Cookstove case study
11/07/14 — Students in the new development engineering class make lunch on cookstoves.
Development engineering
Dean’s word: Engineering global solutions
11/01/14 — Globalized markets and leapfrog technologies, including mobile telecommunications, now offer opportunities to eradicate the root causes of global poverty.
Launching ‘dev eng’
11/01/14 — A new Ph.D. specialty in development engineering teaches students how to build, scale and evaluate technologies designed to combat extreme poverty and other complex international issues.
Outback technology
10/29/14 — TIER scales sustainable technology - and tall trees - to bring cell service to rural villages.
Engineering improvements for the world
10/06/14 Washington Post — A new generation of development engineers, “dedicated to using engineering and technology to improve the lot of the world's poorest people,” is emerging around the world, write Dean Shankar Sastry and Lina Nilsson, innovation director of the Blum Center for Developing Economies, in a Washington Post op-ed article.
Cybertools offer new channels for free speech, but grassroots organizing still critical
10/02/14 — Scholars from CITRIS, the Blum Center and EECS assess the ways the Internet and online tools have changed how social movements operate and communicate in the 50 years since the Free Speech Movement.
USAID is incubating start-ups to tackle poverty problems
09/17/14 Los Angeles Times — Seeking entrepreneurial solutions to poverty, the US Agency for International Development has bet a million dollars on Gram Power, the brainchild of two Berkeley Engineering grads who aim to bring electricity to rural India while slowing climate change at the same time.
Defining development engineering
09/12/14 — Development engineers elude easy definition, but they are trained as multi-tooled tacticians creating holistic solutions to technical challenges that are interlaced with social and political complexities.
Holistic development engineering on the upswing
06/24/14 SciDev.net — The open access Journal of Development Engineering is due to launch in 2015, a move that could encourage more researchers to enter this nascent and holistic field, where UC Berkeley's Blum Center for Developing Economies plays a leading role.
The graduate
06/17/14 — Saddiq Nuru, a recent graduate from the Fung Institute's Master of Engineering program, reflects on his education, experience and ambitions. Nuru was chosen to deliver the graduate student address at this year's College of Engineering commencement ceremony.
Big Ideas@Berkeley 2014: Launching new generations of social innovators
05/14/14 — The annual Big Ideas@Berkeley competition continues to spur Berkeley students to change the world via life-changing innovations. This year's winning projects, honored at the Blum Center for Developing Economies, included a host of Berkeley Engineers representing several disciplines.
Engineering social justice
05/02/14 — In a new course, "Engineering, the Environment and Society," Khalid Kadir is challenging his students to build more just and equitable systems by rethinking the role engineers play in social issues.
Gadgil’s inventions win him spot in hall of fame
03/04/14 National Inventors Hall of Fame — Ashok Gadgil, professor of civil and environmental engineering, had been inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. Gadgil was honored for two inventions that have helped millions of people in remote areas: UV Waterworks, a low-powered water disinfection system that uses UV light to kill pathogens, and the Berkeley-Darfur Stove, which reduces fuel demands of those in displacement camps.
UN Scientific Advisory Board aims to build ties between science and policy
02/04/14 UNESCO — At its inaugural meeting in Berlin Jan. 30, members of the United Nations Scientific Advisory Board, including Berkeley Engineering Dean Shankar Sastry, vowed to "pull our resources and wisdom together," strengthening cooperation between the scientific community and policy-makers "to put the world on a sustainable path."
Chris Ategeka named to Forbes 30 Under 30
01/08/14 Forbes — Christopher Ategeka (B.S. '11 ME), founder of CA Bikes, which builds bike and motorcycle ambulances for those in need in his native Uganda, has been selected as one of Forbes magazine's 30 Under 30 Social Entrepreneurs.
Young engineer’s smart prepaid meter helps remote villages gain access to electricity
12/09/13 dnaindia.com — When Yashraj Khaitan traveled to remote villages in India in 2009 as a member of Engineers without Borders, he came back with the idea for Gram Power, a company that provides remote areas with on-demand, reliable electricity through affordable prepaid purchases modeled on cellphone recharge plans.
A carbon map to development
10/15/13 Daily Californian — In a Daily Cal op-ed, Dean Shankar Sastry calls for an international roadmap for economic growth, job creation and poverty alleviation that also contributes to controlling greenhouse gas emissions.
Plate piles keep levees intact
05/13/13 — In the basement of Davis Hall, Hamed Hamedifar (Ph.D'12 CEE) is rattling scale models of levees on a shake table, subjecting them to vibrations replicating the magnitude 6.9 El Centro earthquake of 1940. Hamedifar is designing a plate pile system, rectangular plates affixed to three-yard beams, to bolster the strength of levees in places like the California Delta.
The worldwide reach of Berkeley Engineering
03/05/13 — Global problems demand global cooperation. To tackle a wide range of challenges, from clean energy and intelligent infrastructure to cost-effective healthcare delivery, we are launching ambitious research and teaching partnerships with a number of international colleagues.
Riding the wave
03/05/13 — A member of the Berkeley faculty for less than two years, mechanical engineer Reza Alam is already making waves. His efforts to “cloak” objects at sea could one day help shield oil drilling platforms, wind turbine towers or data-collecting buoys from rough seas. His inspiration came from beyond his field: “I was reading papers about electromagnetic cloaking and started thinking, can we do something similar in fluids?”