Health

Wheels of change in South Africa

12/14/10 — More than 9 million South African children walk to school every day. Three million walk for more than an hour, and in the rural countryside, some walk more than four hours. “It's madness,” says Louis de Waal (M.S'72 CEE), who grew up in rural South Africa and spent his professional life designing and building thousands of kilometers of roads there, many of which opened up inaccessible places deep in the country's interior. Now retired, De Waal is on a mission to improve mobility for all South Africans, especially in rural areas. The goal, says the 73-year-old Cape Town resident, is to keep children in school and help adults reach work more easily, ultimately easing poverty and slowing the flood of people forced to move to urban areas for work.

Silent and deadly: Smoke from cooking stoves kills poor people

09/23/10 The Economist — The appeal of a stove that produces more heat, more cleanly and with less fuel is clear. But Kirk Smith, a stove specialist at UC Berkeley, points out that most efforts to promote cleaner stoves have flopped. Too much emphasis has gone on technology and talking to people at the top, too little to consulting the women who actually do the cooking. Another lesson of past failures, says UC Berkeley professor Daniel Kammen, who runs the World Bank's clean-energy programs, is the need for better data about how stoves are actually used

UC Berkeley researchers study health effects of 3D

08/29/10 ABC News — More 3D movies than ever are in theaters now and manufacturers are selling 3D TVs. Yet surprisingly little is known about the effects of stereo vision on our brains. Researchers at Berkeley are applying cutting-edge technology to find out what happens when 3D is not produced correctly. UC Berkeley Visual Science Professor Martin Banks' lab is breaking new ground in studying the way we perceive depth. Enabling test subjects to see two screens at once using mirrors, his team has established some of the things that lead to bad 3D

Gene therapy shows promise for blocking HIV, controlling AIDS

06/15/10 Bloomberg — Two cutting-edge medical technologies, stem cell transplantation and gene therapy, were combined in an attack on the AIDS virus that may lead to new strategies for treating people infected with HIV. "If you could develop a therapy to make HIV-proof blood cells, then you could create a true cure for HIV. This is a very promising clinical trial that takes us in that direction," said David Schaffer, a professor of bioengineering at UC Berkeley, who co-directs the school's stem cell center and wrote a commentary accompanying the study.

Ahead of the headlines

05/05/10 — Whenever you see a headline about a new threat to our health, safety or well-being, rest assured that a Berkeley engineer is thinking of ways to mitigate that threat in the future. Civil engineer Robert Bea, for example, has spent 55 years thinking about offshore oil drilling platforms and how to make them more reliable. So, when the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded on April 20 and began gushing 5,000 barrels a day into the Gulf of Mexico, Bea was one of the first experts contacted and interviewed by the press.

On the trail of cellular mysteries

05/05/10 — UC Berkeley assistant professor of bioengineering Mohammad Mofrad has been busy uncovering the mysteries of how human cells behave when physical force is applied to them, working at the exact intersection of engineering and biology. Mofrad and a handful of fellow researchers are in the vanguard of a subspecialty called cellular mechanobiology, or cellular biomechanics, where they're stirring up the entire field of biology by adding physics to the mix. The ramifications of their work may one day bring about better treatments for cancer and cardiovascular disease as well as HIV/AIDS and the common flu.

Engineering health reform

04/07/10 — The health care reform bill enacted last month is the most far-reaching domestic policy the nation has seen in decades. Only time will tell us all the ramifications of this historic legislation. As the acting dean of the College of Engineering I ask, how can engineers help patients, physicians and providers make the best use of the changes ahead?

Berkeley Lab nabs $13.5M for breast cancer work

03/22/10 San Francisco Business Times — Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory will receive about $13.5 million over five years from the National Cancer Institute to develop computational models that predict breast cancer responses to therapeutic agents. The new Center for Cancer Systems Biology will be co-directed by Joe Gray, director of the lab's life sciences division and an adjunct professor of laboratory medicine at UCSF, and Claire Tomlin, a professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences at UC Berkeley.

Rubinsky goes global with health care reform

03/03/10 — Inventor, researcher and educator Boris Rubinsky has taken his show on the road. During three prolific decades in Berkeley's labs and classrooms, the professor of bioengineering and mechanical engineering stacked up nearly 40 patents and cofounded half a dozen startups in surgical techniques, bionic technology and imaging. Now Rubinsky is finding inspiration in his new role as health care advocate for the economically disadvantaged, building endorsement for his conviction that inexpensive but scientifically advanced technologies can improve health care for underserved populations.

Anti-medical school, pro health

02/03/10 — No offense to medical schools, but students last fall liked taking "Anti-Medical School," a new graduate seminar at Berkeley. While medical schools generally teach what is known in medicine, Anti-Medical School explores what is unknown and unsolved in medicine, and that's what students found compelling. At each weekly lecture, like the one on Alzheimer's taught by neurologist and neuroscientist Adam Gazzaley, a UCSF physician presents a problem in need of an engineering solution in hopes of engaging the students in solving thorny, real-world clinical challenges as part of their master's or doctorate research.

Restoring Our Health Care System to Health

12/15/09 — Some economists attribute about 50 percent of the annual rise in health care costs to medical technology. Technological advances have allowed doctors to treat previously untreatable conditions and prolong both the duration and quality of life. However, as engineers, we believe that new technology opens up greater access and that scalability holds the power to drive down costs. Witness, for example, Moore's Law at work in the area of information and communications technology.

Brain–Machine Interface Holds Promise for Prosthetics

09/04/09 — "Practice makes perfect" is the maxim drummed into anyone struggling to learn a new motor skill, be it riding a bike or developing a killer backhand in tennis. New research by UC Berkeley assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences Jose Carmena and colleagues now reveals that the brain can also achieve this motor memory with a disembodied device. The study provides hope that physically disabled people could one day master control of artificial limbs with greater ease.

A Breath of Fresh Air

06/04/09 — We spend up to 90 percent of our time indoors but probably don't give much thought to the quality of the air we breathe until we step outside. That could be a mistake, says Beverly Coleman (M.S.'05, Ph.D.'09 CEE), who received her doctorate just last month.

Drug Delivery, Nanoscale

05/02/09 — Roughly the size of a matchstick, a slender titanium tube could become a pint-sized weapon against chronic hepatitis C and a host of other debilitating diseases. Three UCSF/UC Berkeley doctoral students are designing a tiny implantable device capable of delivering steady and minute quantities of potent drugs into the bloodstream. The Nano Precision Pump could reduce serious side effects caused by injections of far larger doses of medicine-improving patient quality of life, compliance and cure rates, the students say.

The Ozone Weekend Effect

03/02/09 — A large part of gasoline and diesel engine pollution consists of two components: soot and nitrogen oxides, or NOx. Soot is made up of tiny carbon particles that hang in the air and dirty it, but NOx, a mix of nitric oxide and nitrogen dioxide, has a more complicated story. NOx feeds chemical pathways that are fueled by sunlight and produce the noxious brew we call smog. In general, reducing NOx tailpipe emissions reduces this pollution. But, as CEE professor Robert Harley has found, there is an exception to this rule, known as the ozone weekend effect, that can confound air quality management efforts unless it is understood.

Engineering and Health Care: Bridging the Divide

11/02/08 — According to the World Health Organization, some 10 million children under the age of five die each year. Almost all of these children could survive with access to simple and inexpensive interventions, better maternal health care and safer sanitation and drinking water. At the same time, our increasing longevity accounts for large rises in cancer, heart disease, stroke and other age-related chronic illnesses.

Sensors Could Give Elderly an Assist

10/02/08 — Most people hope to live healthy, independent lives through their elderly years. But that's not always the case because, as people age, they and their loved ones have to worry about not only illnesses, but also injuries, especially from falls. For seniors, falling is the leading cause of injury deaths, nonfatal injuries and hospital admissions. But one team of researchers is working to enable the elderly to live independently through a network of body sensors. The project could allow computers to remotely monitor and analyze the activity of seniors so that, if they fall or stop moving, help can arrive quickly.

Preserving Vision with Hydrogel

08/02/08 — High axial myopia, or extreme nearsightedness, is one of the world's leading causes of blindness. The condition stems from weakness in the sclera, the eyeball's white outer wall, which causes it to deform even under normal pressure within the eyeball. James Su, a graduate student researcher co-advised by MSE and Bioengineering Professor Kevin Healy and School of Optometry Professor Christine Wildsoet, is developing a promising new treatment for the condition, based on a synthetic biomaterial known as hydrogel.

A Remedy for Deadly Water

06/02/08 — In Bangladesh last year, Johanna Mathieu saw unmistakable signs of the poisoning afflicting the impoverished country. "Everyone would show us their hands," says the 26-year-old doctoral student in mechanical engineering. The painful and disfiguring sores, blisters and dark spots are telltale indicators of the deadly toll exacted by arsenic-laced water wells. Mathieu is working with an interdisciplinary group to develop a simple, inexpensive process for removing the toxic element from the water supply.

Genealogical Conclusions

05/02/08 — There are about six billion base pairs in the human genome, and our family tree includes about six billion living humans. So, although DNA sequencing begins in a laboratory, it requires research-level computer science and statistics to crunch the resulting mass of data and make sense of the results. As EECS and statistics professor Yun Song remarks, “Just 15 years ago, it was very difficult for population genetics researchers to run their computationally intensive analyses on desktop computers. It's thanks to relatively recent improvements in computers and algorithms that these problems have become tractable.”