Basic surgeries are far from basic. They require approximately 50 tools, which take about 2 minutes each for an experienced technician to clean. Operations in a trauma unit require as many as 400 tools. And in both environments, surgical tools can be easily misplaced, thrown away, or
In 2016, as Sarrah Nomanbhoy was starting her MBA at the Haas School of Business, the refugee crisis in Europe was in its second peak year and over a million applicants applied for asylum to the EU.
Nomanbhoy, a native Californian, had been watching
2018 Big Ideas Contest winner VIDI, a team that includes three UC Berkeley graduate students, was named a finalist in the 2018 Collegiate Inventors Competition.
The Lemelson Foundation, the world’s leading funder of invention in service of social and economic change, and the Blum Center for Developing Economies
As a graduate student at MIT, Aukrit Unahalekhaka decided to put his education toward a critical piece of the global hunger challenge: financial inclusion for smallholder farmers.
Big Ideas is not just big in aspiration, it’s big in social and entrepreneurial impact. Since 2006, the Contest—open to undergraduate and graduate students at all 10 UC campuses—has kickstarted 2,000 early stage ventures and funded nearly 500 organizations, with teams going on to leverage an additional $650 million in funding in the areas of global health, workforce development, energy and resource alternatives, art and social change, food systems, connected communities, and more.
To date, 2012 Big Ideas winner Jacaranda Health has provided maternal care to 30,000+ women and delivered 3,000+ babies, transforming childbirth survival rates in Kenya. Most recently they have begun leveraging technologies such SMS to make progress towards improving maternal health of even more low-income mothers and their newborns.
By 2050, more than two-thirds of the world’s population will live in urban areas, with 40 percent of this growth occurring in slums. One critical development challenge is the lack of adequate sewer systems–currently, one in every five city dwellers lacks access to
To celebrate UC Berkeley’s 150th anniversary, the Blum Center for Developing Economies created an interactive graphic showcasing 150 Big Ideas winners. Big Ideas is the Blum Center’s annual student innovation contest, which since 2006 has provided funding, support, and mentoring to over 6,000 students seeking to have real-world impact in the areas of clean energy, global health and food security, among other global challenges.
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