Category: Faculty

By Alisha Dalvi

In 2007, the Blum Center hosted UC Berkeley’s first Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene (WASH) symposium for scholars and development practitioners. The event was the first of its kind in the Bay Area, and for the next decade, Stanford and Berkeley hosted WASH events on alternating years. After a hiatus due the pandemic, the symposium was back this year for the first time since 2019. This time, it’s the Blum Center continuing the tradition, with a wider scope of research and a larger community since the original WASH event over 15 years ago. 

Water, sanitation, and hygiene are crucial pillars of public health initiatives and in the fight against poverty. Issues like inadequate water access and poor sanitation disproportionately affect under-resourced communities, leading to waterborne diseases and socioeconomic impacts within vulnerable populations. Solutions are interdisciplinary, blending research findings and policy interventions in pursuit of infrastructure development, with communities’ contexts and needs at the core of WASH efforts. Practitioners range from chemical and environmental engineers to public health professionals. 

On December 6, the Blum Center hosted graduate students, professors, and experts with one common connection — a commitment to sharing and expanding collective knowledge in the WASH sector. The event kicked off with an introduction from its head coordinators, Prof. Amy Pickering, Blum Center Distinguished Chair in Global Poverty and Practice, and Prof. Kara Nelson, Blum Chancellor’s Chair in Development Engineering. Icebreakers followed, where attendees broke out into teams to play a sanitation-inspired game. 

The main attractions, however, were six longer research presentations and 17 quicker lightning talks, which included research developments that have concluded, are currently underway, or still in planning stages. They covered biological, environmental, and social issues, from cost assessments of water supplies to chlorination techniques for reducing maternal and neonatal diseases to proposing a compostable toilet. 

The sheer scope of presentations demonstrated the multifaceted range of the field. “WASH challenges primarily affect low-resourced and underserved communities,” says Nelson. “Those in the field have to understand these problems from an interdisciplinary perspective.” 

The end of the night featured a reception and awards. Joyce Kisiangani, a UC Berkeley PhD student, won for Best Visuals for her presentation introducing a low-cost passive-chlorination device for disinfecting water at the point of collection. Another UC Berkeley PhD student, J’Anna-Mare Lue, won for Most Creative for her presentation on water as a medium to address environmental inequity. Christine Pu, a PhD candidate at Stanford, was awarded Most Engaging for her discussion of how investments in water infrastructure transform rural livelihoods in Ethiopia. 

The event was deliberately small and intimate, designed to cultivate in-depth conversations and small-group discussions. “It is an event by and for the people who participate in the WASH field,” Nelson says. Hannah Wharton, a environmental engineering PhD student in Pickering’s lab and a member of the WASH symposium student committee, agreed. “Connecting with other researchers and professionals in the WASH field is so important for making progress on the global inequities that we are all trying to eliminate,” she says. “Having people there from a variety of fields really speaks to the interdisciplinarity of WASH and the need for future events.”

With around 60 attendees and plenty of time for networking, WASH aficionados were able to dive deep into the complexities of their peers’ projects. “Compared to the scale of the problems, we are a relatively small group of researchers working on them,” says Nelson. “We have to be resourceful and work in teams. And have a strong community that is supportive and lifts you up when you are feeling discouraged.” 

When asked what they hoped to see in the future for WASH events, nearly every attendee had a similar answer: “To see more people!” They are certainly on track to meet this goal — each year, event planners have welcomed more and more first-time attendees. The increase in symposium attendance parallels new and expanding research projects in the field, like those of Kisiangani, Lue, and Pu. And as the WASH sector grows, these symposia are vital to encouraging collaboration and fostering a network where projects can succeed on an individual and community level. 

“Next year,” Wharton says, “we want to host even more members of the community and continue increasing dialogue.”

By Alisha Dalvi

When Master of Development Engineering students find out about the core class on social entrepreneurship, some tend to be a little skeptical. Some, having learned to eschew capitalist norms in previous work and academic experiences, now wonder how a class that teaches market-oriented approaches will be beneficial. Cleveland Justis, professor of MDevEng’s “Introduction to Social Entrepreneurship,” fights these misconceptions by teaching how business strategy can be used as an instrument of social change. 

Justis started his undergrad at Swarthmore College and then fell in love with UC Berkeley when he spent the summer in Berkeley after his freshman year. The university, the town, and especially the outdoor scenery prompted him to transfer; one year later, he was a Cal student, studying environmental science. Justis found his passion for environmental education working with Cal Adventures promoting outdoor skills and activities. Immediately after graduating, Justis became an instructor at the National Outdoor Leadership School, leading hiking and kayaking expeditions across Alaska, Chile, and Mexico, while also at the Headlands Institute, another environmental educational nonprofit. While dedicating 10 years each at both organizations, Justis discovered an interest in the strategy side of running nonprofits, an intersection he had not heard much about. “Environmental activists always seem to disagree with business,” said Justis. “But I was dedicated to reconciling that.”

Tackling this goal led him back to school to obtain an MBA from UC Davis Graduate School of Management. Coming from a family of entrepreneurs working in poverty alleviation, Justis knew he did not want to use business school to make companies wealthy, but to create social change. While pursuing his MBA, he began operating under a then-new concept: social enterprise. He identified three crucial facets that remain fundamental to his curriculum to this day: using the tools of nonprofits, government, and business in creative ways to bolster social change. He wanted to understand business as a way to uplift other fields. 

Justis wasn’t alone in his curiosity about social enterprise — other students were hungry for it, too. Upon completing his MBA, the dean of the School of Management encouraged Justis to start the first-ever social enterprise course at the business school. So he did just that, formulating a class from scratch. He pulled in guest speakers, many from the government, with the goal of bridging the business-versus-public sector divide. And he soon realized that he really loved teaching —  even more than his day job at the time, leading the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy, a non-profit that supports park conservation throughout the Bay Area.

Despite some hesitation that it was too late and he was too busy to go back to school, Justis returned for an interdisciplinary Ph.D. at UC Davis, working with top-notch faculty and researchers from the business, geography, and community development schools to create unique ways to apply business techniques to create social change.   

While working on his Ph.D., which he finished four years ago, Justis was also teaching social enterprise to undergraduates at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. In early 2020, a professor at Haas’ Center for Social Sector Leadership reached out to him and mentioned the start of a new master’s program housed at the Blum Center for Developing Economies: Developmental Engineering. The MDevEng needed someone who could bridge the different worlds of social change and business planning. And this was Justis’ forte. 

Justis has taught DevEng 204: Introduction to Social Enterprise since the program’s start two years ago. MDevEng students are required to take the course in their spring semester, learning how to incorporate entrepreneurial approaches to their personal social ventures. This is especially useful to the degree’s required capstone project. Justis has one main goal in his class: help students understand how successful social change requires government, business, and nonprofits to coexist by pulling in strategies across disciplines. Some students tend to be a bit skeptical of capitalist-oriented approaches. “And this is good, it’s a healthy apprehension,” Justis contends. “But I want to help them understand that government hasn’t been universally beneficial either, and non-profits also don’t always act in the people’s best interest.” The ideal system? One which creatively melds all three approaches. 

Justis formats his class with some lecturing in the beginning and a substantial amount of time for students to discuss and learn from each other. “The past two cohorts have been very intelligent and great critical thinkers; it’s really impressive,” says Justis. “And I am continuously amazed by how students use their international knowledge and connections to apply my lessons on a global scale.” Justis also brings in guest speakers throughout the course, many of which are based outside the US and represent marginalized groups across the world. And through learning from these speakers, lectures, and each other, students understand the magnitude that small-scale models, ones they can devise and develop within their own networks, have in forging social impact. For example, Mathews Tisatayane, is working to provide his community in Malawi clean energy, healthy food, and economic independence by using a social enterprise for-profit system. This is exactly what Justis hopes students get out of the class — developing impactful models doable at an individual and community scale. 

Students in this year’s DevEng 204 class had a new pedagogical tool: Justis’ recently released book Don’t Lead Alone, a culmination of his work, combining the tools he learned through research and valuable lessons he’s learned through teaching social entrepreneurship and leadership. Don’t Lead Alone’s goal is to make his past work more readable and accessible to everyone beyond academia, and it was inspired by students he has inadvertently learned from in his previous classes. The book — Justis’ first — encourages readers to “think like a system, act like a network, and lead like a movement,” drawing skills from leaders across — guess where — businesses, nonprofits, and governments. Daniel Student, a fellow UC Davis MBA alumnus and theater director and actor, co-authored the book and provided creative direction to Justis’ academic linear. Three years of on-and-off writing paid off. Since its release in February, it has landed on at least three different Amazon bestseller lists. But, ever the educator, Justis is most interested in how the book lands with his pupils. “I wrote the book for my students,” he says, “so they’re the true test-case.”

UC Berkeley helped pioneer the field of development engineering more than a decade ago. Yet for many years, the professors teaching Berkeley’s foundational class, DevEng C200 (“Design, Evaluate, and Scale Development Technologies”), didn’t have a textbook for their students. The discipline — which integrates engineering with economics, business, natural resource management, and the social sciences — focuses on technological interventions that can address the needs of low-income communities, at scale.

When the field of development engineering was first getting started, “we had to scrape the bottom of the barrel to find case studies for the students to understand and debate,” explained Prof. Ashok Gadgil, Rudd Family Foundation Distinguished Chair of Safe Water & Sanitation and professor of civil and environmental engineering.

So in true development engineering fashion, Gadgil and colleague Temina Madon, part of the professional faculty at Haas School of Business, teamed up to publish Introduction to Development Engineering: A Framework with Applications from the Field — the discipline’s first textbook. It was published by Springer as an open access title on Sept. 9.

“We want to make this a topic of academic research because, whether it’s business or engineering or economics, everybody is too fractured intellectually and looks up their own stovepipe and doesn’t solve the problem,” Gadgil said. “They just go deeper and deeper and get narrower and narrower in viewpoint.” 

“The big picture question,” he continued, “is how are we going to meet the U.N. sustainable development goals and still not blow our planet’s carbon budget?”

The textbook is available online at no cost and in its first few weeks was downloaded from publisher Springer’s website more than 30,000 times. The Development Impact Lab, a USAID-backed initiative co-led by the Center for Effective Global Action (CEGA) and the Blum Center for Developing Economies, supported the expenses of creating the book, which included honoraria for contributing authors and other costs associated with open-access publishing.

Introduction to Development Engineering isn’t Berkeley’s only effort to formalize the field of DevEng. Gadgil, Madon, and Paul Gertler, an economics professor at Haas and the School of Public Health, launched Development Engineering, an open access research journal, in 2015. 

“We are going to launch this journal and it’s going to be open access,” Gadgil recalled telling the chairman of Elsevier — the world’s largest, and one of the most expensive, research-journal publishers — at a reception for a prize Gadgil had won. “Because otherwise the journal isn’t going to be useful for people and for the institutions in the countries where poverty is widespread.” To Gadgil’s surprise, the company wanted to get into open access publishing and was willing to take a loss for the first five years of the journal to ensure that DevEng could establish itself as a discipline.

That open access belief carried over to the book. 

After Springer expressed interest, Gadgil and Madon talked to EECS Professor Emeritus Eric Brewer, Haas’ Prof. Catherine Wolfram, economics Prof. Edward Miguel, and CEGA, among others, and knuckled down on the book “well before COVID” — as early as the beginning of 2019, Gadgil reckons. Some three and a half years later, anyone can download a free copy or purchase a hard copy from Springer’s website.

Whether or not other colleges’ efforts in this area use the term “development engineering,” there is no longer a need to “scrape the bottom of the barrel” for teaching materials.

Clocking in at 650 pages, the textbook features 19 DevEng projects that graduate students can use as case studies, ranging from fintech for rural markets in Sub-Saharan Africa to stopping arsenic poisoning in India to protecting electoral integrity in emerging democracies. The DevEng practitioners who authored a set of invited chapters have included open-ended discussion questions for students to consider the pros and cons of a project and debate other decisions that could have been made. None of the questions have simple answers, Gadgil said: “It’s still an evolving field.”

Yet rather than just presenting “a bunch of projects put together and stapled into a book,” Gadgil, Madon, and co-editors led the development of four framework chapters at the beginning to provide the intellectual history, ethical challenges, and philosophical underpinnings of development engineering. This is important, Gadgil noted, given the history of white-collar and often-white researchers and engineers going into poorer areas without the context or cultural fluency to ask the right questions, include the right people, or solve the right problems. An instructor can start with those four framework chapters and then select any subsequent projects from which they would like to teach. 

“Top-tier universities across the U.S. and across the world have courses that recognize that engineering is not just about solving existing problems of big industry,” Gadgil said. “They recognize that it must also be about solving pressing problems of society.”

Blum faculty Ashok Gadgil and Berkeley Lab research scientist Vi Rapp (Ph.D.’11 ME) won a “Patents for Humanity” award for their Warming Indicator, a phase-change material temperature indicator that improves the Infant Warmer’s functionality and safety, received a 2020 Patents for Humanity award. The Infant Warmer is a low-cost, convenient, re-usable, and non-electric wrap-around pad that maintains a temperature of 37 degrees Celsius/98.6 degrees Fahrenheit for approximately six hours for a newborn infant.
Read more here: https://eta.lbl.gov/award/honorable-mention-2020-patents-humanity