To teach the world robotics
06/17/15 — An electrical engineering professor and a graduate researcher designed a massively open online course to teach an intro to hacking electronics course.
International
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.