in representation equity and a D when it came to completion equity. According to the report, Black students at UC Berkeley are graduating at a rate of 75.4 percent — 15.9 percent less than the overall graduation rate. 

Ibrahim Baldé is a Bay Area native and UC Berkeley alumnus who graduated from the Haas School of Business with a BS in Social Entrepreneurship and Finance in December 2020. The Report led Baldé and a team of peers to question the implications of UC Berkeley’s ranking for Black students and how “community organizers and groups [could] use this to challenge or call out the narrative of UC Berkeley.” Baldé believes that the prestige surrounding UC Berkeley tends to downplay and often erase recognition of the barriers and challenges that underrepresented communities face. He wanted to do something. Blackbook University was the answer. 

Blackbook University is a digital platform that equips Black students with relevant information, opportunities, and a network to connect with their peers. It was launched to meet the needs of Black students on UC Berkeley’s campus — and to be a model that can be replicated across California, and eventually the nation.

In its research, the team discovered the legacy of the African American Student Handbook, which served as a resource guide for Black Students at UC Berkeley in the 1980s and 1990s. This resource guide, dubbed Blackbook, listed Black faculty, advisors, student organizations, alumni, and Black-owned businesses that would support students during their time at UC Berkeley. It was a tool “for the community to streamline networking and belonging the moment that someone [touched] base on this campus,” Baldé says. 

In 1996, Proposition 209 was passed in California, elimating “state and local government affirmative action programs…based on race, sex, color, or national origin.” Once this proposition went into effect, it significantly decreased the number of Black students admitted to Berkeley, as the University of California system could no longer provide outreach, counseling, and tutoring services targeted at individuals based on sex, race, or ethnicity. Baldé notes that the impact of Proposition 209 on UC Berkeley’s campus was that the infrastructure of the Black community started to diminish and “the resource guide was no longer maintained.” 

The Blackbook team came together in 2019 to discuss the importance of the resource guide for students in the past and how they could modernize it to meet the needs of current Cal students. The team included UC Berkeley students Chase Ali-Watkins ’20, Nahom Solomon ’21, Farhiya Ali ’23, Nicholas Brathwaite ’20, and Imran Sekalala ’22. Kyle Parkman, a 2020 UC Santa Cruz graduate, rounded out the founding team. 

To assess need, the team polled Black students on campus and found that around 90 percent of Black Cal students wanted a platform for Black students built by Black students. Blackbook was founded on three pillars: an accessible mobile application for students, university programming to empower the professional development of students, and storytelling to highlight the success of Black students and professionals. Blackbook University’s mobile platform connects students to events, opportunities, and programs led by on campus organizations. The team is currently in the process of reaching out to Black student leaders on UC Berkeley’s campus to get them onboarded and to begin utilizing the platform to communicate with Black students. 

“We’ve made it so that any Black student can enter the platform and understand exactly what resource or experience is available and optimal for them,” Baldé says. 

Currently, the mobile application is available on the App Store and the Google Play Store for download. Blackbook’s goal is to have 500 active users on the platform by the end of the 2022–23 school year. 

The 2020–21 Big Ideas Contest gave the Blackbook University team the ability to take Blackbook from an idea to a tangible product. The competition helped the team challenge themselves, offered them access to advisors, and helped them structure the model of Blackbook. One of their advisors was Bill Allison, the current campus technology officer at UC Berkeley. Baldé notes that Allison offered insight on how to “think about and navigate both the development of the platform and the onboarding process for our users in our pilot [and] also at scale.” Big Ideas also allowed them to network with several other entrepreneurs who have built other university-based platforms. The networking opportunities showed the Blackbook team it was on the right track, Baldé says. He also credits Big Ideas workshops and advising sessions with helping Blackbook solidify its approach to building their program. 

Since winning Big Ideas, Blackbook has continued evolving through app development, a pilot program, and continued involvement in the Black community at UC Berkeley. In late 2021, it created a pilot in collaboration with African American Student Development on Berkeley’s campus to work on projects to integrate Blackbook further into the Berkeley ecosystem. This pilot program consisted of five interns who worked on thinking about and tailoring solutions related to the complexities of Blackbook. They pitched different ideas about the trajectory of Blackbook and how to further leverage technology to positively impact the experience of Black students. The team continued to connect with the Blackbook interns over the summer to ensure that their input was being integrated into updates to the Blackbook application and marketing strategies. 

This past summer, the Blackbook team connected with high school Black Student Unions and community colleges to continue their outreach and upliftment of the Black community across the Bay Area. It hopes increased contact with high school and community college students will allow the platform to create meaningful connections with these students and communities before they arrive at a four-year institution. 

“We are working to make the Blackbook platform accessible beyond the UC Berkeley campus,” Baldé says. “Our goal is to build a Blackbook presence on every campus in the US, starting with major campuses and the UC system. We see university recruiting as a huge aspect of the growth of our model moving forward — we intend to position Blackbook as the access point for companies and organizations to hire Black talent.”

By Lisa Bauer

Nearly a decade ago, more than 80 global organizations came together to sign the London Declaration on Neglected Tropical Diseases, to control, eliminate, or eradicate at least ten of the diseases by 2020. Progress has been made on “NTDs” (neglected tropical diseases), but they still affect nearly one billion people, reinforcing poverty in low-resource regions.

UC Berkeley Professor of Bioengineering Dan Fletcher has been working to accelerate NTD diagnosis and treatment with a device so ubiquitous it’s probably in your hand: a smartphone. Fletcher, with a group of interdisciplinary scientists from in and outside his lab, have steadily proved that smartphone cameras can be repurposed as microscopes to identify disease-causing pathogens, such as the bacteria that cause tuberculosis and the parasites that cause River Blindness.

“Phones have enormous imaging and processing capabilities,” explained Fletcher at a recent faculty salon of the Blum Center, where he serves as chief technologist. “Our work has been to harness these consumer electronics to do the complex imaging and image interpretation tasks. We add lenses and automation to the mobile devices; then we capture, geotag and upload the image data we collect, giving us greater information about the spread of disease.”

By removing the need for a laboratory and highly trained technicians to perform image-based processing, the Fletcher Lab’s CellScope, as the family of devices is called, can dramatically expedite NTD treatment by enabling patients to receive rapid, low-cost, and highly accurate diagnoses, even in remote regions. Fletcher and others believe the device has enormous potential to contribute to NTD elimination efforts, because while the drugs to treat NTDs already exist–an efficient, systematic, and affordable diagnosis and treatment method does not.

“Thanks to the London Declaration, major pharmaceutical companies have pledged to contribute the drugs needed to treat many NTDs,” said Fletcher. “CellScope will help us tackle the missing ingredient: the way to identify those in need. For effective treatment and monitoring, we must know who’s infected, where they are, and whether there is reemergence. That’s where technology comes in.”

The latest version of CellScope, called LoaScope, has proven effective in Cameroon, where it is being used to combat a NTD called River Blindness or Onchoceriasis. Endemic in Sub-Saharan Africa, Onchoceriasis is a severely debilitating disease that results in human blindness. Although the antiparasitic drug, Ivermectin, is readily available, treatment via mass drug administration has been halted in some regions due to serious adverse effects caused by co-infection with a worm call Loa loa. Treatment in Loa-endemic regions is complex because if Ivermectin is administered to someone who is simultaneously infected with Loa Loa, the drug can lead to fatal complications.

To safely relaunch mass drug administration of Ivermectin, Fletcher and a team of medical professionals from NIH in the U.S., IRD in France, and CRFilMT in Cameroon launched a pilot project in Okola District of Cameroon, with funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Local healthcare workers collected small blood samples from patients and inserted them into the LoaScope to measure the number of parasites; if the number was below a certain safety threshold, then the patient was treated with Ivermectin. Patients with parasite loads above a certain threshold did not receive Ivermectin to reduce the possibility of complications from treatment.

With this approach, 96 percent of the 16,000 people examined in the Okola District pilot study had Loa loa levels below the safety threshold and were treated for River Blindness, while only 2 percent had to be excluded because of Loa loa levels that put them at risk of complications from treatment (the remaining 2 percent could not receive Ivermectin for other reasons such as pregnancy or illness). Findings from the Cameroon pilot were published in 2017 in the New England Journal of Medicine.

The Cameroon Ministry of Health approved the study and backed the use of the LoaScope technology to restart mass administration of Ivermectin for control of River Blindness. Prior to the pilot study, a public health education campaign to encourage citizens to seek safe diagnosis with LoaScope was carried out–including public testing of the Minister of Health with the LoaScope.

Although the Cameroon pilot was a success, the next challenge is scaling the technology so that the millions of people living in Loa-endemic regions can benefit from safe treatment of River Blindness with ivermectin.

“The problem is no longer that we don’t have the tools. We now do,” said Fletcher. “The problem right now is the funding, manufacturing, and distribution gap–how do we best scale this device and get it to the people who need it?”

Funds are needed to mass produce the device, establish a support infrastructure, and develop an IT system. Yet the cost benefits could be significant. For example, currently the cost of a single capillary for the LoaScope is $2; if the process was automated, the cost would decrease to just 30 cents. A similar reduction in cost of the device is possible.

In addition to River Blindness, the Fletcher Lab has identified five other NTDs for which CellScope could be applied. Schistosomiasis is the next disease the lab hopes to test and treat. Like River Blindness, schistosomiasis is a worm-based disease, but the parasites that cause it are detected in urine or stool samples. Thus, instead of taking a blood sample, CellScope would be adapted to analyze filtered urine and stool that is loaded into the same capillary and imaged with the same device.

“The basic technology–a mobile microscope with image processing capabilities–is already there, and with a few modifications we can adapt it to new diseases,” said Fletcher. “Increasing access to high-quality disease diagnosis is beginning to be within reach for low-resource settings with technologies such as these. But the same challenge remains: scaling.”

The Lemelson Foundation, the world’s leading funder of invention in service of social and economic change, and the Blum Center for Developing Economies are embarking on a yearlong collaboration to enable students participating in the University of California Big Ideas Contest to increase their expertise in developing environmentally responsible inventions and innovations. The initiative exposes students to sustainable practices with the goal of increasing awareness around environmental impact throughout the invention and business model development process–from the materials used to the end of lifecycle implications.

The partnership between The Lemelson Foundation and the Blum Center will enhance the importance of environmental responsibility in the Big Ideas Contest, with special emphasis on the Hardware for Good category. Additionally, there will be an increased focus on engaging students from low-income and underserved backgrounds to participate in the contest.

Since 2006, the Blum Center has hosted the Big Ideas student innovation prize, to provide mentorship, training, and resources for budding social entrepreneurs across the University of California system. Hardware for Good encompasses everything from wearable and assistive technologies and devices to improve agricultural productivity to smart home systems that improve energy efficiency and safety. The 2017-2018 winner in the Hardware for Good category was Innovis Medical, a blood clotting prevention device for civilian and military trauma care that is being tested on cardiac patients at UC Davis Medical with the aim of FDA approval by 2021.

Said Phillip Denny, director of Big Ideas: “Since 2006, over 6,000 students from more than 100 majors have participated in the Big Ideas Contest, raising more than $2.4 million in seed funding that has been invested across 450 ventures. In this age of climate change and resource constraints, we need more students focused on planet-saving big ideas. We are thus immensely grateful to The Lemelson Foundation for making environmental responsibility an explicit element of the competition and for strengthening our outreach to low-income and first-generation college students. Diversity in innovators leads to diversity of innovations.”

With support from The Lemelson Foundation, Big Ideas 2018-2019 activities will include educational programs coupled with outreach to keep environmental responsibility top-of-mind as student inventors and innovators design new devices and ventures. Judging criteria will also be modified to reflect greater emphasis on environmental impact. Among the student education programs will be the “Inventing Green” workshop on October 22 to raise awareness and understanding of environmental responsibility in innovation and entrepreneurship among the University of California’s 240,000 undergraduate and graduate students and participating students from Makerere University in Uganda and Hebrew University in Jerusalem. The Lemelson Foundation funding will also support Blum Center practitioners-in-residence who will provide environmentally responsible design expertise to Big Ideas student teams and their projects.

“Students have the passion and drive to make the world better through inventions and entrepreneurship, and the Big Ideas program will better prepare them to ensure the solutions of today don’t become the problems of tomorrow,” said Cindy Cooper, program officer for The Lemelson Foundation. “Thinking holistically about environmental impact early on can also lead to more creative product ideas and put startups on a path to being more competitive and resilient as they grow to scale. We’re excited to see what students come up with.”

In February 2018, Big Ideas Contest Director, Phillip Denny, traveled to Kampala, Uganda to explore opportunities for Big Ideas expansion in Africa, in partnership with Makerere University. Makerere—one of Africa’s leading institutions of higher education—has been a key partner of Big Ideas since 2013. Over the last five years Makerere’s involvement in Big Ideas has grown steadily, as has its reputation as a regional leader in fostering innovation and entrepreneurship among students. Big Ideas is working with Makerere to advance the mission of the competition, which challenges students to dream big about how they might change the world, and supports them to execute that vision.

“Like Big Ideas, Makerere provides a supportive ecosystem that helps students, particularly those who are in the early stages of innovation, realize their dream of making a positive impact on society,” said Denny.

This year, over 50 student teams, representing over 150 students, from Makerere University submitted proposals to Big Ideas, and nine teams advanced to the final round—a record for Makerere. During his trip, Denny mentored teams as they worked to complete their final proposals. He was impressed by the creativity of their innovations, as well as the incredible energy and commitment shown by each team.

“What stands out to me in my work with Makerere students is that many of them are from communities that are directly impacted by the challenges the students are seeking to solve,” said Denny.  “When you meet with them you immediately grasp their passion and dedication, which is undoubtedly fueled by their personal and first-hand experiences with the issues they’re trying to solve.”

Deborah Naatujuna, Engagement Manager for the Resilient Africa Network, which hosts the Big Ideas Contest at Makerere, noted the many ways Big Ideas has fostered student collaboration and innovation on campus.

“One of the requirements of the contest is to have a strong team, so students who ordinarily work alone have been able to onboard students from other disciplines. For example, engineering students will work with business students. We did not have this interdisciplinary engagement before, but the contest has improved collaboration between students from different disciplines,” said Naatujna.

The contest has also had a significant impact on students’ relationships with faculty members, breaking down barriers and fostering an innovator-mentor relationship that did not exist before.

“Big Ideas has fostered an innovator-mentor relationship that is not intimidating. Students at Makerere are used to working with academic supervisors in an environment that can often be intimidating for the student, but mentorship through Big Ideas is focused on constructive feedback and collaboration. Participating in the contest has helped students work with their professors in a more collegial way and develop close relationships with their mentors.”

When Big Ideas first launched at Makerere five years ago, the majority of proposals submitted were from male teams. Since then, the involvement of female students from Makerere has also grown.“In the beginning, we had very few females taking part in Big Ideas, but now we have more. Some of the teams are led by women while other teams are completely female. When female students worked with their male counterparts [before], the male students would do the majority of the work. Now we are seeing all-female teams as well as mixed teams in which everyone takes part,” said Naatujuna.

Innovations that were developed on Makerere’s campus include Mama-OPE, a cell-phone based lung monitoring device that helps diagnose pneumonia, and PedalTap, which won 3rd place in the highly competitive Global Health category. Mama-Ope was recently featured on CNN/Africa, and in 2017, PedalTap won Johnson & Johnson’s first Africa Innovation Challenge.

To learn more about the Big Ideas Contest, visit http://bigideascontest.org 

UC Berkeley changemakers built a cellphone-turned-microscope that detects parasites in the blood in just 30 seconds—without expensive equipment, a lab, or a clinic. Reporter Laura Ling meets with the team to discuss how the innovation could revolutionize the field of public health. Watch here.