International

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.

UN honors nanotech pioneer

04/13/15 UNESCO — Connie Chang-Hasnain, Whinnery Distinguished Professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences, was awarded a medal from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in recognition of her innovative nanotechnology research.

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.

Ken Goldberg at the World Economic Forum

Forget the Singularity, let’s talk Multiplicity

02/26/15 Robohub — EECS and new media professor Ken Goldberg recaps his trip to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, where he talked about artificial intelligence and took part in a debate on "Will Machines Make Better Decisions Than Humans?"

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.

A drop to drink

02/18/15 — Susan Amrose, a lecturer in the civil and environmental engineering department, is developing a modular and scalable technology to remove arsenic from drinking water.

Devices: Sun Fridge

02/03/15 — Alumnus Steve Lanzisera (Ph.D'09 EECS) is part of a Berkeley Lab effort to design a portable solar-powered refrigerator to safely deliver vaccines to the developing world.

Beyond clean water: A development engineer profile

01/13/15 Blum Center — Listening to a dry academic lecture on flood prediction while monsoons flooded a fifth of Pakistan sparked a humanitarian drive in Syed Imran Ali, now a Blum Center postdoc pursuing his vision of safe water delivery through development engineering.

Emmunify team member Jessica Watterson in New Delhi with an outreach worker to conduct a usability test.

Project uses tech to help boost vaccination rates in India

12/02/14 — UC Berkeley students from public health and EECS are creating a new tool to store patient vaccination records on a portable chip, which could soon make it far easier for children in developing nations to get life-saving vaccines.

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.

Yashraj Khaitan, left, and Jacob Dickinson, co-founders of Gram Power, stand next to several solar panels in India

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.

William Tarpeh at the Berkeley Water Center

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.

Antimalarial drug based on Berkeley technology shipped to Africa

08/13/14 Berkeley Lab — The road from lab bench to market can be long, but UC Berkeley's Jay Keasling has been patient. Thirteen years after he discovered how to make an antimalarial drug in microbes, the product - the world's first semisynthetic antimalarial drug - has been shipped from Italy to Africa to bolster the fight against this killer disease.

Indian company licenses invention for arsenic-free water

03/10/14 Berkeley Lab — Berkeley researchers, led by Ashok Gadgil and Susan Amrose of civil and environmental engineering, have developed technology that uses electricity to remove arsenic from groundwater, where it can be a silent killer. More importantly, they have created a business model and partnered with a company in India to improve the technology's chances for longevity.

Berkeley Lab scientist Baptiste Dafflon collects electromagnetic data

The underground: Studying the Arctic tundra

02/12/14 — Normally, scientists don't have to worry about a polar bear charging them at 30 miles per hour. But this can be a big safety concern for researchers in Barrow, Alaska, where geophysicist Susan Hubbard (Ph.D'98 CEE) studies the Arctic ecosystem to improve climate modeling.

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."

Do-it-yourself cellular coverage for remote places

12/12/13 MIT Technology Review — With Swedish telephone numbers, a tree-bound base station, and help from a team of Berkeley engineers, a remote Indonesian village is running its own telecommunications company.