Category: News

By Sophi Martin

When you get a PhD, you are the world’s expert in some narrow but incredibly deep scientific realm. You have asked a question never before asked, developed a hypothesis informed by reviewing the previously collected knowledge in the space, spent significant time testing, defending, and retesting your ideas–and arrived at some new truth.

Perhaps you were part of a dynamic and interdisciplinary research group that met regularly and engaged in intellectual battles that strengthened your knowledge. Perhaps you spoke with your doctoral advisor infrequently and to other researchers even less so. Perhaps you’ve had access to a network of mentors and advisors and peers. Regardless, you emerge as an “expert,” expected to ask great questions and seek knowledge, and society generally regards you in an impressive light.

But what happens the day after you wear your tufted hat and are marked as “doctor”? The 2018 report “Graduate STEM Education for the 21st Century” from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine finds that graduate programs don’t do a great job of training graduate students for non-academic careers, where complex challenges cannot be solved by one smart and dedicated individual, but rather require collaboration across many fields, with colleagues who may have other kinds of training, or perhaps no training at all. Will you be able to communicate with your peers, with your boss, with people who work for you, and with society at large in a productive way? How will you oversee other researchers when you’ve never had any exposure, let alone real training, for managing projects?

A recent National Science Foundation meeting of multidisciplinary programs highlighted various approaches to transform this graduate student experience from that of developing a lone genius toiling away in a lab to one that prepares graduate students to tackle complex new fields of knowledge–like data-enabled science or the food-water-energy nexus–while also building critical skills in communication, collaboration across multiple disciplines, and leadership.

The two-day symposium brought together over 60 NSF Research Traineeship (NRT) programs to share ideas on how to build these skills, how to assess whether the approaches work, and how programs like these might fundamentally change how graduate students are trained. The programs seek to build bridges across departments–e.g., blending civil engineering, energy sciences, environmental sciences, agricultural economics, business, and public policy, as the InFEWS program from UC Berkeley’s Blum Center does. The NRT programs also support graduate students conducting research at the intersections of these fields, aiming to build lasting bonds between the participating departments after the grant period concludes.

NRT Graduate Student Anaya Hall, said the NSF meeting provided an  “opportunity to get to know students and faculty in other programs across the country and to learn from each other on how to foster interdisciplinary research, while preparing for a variety of career paths.” She added, “It was inspiring to know the program at UCB is serving as a model for its commitment to diversity and inclusion as well as encouraging science for a broader impact.”

Dawn Culpepper and Colin Phillips of University of Maryland, College Park remarked in a joint presentation that the “NSF Research Traineeship allows students to develop competencies in framing the importance and potential impact of their work.” In addition to building academic depth, they argued that the NRTs serve to shift the values and highlight the context surrounding the academic research by exposing students to different perspectives–showing how other disciplines might view the same challenge or asking how communities might be affected by research questions. The NRT’s emphasis on communication skills trains students to clarify their role in research and explain what they are doing and why to diverse stakeholders, thus building more well-rounded researchers and job candidates.

With over 100 NRT programs nationally, there are emerging benefits–communications, ability to work in teams, seeding new areas of research–as well as consistent challenges. Repeatedly, the NRT program representatives at the meeting cited that fostering true collaboration among faculty across campuses was difficult, due to time pressures, insufficient funding for dedicated research projects, and insufficient recognition among the academic community for interdisciplinary work. Many programs discussed the bureaucratic barriers of establishing lasting cross-disciplinary programs, like certificate or degree programs, individual classes or series of classes. Almost every NRT at the meeting cited challenges in securing enduring institutional and financial support for team teaching, program staffing, and program elements such as communication skills workshops.

Finally, there is a clear mandate from NSF that programs like this must influence their own institutions, and ultimately influence other institutions nationally. With academic innovation typically taking multiple years, if not decades, it will be some time before programs that offer deep technical training plus interdisciplinary learning are the norm for STEM and other doctoral students. The harsh truth is that not all great programs are scalable or should aim to be a priori. And indeed, it is the deep personal connections between students and mentors, and student peer groups, that was cited by NRT students at the NRT principal investigator meeting as the most special, and personally transformative, part of their program. Although some coursework might move online, a whole interdisciplinary training program inherently cannot live online, in a MOOC, or some massively distributed medium. Fostering people skills takes people–in real life–and while expensive to support students, faculty time, staff time, and program cost, it is 100 percent worth it.

Since interdisciplinary learning at the PhD level has become of core national interest–undisputed in necessity by business leaders, university heads, and innovators of all walks–there needs to be federal funding available for it. For decades, educating well-rounded, articulate, technically proficient students has kept the U.S. competitive in science and technology and influential in global politics. Now, with the continuing effects of globalization, climate change, and the information and computational revolutions, we need students who can work at the intersections of fields with the greatest chances for ensuring both our survival and our most ambitious dreams for progress.

Sophi Martin is the Innovation Director at UC Berkeley’s Blum Center for Developing Economies, where she serves as the Program Coordinator for the NSF-funded InFEWS program (infews.berkeley.edu ; DGE # 1633740)

Clinton Global Initiative University (CGI U) is President Clinton’s initiative to engage the next generation of leaders on college campuses around the world. Each year, CGI U hosts a conference where students, youth organizations, and topic experts come together to discuss and develop innovative solutions to pressing global challenges with policy makers, topic experts, philanthropic, and leaders from the public, private, and NGO sectors. Participants attend plenary sessions, workshops, networking events, and a day-long service project. This year CGI U 2018 will take place at the University of Chicago from October 19 to 21.

Each CGI U student must make a “commitment to action”: a specific plan of action that addresses a pressing challenge on campus, in the community, or in a different part of the world. Students can apply within five focus areas: education, environment and climate change, peace and human rights, poverty alleviation, and public health.

This year, 31 UC Berkeley students were accepted to attend CGI U. Their projects are described below.

Artists in Residents

Students: Monica Schreiber (Public Health), Kyle Gibson (Public Health)

Summary: Artists in Residents (AiR), is an initiative of the Suitcase Clinic, a weekly student-run organization that has been serving Berkeley’s homeless community for over 30 years. In response to the mental health needs of this population, AiR seeks to provide arts and music programming within clinic spaces while leveraging the Suitcase Clinic’s unique ability to elevate and advocate for unhoused Berkeley residents. The team will partner with local community partners to implement art and music workshops, galleries, and performances. AiR will provide creative outlets for self-expression, promote mental health, and foster self-efficacy and upward mobility. Over one year, AiR will work with 30-50 individuals to provide safe spaces to practice, develop, and showcase their artistic talents. AiR won 1st place in the Art & Social Change category of the 2018 Big Ideas Contest.

Our Campus Kitchen

Students: Lucinda Laurence (Architecture), Sara Tsai (Business), Ibrahim Ramoul (Public Health)

Summary: In the 2018-2019 year, Lucinda Laurence, Sara Tsai, and Ibrahim Ramoul are committed to enact a centralized waste recovery kitchen on UC Berkeley campus. They will establish a closed-loop ecosystem that streams food waste from the dining halls and transforms them into edible meals for students at an accessible sliding-scale price model. The team plans to improve the lives of marginalized students by offering affordable meals while educating more than 35,000 students in food recovery and security. Each semester, they will lead 125 volunteers to make 600 meals daily by transforming 200 pounds of dining hall waste. Their partners include the Berkeley Student Food Collective, Berkeley Food Institute, Copia, Food Pantry, Educational Opportunity Program, University Health Services, and Cal Dining. Our Campus Kitchen won second place in the Food Systems category of the 2018 Big Ideas Contest.

Project S.a.F.E.

Students: Briana Boaz (Biology), Carrie Trible (Biology) Emily Kearney (Graduate Student – Environmental Science)

Summary: In 2018, Emily Kearney, Briana Boaz, and Carrie Tribble committed to eradicating sexual harassment/assault from fieldwork in order to create safe spaces off-campus in which everyone could contribute to science effectively. This team will survey the campus community to understand this issue and will use this information to write a code of conduct and create resources to prevent field sexual harassment/assault in partnership with several UC Berkeley campus organizations. These efforts are expected to reach everyone involved in fieldwork and increase the use and awareness of field preparation resources by 50 percent.

Project Air Mask

Students: Anirudh (Rudy) Venguswamy (Economics)

Summary: Rudy Venguswamy has committed to creating an affordable respirator mask to help reduce the number of people who die due to pollution and biomass burning related diseases in India. The team will sustainably produce a waterproof, fashionable, and functional respirator that people can wear while outside or engaged in hazardous activity. Project Air Mask will partner with hospitals to distribute masks first to pregnant women, young children, and at risk populations. The team expects to reduce the cases of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and other respiratory infections by 20 percent in 24 months in the states in which this solution is deployed.

How do we create enduring prosperity rather than address just the symptoms of poverty?

This is a question that the Chandler Foundation (formerly known as the Cassia Foundation) has been grappling with over the years. On September 5, Leslie Lang Tsai, who serves as the assistant vice president and general counsel of the foundation, spoke at the Blum Center about the challenges of effective philanthropy and the road the Chandler Foundation has taken to achieve it.

As she addressed the packed room, Tsai, who earned a B.A. in Rhetoric and a B.S. in Business Administration from UC Berkeley, noted there are now more opportunities for Cal students to focus on poverty alleviation and social impact. When she graduated in May 2006, the Blum Center was just about to launch its Global Poverty & Practice minor and the Big Ideas student innovation contest. The landscape of poverty alleviation, particularly on the UC Berkeley campus, was shifting toward ideas about how to understand, build, and maintain effective programs, using a mix of history, social science, and technological innovation.   

Tsai started her talk with a thought experiment, asking the audience of largely undergraduate and graduate students: If you had one billion dollars, how would you use it to eliminate poverty and create inclusive prosperity?

Answers from the audience ranged from unconditional cash transfers to maternal health investments to comprehensive education programs, allowing Tsai to introduce the audience to the Chandler Foundation’s method for determining how to invest in effective organizations in the field. She recounted that Chandler Foundation Founder and Chairman Richard F. Chandler, who started his philanthropy in 1997, underwent “four seasons” of giving before deciding to apply a “Business House Investment Strategy” based on John D. Rockefeller’s idea that giving is investing.

Richard Chandler and his brother, Christopher Chandler, both successful investors, believed, per Andrew Carnegie’s maxim, “It is more difficult to give money away intelligently than to earn it in the first place.” Their first philanthropic venture, Geneva Global, became the first “philanthropic investment bank,” advising the donor community with the same level of advice they’d expect if they were making an investment.  

In subsequent years, Richard Chandler focused on operating social enterprises as well as supporting social justice leaders before he ultimately created the Chandler Foundation. Tsai said its grant-making program is based on three lessons learned from Richard Chandler’s prior social impact ventures: 1) address the root causes of poverty, not the symptoms; 2) “stay in our lane” as investors; and 3) have measurable impact and return on investment.

Tsai shared that the foundation’s model is to work collaboratively through partnerships. The Chandler Foundation is a founding donor of the Co-Impact collaborative, along with the Bill & Melinda Gates and Rockefeller Foundations, which aims to address global poverty through systems change solutions. The foundation’s approach also places a significant emphasis on encouraging all those involved to hew to the “values at the heart of property: humility, accountability, and integrity.”

Near the end of the program, a student from the Global Poverty & Practice minor asked Tsai how best to pursue a career in poverty alleviation. Tsai, who has worked in corporate law at Sullivan & Cromwell and in development at Microclinic International and the World Bank after internships at the United Nations, the African Development Bank, the Supreme Court of Rwanda, and the Special Court for Sierra Leone, shared that a typical career path in the social sector is not a straight line. She advised students to gain expertise and marketable skills in technical areas such as law, engineering, and business, or specific sector expertise in health or urban planning–and to not necessarily focus on how the nonprofit industry works.

Ultimately, she advised, “Develop marketable skills while following your passion and purpose.”

The video of Leslie Lang Tsai’s presentation about the Chandler Foundation can be viewed here.

By S. Shankar Sastry

Today, access to water, energy, health care, and financial services remain the greatest challenges to alleviation of extreme poverty, which affects nearly half the world’s population, more than 3 billion people. United Nations officials designed the 2000 Millennial Development Goals and the successor Sustainable Development Goals of 2015 to mobilize resources against the massive challenges. As such, the UN blueprints identify targets for progress in the four crucial areas of water, energy, health care, and wireless, along with the intertwining challenges of hunger, education, global warming, gender equity, environment, and social justice.

In many ways, the Millennial/Sustainable Development Goals are the most pressing problems of development. They are the challenges that must be of actionable focus for years to come. They are the wicked problems, as UC Berkeley Professor Horst Rittel coined them in 1973, “whose social complexity means that it has no determinable stopping point.”

Yet there are new and emerging technologies in our midst that are changing the 40-year dialogue about development interventions and disrupting the very idea of how intertwining problems can be “fixed.” These technologies are responsible for the many digital transformations that are revolutionizing the global economy. From banking and transportation to agriculture and health care, a multi-trillion information technology industry is in motion that is changing how human beings move, work, live, and think. This Information Age, this Third Industrial Revolution is leading over the next decade to an economic system in which more than 70 billion Internet of Things (IoT) sensors will be installed across all sectors to provide unprecedented volumes of data.

Of course, data is not water, energy, health care, or wireless communications access. Yet data can be inexpensively stored and processed, enabling the utilization of computer-intensive machine-learning algorithms that—if correctly directed—can bring down the cost of access to necessary goods and services. In addition, although artificial intelligence is still in its infancy, it is poised to make advances that will affect the development sector as much as the hospitality sector. Indeed, the trifecta of IoT, AI, and cloud computing offers a vision of digital transformation that will alter business models, services, and how every single person on the planet lives.

How might these digital transformations affect the poorest of the poor? How might they improve quality of life and access to goods and services? We at the Blum Center are focusing on how the next 10 years of digital transformation can be harnessed to provide new and sustainable solutions for extreme poverty alleviation. Here are some examples of digital transformations that we have invested in and tested to scale at the Center:

In Energy Access:

REPP Efforts to electrify rural communities in developing countries have been plagued by energy theft, unaffordable connection costs, intermittent supply, and poor maintenance. Despite ambitions of governments and donors to invest in rural electrification, decisions about how to extend electricity access to almost 1 billion people worldwide are being made in the absence of rigorous evidence. The Rural Electric Power Project (REPP) originally sought to address this problem by incorporating new technology, such as village-scale clean energy microgrids, as well as sustainable financing and distribution mechanisms to better serve the rural poor. REPP has been utilizing novel data collection and analysis tools to inform the redesign and refinement of the technology and rigorously measure impacts in the field. Researchers from the Technology and Infrastructure for Emerging Regions (TIER) group, the Center for Effective Global Action (CEGA), and the Energy Institute at the UC Berkeley Haas School of Business have been working with local government and industry partners to generate real-time user data (using “smart” meters) and to collect comprehensive household survey data before and after electricity deployment. Currently, in a partnership with Kenya’s Rural Electrification Authority, the researchers are studying the demand for and impacts of electrification in a large-scale, randomized controlled trial. By offering subsidies of varying amounts to “under grid” households—those located in close proximity to the national grid—the team is measuring people’s willingness to pay for power, and tracking what happens after they connect.

In Health Care Access:

CellScope. In developing regions, where health care infrastructure is limited, there is an urgent need for greater access to reliable diagnostic testing, particularly for infectious diseases. The objective of CellScope, invented by Blum Center Chief Technologist and Bioengineering Professor Dan Fletcher and his lab members, is to establish mobile digital microscopy as a platform for disease diagnosis that can be used by non-expert health workers to in remote settings. The mobile phone-based, easy-to-use platform can rapidly capture images blood, sputum, or other patient samples and wirelessly transmit the data to clinical centers, allowing the patient to be evaluated and treated at the point of care thanks to algorithms running on the phones, with data uploaded wirelessly (when connectivity is available) for epidemiological purposes and quality control monitoring. By using existing communication technology and infrastructure, CellScope moves a major step forward in affordably and innovatively taking clinical microscopy out of specialized laboratories and into field settings for disease screening, diagnoses, and treatment.

In Wireless Access:

Community Cellular Network. Today over one billion people worldwide live beyond the reach of cellular networks. Many live in sparsely populated rural regions, with weak power infrastructure—making it prohibitively expensive for most telecommunication companies to invest. Living outside the network means lack of access to important services like emergency communications, market price information, and job opportunities. To address this challenge, Computer Science Professor Eric Brewer and his lab members, developed the Community Cellular Network (CCN). The CCN is a complete “network in a box,” enabling remote communities to both own and operate their own cellular systems. Designed to be deployed by people with limited technical skills, CNN, which became Endaga under the leadership of Kurt Heimerl, costs less than one tenth the price of traditional cellular equipment, runs solely on solar or micro-hydro power, uses less than 50W average power draw, and can provide kilometers of coverage to rural communities. In 2015, Endaga joined forces with Facebook to scale Internet access to rural communities.

Many who follow these transformations in development are concerned about digital ethics, privacy, and fairness. We need to understand how AI (primarily machine learning and cloud computing) is being used to understand poverty and economic development in urbanization, population density, traffic demand, housing, crop yields, and food security, among other topics.

Questions of particular relevance to development include: Is it fair to be denied a program because the people you talk to on your cell phone make you look less creditworthy or less in need of a service? What rights do people have to privacy in an environment where satellites are photographing their homes, phones are tracking their locations and communications, and their moods are being analyzed on social media? And how much access to this type of data should development researchers have?

The fact is (per the economic concept of competitive equilibrium) if you give up more of your data, you may get lower prices. At the same time (per the Nash theory in economics) decisions about giving up data for individuals can sometimes be terrible for groups, causing users who have high privacy settings to “free-ride” at the expense of those with low privacy settings. Thus, if we want to optimize the utility of the common good around data sharing and AI in development, we may well need to institute societal side payments—means to induce recipients to take part in the transaction that are legitimate and corruption-free, and redress underinvestment in the common good.

This will take as much analysis, debate, and social justice action in development as in every other aspect of digital transformations. It is one of the Blum Center’s stakes in the ground for the 2018-2018 academic year and the years ahead at UC Berkeley.

Shankar Sastry is the Faculty Director of the Blum Center for Developing Economies. He is a Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, Bioengineering, and Mechanical Engineering.


By Veena Narashiman ’2020

Originally a portmanteau of the words hack and marathon, a hackathon typically occurs over a day or two, bringing together computer programmers and others to solve a puzzle or invent a creative solution. During these 24- to 48-hour periods, participants are encouraged to form groups and collaborate, completing the hackathon with a rough prototype or ideas that can be presented to judges for prize money. Over the years, the adrenaline rush that often drives these competitions have created some famous “hacks”: the messaging app GroupMe and the Facebook “Like” button were both conceived during hackathons.

Although hackathons may feel new, they are nearing their twentieth anniversary. The concept was born in June 1999, when UC Berkeley alumni John Gage challenged attendees of a Sun Microsystems event to write a multi-user Internet program in Java for the Palm V. Almost two decades later, hackathons have been organized to advance all manner of technologies in practically every sector. And increasingly, hackathons have been launched to solve societal challenges, such as natural disaster preparedness and government transparency.

But are “hackathons for good” really effective, given that rapid prototyping is rarely a fix for entrenched societal problems? For technologists like Luca Ibota, a former Apple employee who has been active in many hackathons for good, the most important aspect is “identifying the problem you have and the ideal outcome you want.” In fact, said Ibota, the key to a successful hackathon for good is “precisely defining a problem or challenge.”

Still, some Cal students are skeptical about hackathons for good. The most cynical argue that incorporating buzz words such as “social impact” and “corporate social responsibility” at hackathons is a smart public relations move for technology companies looking to improve their public standing. Other Cal students insist that incorporating social good goals in hackathons is a testament to Silicon Valley’s aim to think more holistically and ethically about technology’s effects.

For many, UC Berkeley hackathons that take on a social impact lens are seen as a reflecting a student culture that prioritizes hands-on learning and that seeks to solve grand challenges like climate change and food insecurity. For Swetha Prabhakaran, a UC Berkeley sophomore and computer science student, the 21st century requires companies, nonprofits, and individuals to make solutions to intractable problems a priority.

Either way, the number of UC Berkeley hackathons focused on social impact is on the rise. Causes have ranged from building prosthetics for people with disabilities to developing apps that enable students to source fair trade goods. Student-run organizations have championed these hackathons as a way to ethically fill consumer gaps.

In April 2018, a partnership between the Sutardja Dai Center for Entrepreneurship and the UC Regents Chancellor’s Association hosted Cal Innovates, a hackathon aimed to bridge the engineering and business disciplines. Prabhakaran, who organized the event, said attendance was high because engineering and business students have started to “soul search” for meaningful impact. “Berkeley students have a strong entrepreneurial spirit—you can see it everyday,” said Prabhakaran. “But conversations about using business to help others are happening on small scale. The hackathon is a way to help students do this on a bigger scale.”

The Cal Innovates hackathon presented no strict problem to solve. It allowed participants—of which 40 to 50 percent were engineering majors and 30 to 40 percent were from the Haas School of Business—to build and plan deployment of prototypes. During the competition, participants listened to speakers or pursued their project with the help of guides. Professionals from SkyDeck, Cal’s startup accelerator, helped students with presentations and judged the finals, while employees of GoDaddy and students from BlockChain at Berkeley helped participants with technical aspects of their designs. Finalists included a project for civil engineers in developing countries to create sustainable bridges.

Another example of a UC Berkeley hackathon geared toward positive social impact was EnableTech’s “Make-A-Thon.” Held in April 2018, it aimed to connect those building prosthetics with those who use them, per the club’s motto: “Build with them, not for them.” Spanning 48 hours, the event allowed participants, formed into groups of six people from different majors, to rank which of EnableTech’s active projects should be improved. Kyelo Torres, a rising senior in mechanical engineering and the event project leader, spoke of the hackathon’s purpose: “As students, we are taught only theories. The second we are asked to do something, we get lost. The idea of hackathons is to practice the real world aspect of things.”

Amy Dinh, programs manager of the Jacobs Institute for Design Management, said she believes the reason for the uptick in hackathons with a social good emphasis is simple: “People seek a challenge, and there’s nothing more challenging than the wicked problems of the world.” Yet she dissuades students from expecting implementable solutions post-hackathon, highlighting instead the importance of the iterative process. “The point of a hackathon is to get creative juices to flow,” she said. “It’s not realistic for the ideas to be polished; rather the point is to kickstart a new team or idea.”

By Tamara Straus

For the Pinoleville Pomo Nation of Ukiah, California, collaboration has not historically been a word used to describe interactions with white Americans. As late as 1950, native people were not permitted to walk on both sides of the street and signs in Ukiah’s storefront windows read, “No dogs or Indians allowed.”

Angela James, vice chair of the Tribal Council for the Pinoleville Pomo Nation, remembered this history was she was approached by David Edmunds, her tribe’s environmental director, about a possible collaboration with UC Berkeley. The goal was to co-design a sustainable housing project for the low-income families of her 300-person nation.

On the one hand, James, a mother of four, was eager to advance the education of young tribe members and teach them to live in two cultures. Yet her mind jangled with stories from her grandfather Smith Williams. He had told her about Ba-lay Ba-lin—the Bloody Run—an 1871 atrocity in which white settlers violently forced Native Americans off their land, turning the Eel River red with their blood. In 2007, when James first stepped onto the UC Berkeley campus to talk with Mechanical Engineering Professor Alice Agogino, now education director of the Blum Center and chair of the graduate group in Development Engineering, and graduate students Ryan Shelby and Yael Perez, she was aware that this was the place where Ishi, the so-called “last wild Indian,” became the research subject of anthropologist Alfred Kroeber. She also knew there was an ongoing dispute about the Hearst Museum’s return of 12,000 Native American remains to California tribes.

James’ warm-up to the UC Berkeley engineers was slow. She recounted that because Shelby is African American and Perez is foreign (Israeli), she felt they might be worthy of her community’s trust. She also wanted to believe that “science can cross cultural barriers,” and she observed from Agogino’s classroom that engineering was no longer “just a field for white males.”

At the same time, the interdisciplinary UC Berkeley group called CARES—Community Assessment of Renewable Energy and Sustainability—was seeking to tread new water in the field of development. “As we worked with the nation on the sustainable housing project, our understanding of development changed,” said Perez. “We realized technology, and technological ‘fixes,’ are not enough. We needed to start with what sustainability meant to the tribe. And they had a lot to say about sustainability, because of the way they view their connection to the Earth—resulting in unexpected design decisions around heating, water use, solar power, and the shape and functionality of their homes.”

This insight about collaboration led the CARES group to a development methodology called “co-design.” The term, which builds on human-centered design, user-centered design, design thinking, and participatory design, goes further in empowering stakeholders in the decision making and design process to recognize that users (or locals or recipients of development assistance) are key participants in their own economic, environmental, and sociopolitical advancement, with significant contributions to offer. In essence, CARES, a forerunner of UC Berkeley’s development engineering graduate program, embraced co-design to address the disconnect between the creation of technological innovations by engineers and the needs, preferences, and cultural views of the people who will use them.

Explains Agogino, “The 10-year collaboration with the Pinoleville Pomo Nation shows a number of things: It shows that development projects can and should be local, not just international. And it shows that development solutions can range from how we design to how we publish academic research. The journal articles that have come out of the PPN collaboration have notably been co-authored by PPN members.”

Since 2008, CARES has collaborated with the Pinoleville Pomo Nation on engineering, architecture, and educational projects that have tested the boundaries of development. Co-designed results have included sustainable housing, renewable energy power systems, water restoration and management projects, and most recently science, technology, engineering, art, and math (STEAM) workshops for middle and high school students and a K-12 maker space.

Like past collaborations, the recent educational one was the result of shared interests and available funding. Zhao Qui, project director of the Pomo Youth College and Career Success Project, explains that in October 2016 her organization received a Department of Education grant to fund new cultural and academic enrichment activities for native students; one area of concern was low access and achievement in math and science. At around the same time, the Blum Center received funding from the National Science Foundation to support development engineering students working on InFEWS (Innovations at the Nexus of Food, Energy, and Water Systems) for low-income communities facing extreme challenges. And the CARES team, energized by development engineering graduate students and Global Poverty & Practice (GPP) undergraduate students, was ready for a new collaboration.

The task for the co-design was to integrate native activities and sensibilities into STEM education. Says George Moore, a UC Berkeley mechanical and development engineering graduate student, who taught at the summer workshop, “It became clear in conversations with the PPN that it was hard to get the native students to apply themselves in the STEM disciplines. Institutionally, it just wasn’t structured for them. But these students got really engaged at the workshops and are really good at math and science.”

According to Moore—and other participating UC Berkeley students, including GPP students Dor Chavoinik, Grace Harrison, and Arielle Levin and Elena Duran, a PhD student in Graduate Group in Science and Mathematics Education—what works best is listening and not imposing views on what works in a STEM-based activities. Among the decisions were to teach engineering design through Pomo Pinoleville basket-making techniques and to engage students in 3D printing designs from local art and nature.

Qui says the workshops and maker space are generating excitement among the students to get into STEM fields. “We have a college career counselor coming to the classroom,” she notes. “The students have a sense these are high paying jobs. Yet for native people, we’re not just looking at the pay. We’re looking at how we can use the STEM program to serve our own community around solar power, rain catchment, and other sustainable and environmental solutions.”

For graduate student Pierce Gordon, the co-design approach is crucial for mechanical/development engineers like himself working in poor communities. Gordon says co-design is “de-colonizing,” as it simultaneously aware of the deep history of technological interventions and adamant that everyone be heard, understood, and acknowledged. Continues Gordon, “If we don’t do that, then we’re doing the very similar kind of harm that many people have done over the history of international development and interventionist work as a whole.”

Gordon, who is finishing his PhD dissertation, which includes case studies of co-design efforts in the United States and Botswana, says the first priority of development engineering work is not to get research publications, funding, or material for teaching classes, but to benefit marginalized communities. “It is to figure out what the community wants, because this research moves at the speed of trust. Once you build up that trust, you have the opportunity to build up to collaborations and research outcomes and beneficial activities that you didn’t even know could have existed.”

For Angela James, one very specific outcome of the 10-year collaboration is her children’s interest in STEM. “My daughter has been a participant in CARES since she was four. She’s 14 now. She’s very comfortable leaving Ukiah. She’s looking at a lot of different colleges. All her career interests are science-based. My son is right behind her and just the same.”

James, who was on the UC Berkeley campus on July 13, 2018 with a group of Native American high school students, says the days of cultural and educational isolation can end for her tribe and others in California. “My goal has been to open the minds of our youth and introduce them to college and science, and teach them how to build positive working relationships with people outside their immediate circle,” says James. “It is important that the university has the right individuals involved in a collaboration—people who are willing to advocate for the human approach, get to know the individuals, and ask about background and culture. An important part of this collaboration has been that our voice is finally being heard.”

Research about this collaboration was partially supported by the National Science Foundation’s Research Traineeship in Innovations at the Nexus in Food, Energy, and Water Systems (Award No. 1633740).

By Veena Narashiman

An injured soldier is rushed to a field hospital and is bleeding out. A surgeon needs to give the soldier meds to speed up her clotting. But too much or too little will kill her. The doctors rely on lab equipment to determine dosage; however, the large machine was never designed for field use. The surgeon is caught between an educated guess and blind dosing, putting the soldier’s life at risk.

This was the story that Jeffrey Lu and Johnathon Li heard from a U.S. Air Force vascular trauma surgeon. The two old friends, UC Davis graduate students in biomedical engineering and animal science, realized they had possibly stumbled upon a market gap for a mobile blood clotting monitoring device.

After conversations with UC Davis doctors, their hunch was confirmed. Not only did they learn that traumatic injuries which disrupt blood clotting are the second leading cause of preventable death in developed countries, they discovered that mobile blood clotting solution could had worldwide application—from the frontlines of the war in Syria to rural areas in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Lu and Li also learned that with current technologies, an injured soldier may not receive treatment for up to 24 hours; and in civilian hospitals, patient treatment can be delayed three hours. The technicians and surgeons they interviewed said they wanted a device they could use in the operating room, circumventing the time involved in sending samples to the lab. Surgeons especially complained that when they got back lab results, the information was often obsolete because the patient’s condition had changed from further bleeding out.

“Current [blood-clot testing] devices are like using microwaves to cook,” said Lu. “It works if you don’t move it, and occasionally they come out great, but more often than not you’re just going to be disappointed.”

Or as Dr. Joseph M. Galante, the trauma medical director at UC Davis Medical Center, put it: “Undiagnosed coagulopathy [bleeding disorder] in trauma patients is associated with greater transfusion requirements, longer intensive care unit and hospital stays, and greater incidence of multi-organ failure or death. Patients with uncorrected coagulopathy are eight times more likely to die within the first 24 hours following trauma.”

Lu and Li spent part of their graduate school years working on the project they dubbed Innovis Medical. The partners began to understand their competition, their possible business model, and the people they needed to cultivate to make the best possible medical device.

In October 2017, Lu and Li turned to the Blum Center’s Big Ideas student innovation contest, to further shape and fund their idea. Big Ideas is open to undergraduate and graduate students at all 10 UC campuses and had a contest category that fit their invention: Hardware for Good, made possible through the generous support of the Autodesk Foundation. The contest put them through a nine-month project incubation, mentoring, and application process that Lu and Li saw was crucial to their company’s development.

“In entrepreneurship, you’re not selling your idea, you’re selling your network,” said Li. “Big Ideas participants enter Berkeley’s well-oiled machine, and their biggest advantage is their network.”

By meeting new people and potential advisors, the Innovis Medical founders realized they needed to pivot their strategy. Lu and Li decided to prioritize the civilian market instead of battlefield situations and use more layman language to describe their product.

At the 2018 Big Ideas Pitch Day before winning a first place prize, Lu went into the specificities of the device:  “Our solution is a portable medical device that uses a solid state sensor to track an electrical property of blood known as bioimpedance as it clots. Our device produces graphs and data similar to the current state of the art device, but without the bulky sensor mechanical components. The sensor itself is a disposable cartridge with no mess to clean up, no chemicals to work with. With a solution designed specifically to mobility, blood clot tests are no longer restricted to laboratories but can be used in a battlefield, operating room and even the comfort of your own home.”

At the pitch, Lu further argued that tests during surgery, which take 30 minutes to receive back from the lab, could be performed in the operating room within four to 10 minutes. Post-surgery patients who previously needed to make a trip to the hospital every few weeks to have their blood thinner dosage checked, could run the tests themselves at home—much like diabetic patients who are able to track their own insulin levels.  

In January 2018, Lu and Li joined UC Davis’ Inventopia, a makerspace for startups, where they were able to witness the production of their device’s sensor. The next month, they attended Meet the Experts Night at UC Berkeley, whey they were connected to Rhonda Shrader, director of the Berkeley-Haas Entrepreneurship Program, who referred them to contacts throughout the Bay Area.

Innovis Medical estimates significant reach and cost savings. Its market could include an annual 672,000 U.S. military trauma cases, 15 million U.S. civilian cardiac surgeries, and 7 million disaster-related surgeries in the developing world. As for costs savings, Innovis estimates the 15 million annual civilian patients of cardiac surgery could save up to $7,000 per operation. In developing countries, Innovis believes its device could be crucial in setting where reliable energy and technicians may not be available.

Lu and Li recently expanded their business plans through the UC Berkeley Innovation Corps course and were accepted to the national I-Corps incubator for scaling university-based innovations run by the National Science Foundation.

The founders also have launched a collaboration with UC Davis Medical, where civilian and military surgeons are using the Innovis device to directly test human blood from cardiac patients alongside status quo devices. Lu said sensors are being deployed for clinical tests with the aim to iterate the device to address as wide a range of patients and blood types as possible. He and Li hope to get FDA approval by 2021.  

By Veena Narashiman and Blum Center News

In 2013, the Blum Center and  the Center for Effective Global Action founded the Development Impact Lab, to launch the new field of Development Engineering and create a model for university-based poverty action labs. Since that time, the Development Impact Lab, with support from USAID, has tested over 135 innovations and engaged more than 500 students, 400 experts and 375 organizations, involving 16 universities in the United States, India and Uganda.

On June 4, key representatives from the network met at the Blum Center to discuss their five years of findings and outcomes. Temina Madon, executive director of the Center for Effective Global Action, summarized Development Engineering as enabling doctoral students from multiple disciplines to research and test poverty solutions as part of their dissertations. A panel entitled “Institutionalizing the Field of Development Engineering” included UC Berkeley Mechanical Engineering Professor Alice Agogino and Economics Professor Paul Gertler, who attested to the long need for such a PhD minor. Rachel Dzombak and Sophi Martin, who earned their PhDs at Cal and are serving as the Blum Center’s doctoral fellow and innovation director, respectively, also offered anecdotes about rising interest in Development Engineering. 

“Thanks to this new field, doctoral students considering international development now have a way to harness this aspect of their academic interests,” said Professor Agogino, who is chair of the Graduate Group in Development Engineering and Education Director of the Blum Center.

Professor Gertler gave an overview of the Development Engineering journal, an open access,  interdisciplinary publication that applies engineering and economic research to the problems of poverty. The two-year old journal, he explained, is giving scholars academic credit for novel research that previously had not been widely acknowledged or disseminated.

Katherine Dow, program manager of the Global Development Lab, said that the Development Impact Lab has helped USAID better understand emerging trends in science and technology for development and the role that university professors, researchers and students can play. She also said the UC Berkeley collaboration has helped bring quality data and data methodologies to government decision makers, allowing for a redefinition of problems.

Data gathering around energy reliability in Ghana was a focus of one session. Hana Freymiller and Jeffrey Garnett from the U.S. Government’s Millennium Development Corporation, gave an overview of its $535 million, five-year project in Ghana, which aims to decrease the country’s energy outages by 20 percent by 2021.  The Millennium Development Corporation is collaborating with the Development Impact Lab and UC Berkeley’s Lab11 to better understand where and when outages are happening in Ghana—using a mobile app called Gridwatch. GridWatch enables utility customers to automatically report outages through sensor technology on their cell phones. The data collected is more accurate in many cases than what the utility company can gather, and can show a variety of possible solutions for energy investment, energy savings, economic development, and improved quality of life.

“People are worried about the 1.1 billion people who don’t have access to electricity worldwide,” said UC Berkeley Business and Economics Professor Catherine Wolfram, a GridWatch project lead. “But what about those who don’t have reliable access? As urbanization trends move forward, it’s really important to understand reliability and measure how investment changes with reliability.”

The daylong conference also featured presentations by faculty and current and former PhD students associated with the Development Impact Lab.

UC Berkeley Bioengineering Professor Dan Fletcher summarized the progress of CellScope, an invention from his lab that adapts the camera of a mobile phone or tablet computer into a high-quality light microscope for disease detection in low-resource areas. Since 2008, Professor Fletcher has used CellScope to test more than 83,000 patients, analyzing the results in a dozen journal articles—and now is aiming to mass produce 10,000 CellScopes for use in rural areas in Africa. His insight was: “Don’t make technology for development as simple as possible; make it as automated as possible.”

Erin Kelly, a PhD candidate in Agricultural and Resource Economies at UC Berkeley presented a mobile phone application called SmartMatatu, designed to prevent the high incidence of traffic accidents among privately owned minibuses in Nairobi, Kenya. The application uses GPS and other mobile technologies along with affordable, off-the-shelf car sensor devices to collect and send location, ignition, route, distances, speed, acceleration and deceleration information, to show Matatu drivers when, where and how they are driving unsafely. According to a six-month survey of SmartMatatu users, the app has helped drivers raised their profits and reduce repair costs–demonstrating that visibility of data can influence driver behavior and productivity.

Danny Wilson, a Development Engineering alumnus, presented the outcome of his doctoral research: Geocene.com. With Development Impact Lab funding, Geocene has created hardware and apps for data logging and analysis. Wilson talked about findings from a survey of cookstoves users in Sudan in which people over-reported use of their indoor pollution-reducing stoves, making the survey findings unreliable. With Geocene, Wilson aims to create dashboards for monitoring cookstoves across many countries. The goal, he said, is to understand what are the best cookstoves for specific conditions, so people will actually use them. He noted that nearly two million deaths could be prevented annually by replacing cooking fires and inefficient, smoky stoves.

Susanna Berkouwer, a PhD candidate at the UC Berkeley Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics and the Haas School of Business’s Energy Institute, reported on the latest findings from the Development Impact Lab’s Rural Electric Power Project, which is utilizing novel data collection and analysis tools. She explained that Kenya is working on a last-mile connectivity project to power all households by 2020, and is collaborating with her group to better understand how energy access does (or doesn’t) lead to higher consumption, income, health and education. The results, she said, could empower both citizens and governments.

The other presentations included: Niall Keleher, a UC Berkeley School of Information PhD Candidate, presenting the results from Assistant Professor Joshua Blumenstock’s research applying machine learning to high-resolution satellite imagery to measure regional poverty in Africa; Chinmayee Subban presenting Berkeley Lab Water-Energy Resilience Research Institute’s progress on using charge-based salt water removal to clean brackish water; and Dana Hernandez, a Development Engineering student, summarizing UC Berkeley Civil and Environmental Engineering Professor Ashok Gadgil’s ongoing research on removing arsenic from groundwater.

“The Development Impact Lab has had a tremendous five years,” said Heather Lofthouse, the Blum Center’s director of special projects. “By partnering with USAID and other governmental and nongovernmental organizations, we have been able not only to generate new ideas—we have been able to implement real-world solutions.”

World Development journal features the research of Evan Mills and the Blum-funded Lumina Project, which cultivates technologies and markets for affordable low-carbon lighting worldwide.

In this podcast, Blum Center affiliated faculty, Clair Brown, speaks about alternative ways of structuring an economy and measuring economic progress, based on the Buddhist values of sustainability, interconnectedness, capability and happiness. Click to listen to the podcast or learn about her book.

By Rachel Dzombak and Chloe Gregori

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) represent a prioritized agenda for global change by 2030, with objectives such as the elimination of poverty and an end to world hunger. The SDGs present an integrative approach to development by addressing intersectional linkages of poverty that lead to global inequality. The fifth SDG entitled “Gender Equality” is a strong example of this cross-cutting new approach. SDG 5 measures gender equality along nine broad dimensions including increasing access to education for girls, ending gender discrimination, eliminating sexual violence, addressing unpaid work, and increasing female political participation.

In order to truly take action, society, and by extension universities, must address the many nuanced ways in which gender inequality manifests, as well as its systemic causes and its complex interactions with other forms of discrimination. In response to SDG 5, the Blum Center for Developing Economies at UC Berkeley is reexamining what academia can do to improve gender equity – in the classroom and in society. From discussions with faculty, students, and staff, four key insights are emerging.

1. Provide students (of all genders) opportunities to establish empathy

A critical first step for students is to understand why gender equality exists, why most difficult issues in society are not gender neutral, and why working toward gender equality is a worthy pursuit. To that end, establishing empathy for a community or population increases students’ motivation to work on a challenge area and heightens their awareness of problem implications. In order to bring the complexities of gender equity and other global problems alive for students, the Blum Center facilitates connection with those that know and live the problem. This includes examining the root cause of gender inequities in our courses, working alongside marginalized individuals who experience discrimination firsthand in our fieldwork, and discussing strategies in panels and events. Ensuring students of both genders engage in gender equity efforts is a challenge many universities face. Over 95% of fieldwork and projects dedicated to gender equality have been led by female students. Men have an active role in the pursuit of gender equality, but may not know where and how to engage. Whether by facilitating events on campus or supporting fieldwork opportunities, all students need opportunities to hear from and engage with varying perspectives.

2. Support faculty and classes that engage in gender dimensions

The Blum Center strives to support faculty who research and teach about the gender dimensions of global challenges. For some students, classes provide a “critical awakening” or a first exposure to the complexities of gender dimensions in development and everyday life. One Blum-affiliated course, “Water and Development,” taught by Professor Isha Ray, (Energy and Natural Resources, Gender Studies), covers not only the policy and technical challenges that prevent universal access to water, but also the gender implications of the lack of water and sanitation, and the work needed to address the issues. Many students refer to her class as transformative. As one graduate student reflected, “A lot of people say that we need to increase access to drinking water to prevent child mortality, and Isha always says: what about the health of the woman who is carrying the water on her back?” Engaging students with the nuanced implications of gender in anti-poverty work in the classroom allows them to take this perspective into the field, and into their future careers as development practitioners.

3. Connect students with mentors

Mentorship can drive students’ connections to projects and impact areas. Mentors take many forms: a faculty advisor shaping a research endeavor, an alum providing project feedback, or a peer student with experience in a particular subject area. Interviews with students reveal that mentors often inspire students to take on specific projects as well as enlighten students to a dimension they previously had never thought to incorporate. When a team works on a project but is unaware of the gendered implications, that represents an opportunity to connect the students with a mentor who can shed light on why their proposed intervention may differentially impact individuals of different genders. For women students in particular, having the opportunity to work with a female mentor can also grow their vision of the potential impact they can have. As one graduate student said, “The reason I continue to have a lot of interest in my project is that I’m a woman- working with a woman- with a women advisor- on a project for women…which is awesome.” The presence and continued support of mentors can solidify students’ intention to devote time, energy and resources to make impact, including around gender equality.

4. Broaden innovation ecosystem to encourage action from diverse sectors

Interdisciplinary problem solving, by diverse problem solvers, is necessary to tackle the world’s most urgent and complex problems. This is particularly true about gender-based inequality and violence. When addressing such multi-faceted issues, experts from multiple disciplines are required. Policy, technology, economics, social sciences, as well as other fields, must come together to enable changes to entire systems. As examples of this approach, the Blum Center’s Global Poverty & Practice undergraduate minor and Development Engineering graduate program include students across a wide variety of disciplines — from engineering, social sciences, to arts and humanities — all working together on real issues in and out of the classroom. This innovation ecosystem has supported the implementation of a screening tool for cervical cancer, community conversations around masculinity stereotypes, and a summer camp to encourage teenage girls to stay in school. This impact-oriented ecosystem also helps to recruit and retain women and underrepresented students in entrepreneurship and engineering. Over 60% of students across our programs are female (vs. 3% female CEOs, for example) and women-led teams are on average slightly overrepresented among winners of our annual Big Ideas contest. In addition to encouraging and training students to tackle gendered issues, universities also need to expand opportunities for women to become leaders in their respective fields.

Moving Forward

At the Blum Center, we are exploring strategies to make progress toward gender equality. We are interested in engaging with a wide variety of experts. We imagine there are many methods that should and can be implemented (and if you think so too, we’d love to hear them). At this point, what we know for sure is that we want to support individuals engaging in challenging conversations, provide space for students to feel comfortable tackling hard issues, and encourage knowledge sharing throughout our ecosystem. SDG 5 needs smart people working across disciplines, and with irrational determination to end inequality for women, viz., half the world’s population (and ⅔ of those living in poverty). It is our hope that helping students to engage in gender dimensions will prepare them to tackle the many forms of gender inequality as they become tomorrow’s leaders, and will inspire more impact makers to join the fight.

The Blum Center is UC Berkeley’s interdisciplinary hub for poverty action and poverty studies, bridging technology, scholarship and practice to tackle the world’s most pressing challenges. Home to thousands of like-minded students on the UC Berkeley campus, the Blum Center has been an advocate of gender equality since the center’s inception; over 20% of the Center’s project portfolio consistently focuses on gender-oriented projects, tackling both domestic and international challenge areas such as domestic violence, maternal health, community sanitation, and other issues that differentially affect men and women.

Rachel Dzombak is a PhD candidate in Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. She currently researches the role of product design in enabling sustainable supply chain decisions as well as methods to increase women’s participation in STEM and entrepreneurship. She is in the Development Engineering PhD minor program offered through the Blum Center.

Chloe recently graduated in Peace & Conflict Studies with a minor in Global Poverty & Practice (GPP) from UC Berkeley. Her previous involvement as The Blum Center includes peer advising for the GPP minor, serving as the Director for the Anti-Trafficking Idealab, and working as a Program Assistant under the Director of Student Programs and the Director of Innovation. She is now Partnerships and Programs Associate at LeanIn.Org

Screening for blood diseases like Malaria is typically done in a lab by a pathologist. But for many people in developing countries, going to a doctor for a blood test is nearly impossible.

With support from the Blum Center, the Fletcher Lab is building a solution to this problem. Matt Bakalar, a Bioengineering PhD student on the team, spoke with the Seeker Network’s Laura Ling about Cellscope. The Cellscope converts a cell phone camera into a handheld microscope, which can detect parasites in the blood in just 30 seconds. This means patients can be quickly diagnosed on site and give treatment right away.

Special thanks to our partners at Seeker. Seeker features adventurers, explorers, and storytellers who take a deep look at some of the most unique and provocative stories, designed to expand our perspective and build our awareness of the world. Through the lens of world, science and exploration, Seeker’s award-winning journalism team covers current events and global issues through daily programming and field documentaries.

Nearly half the people on Earth use inefficient fuel sources like wood or coal to cook their food. Every year three to four million people die from illnesses related to smoke inhalation from cooking this way, as smoke from open fires contains high amounts of toxic chemicals which can cause a variety of illnesses, including lung cancer and stroke.

To help combat this global health issue, UC Berkeley student Danny Wilson has developed a specially designed efficient cookstove. Wilson and his team are distributing these stoves to places like Sudan, Darfur and Ethiopia where the problem is quite prevalent.

Special thanks to our partners at Seeker. Seeker features adventurers, explorers, and storytellers who take a deep look at some of the most unique and provocative stories, designed to expand our perspective and build our awareness of the world. Through the lens of world, science and exploration, Seeker’s award-winning journalism team covers current events and global issues through daily programming and field documentaries.