Development engineering

Build Change founder addresses CEE Academy Class of 2015

05/01/16 — Elizabeth Hausler Strand delivered the 2015 Civil and Environmental Engineering Distinguished Lecture about Build Change's progress in providing safer, earthquake-resistant buildings in developing countries.

Five questions for development engineer Rachel Gerver

01/29/16 Blum Center — Rachel Gerver (Ph.D.'14 BioE), among the first generation of UC Berkeley students in development engineering, talks about her background and her interest in getting new medical technologies to market, where they can have an impact on patients' lives.

Science and the public good

11/17/15 — To be equitable and sustainable, international development goals need to incorporate innovations in science and technology and harness the data revolution.

Celebrating World Toilet Day, reinventing sanitation

11/17/15 — United Nations World Toilet Day on Nov. 19 is environmental engineering doctoral student William Tarpeh's main chance - a time to proselytize about all things sanitation. For mechanical engineering grad student Emily Woods, it's a boost for Sanivation, the company she co-founded to convert human feces into charcoal for a poor community in Kenya.

The problem with ‘help’ in global development

11/10/15 SSIR — To move beyond good intentions, the development paradigm must shift toward collaboration, community involvement, and empowerment, writes mechanical engineering Ph.D. candidate Julia Kramer in a commentary for the Stanford Social Innovation Review.

blueEnergy project in Bluefields, Nicaragua

blueEnergy’s water and sanitation technology for Nicaragua

11/06/15 Blum Center — NGOs like blueEnergy, founded by Berkeley graduate Mathias Craig (B.S'01 CEE), are helping to provide residents of resource-rich but infrastructure-poor Nicaragua with access to clean water and improved sanitation.

Build Change founder delivers CEE Distinguished Lecture

10/15/15 — Watch: Alumnus Elizabeth Hausler Strand, the founder and CEO of Build Change, is making homes safer, worldwide.

Reports on handwashing studies for a development engineering class

A new kind of development professional: The development engineer

09/23/15 devex — At UC Berkeley, engineers and computer scientists are in the same rooms as economists and political scientists, working together to test, implement and scale technologies in a way that can reframe global development as we know it.

Vanessa Salas and Giovanni Pacheco discuss their project on particulate matter in West Oakland

GM Foundation funding connects engineers with underserved communities

09/18/15 — A poster session focused on community engagement and improvement brings together students in the Engineering Scholars as Engaged Scholars program and their supporters from the GM Foundation.

What are the ethics of humanitarian technology?

07/30/15 Engineering for Change — At this spring's Humanitarian Technology conference, Syed Imran Ali, a postdoctoral fellow in environmental engineering at the Blum Center for Developing Economies, questioned whether, in their zeal to help the world's financially and physically impoverished, engineers are acting in a manner that meets the professional obligation to “first, do no harm.”

Alice Agogino: ME trailblazer

07/15/15 Blum Center — When historians get around to investigating the trials and triumphs of women scientists in the late 20th century, they would do well to spend some time looking at the career of Alice Merner Agogino, a pioneer in mechanical engineering, development engineering and STEM gender equity.

More women in engineering – what’s working?

06/17/15 — From Dean Sastry: In order to increase the representation of women in engineering, we are moving beyond good intentions with proven strategies for sustaining their interest and fostering leadership.

Eric Brewer and graduate student Achintya Maduri inspect solar panels

Power to the people

06/01/15 Berkeley Research — Computer science professor Eric Brewer and the students in his cross-departmental Technology and Infrastructure for Emerging Regions (TIER) program are tackling power shortages in Africa, blindness in India, and other challenges where technology can make a major impact in the developing world.

Smartphone video microscope automates detection of parasites

05/06/15 — A UC Berkeley-led research team has developed a mobile phone microscope, based on CellScope technology from bioengineer Daniel Fletcher's lab, that uses video to automatically detect and quantify infection by parasitic worms in a drop of blood.

For clean water

05/01/15 — Susan Amrose is building new technologies to address arsenic contamination in drinking water.

How to attract female engineers

04/27/15 New York Times — In a New York Times op-ed article, Lina Nilsson, innovation director for the Blum Center, writes that the key to increasing the number of female engineers may be to focus engineering projects and curriculums on achieving societal good.

Ashok Gadgil: The humanitarian inventor

03/09/15 IEEE Spectrum — Named one of IEEE Spectrum's Engineering Heroes for 2015, the civil and environmental engineering professor's work on water purification, cookstoves and arsenic removal has helped tens of millions of people worldwide.

Engineering is: Saving the world with cookstoves

KQED e-book explores engineering through cookstoves

03/02/15 KQED Quest — KQED's new Engineering Is… e-book series launches with the Berkeley Darfur cookstove, developed by environmental engineering professor Ashok Gadgil to improve the lives of refugees in the war-torn Darfur region of Sudan.

Generation innovation: battling neglected tropical diseases

02/25/15 Blum Center — The career trajectory of Ashley Tsai, bioengineering and material science major, was transformed by a Global Policy and Practice experience at Kohn Kaen University in Thailand, where she researched liver fluke infections, a disease common among the rural poor in many countries.

Data and development: The Mezuri platform

02/25/15 Blum Center — Computer science professor Eric Brewer, leader of the Technology and Infrastructure for Emerging Regions (TIER) group, talks about his platform to better understand development projects through integrated data analysis.