Catalyst@Berkeley is one of the first student-led health-tech incubators geared towards enabling undergraduate students to solve tomorrow’s biggest health problems. The goals for Catalyst are to bring passionate students together to create heavily-needed health-tech products to market and improve lives. It teaches student-founders how to pick the right problems to solve (clinically-validated and with the right product-market-team fit). By the end of the incubation period, all teams are expected to be ready to scale with a top-tier accelerator program. Most importantly, Catalyst wants to provide students the opportunity to learn about entrepreneurship in the life sciences and digital health fields through hands-on experience.
University: UC Berkeley
Project Drsti: A Sustainable Method for Alleviating Vitamin A Deficiency
This project proposes an innovative strategy to alleviate Vitamin A (VA) deficiency in the developing world by harnessing the metabolic power of a probiotic bacterium, Lactobacillus casei. By engineering L. casei to produce provitamin A (β-carotene) during yogurt fermentation, the team can develop a safe and sustainable method of increasing dietary intake of VA. This provitamin A biofortified (i.e., enhanced) yogurt can support VA status and benefit the health of populations in India who consume yogurt as a staple. Moreover, the bacteria strain can be produced inexpensively, freeze-dried into a room-temperature-stable powder, and seamlessly integrated into existing yogurt production cycles. As L. casei is common in many different fermentations processes, this strain could be adapted for use in many other human and animal food sources. Once this strain becomes established in a fermentation system, it will self-perpetuate to ensure a sustainable source of dietary β-carotene.
Impact Evaluation Made Easy and Affordable
Impact evaluation is increasingly being used to determine the effectiveness and success of development interventions. This project develops an impact evaluation software kit that allows small organizations to evaluate themselves, measure impact and collect data, to meet their targets, and stay competitive for funding among larger, more mature organizations. This project will increase the effectiveness of NGOs by easing the design, implementation, and analysis of meaningful impact evaluation through a streamlined, easy-to-use, e-tool that includes impact evaluation design, data collection, and data analysis functions. This will be achieved through software that combines two innovations: an easy-to-use interface that guides the impact evaluation design and the integration of tools into a single platform.
The Biodiesel Project
The goal of the Biodiesel Project is to provide UC Berkeley with a sustainable means of acquiring biodiesel as a cleaner, alternative energy source for use in campus vehicles and equipment. This self-sustaining initiative will provide a fulfilling hands-on experience for Berkeley engineers, educate Berkeley students about renewable energy resources, and reduce the consumption of fossil fuels. This will be accomplished through the recycling of waste cooking oil (WCO) from local campus dining facilities. The process involves filtering the recycled oil and producing biodiesel product through a chemical reaction. The biodiesel product will then be stored and made ready for campus distribution. Ultimately, the project will not only make UC Berkeley a more sustainable campus, but also will also educate and inspire the Berkeley community to turn towards green energy and sustainability.
BallotPath
Voter disenfranchisement is at an all-time high. From national offices all the way down to local school and water boards, people are frustrated with their elected officials. BallotPath is leveling the playing field so that the average citizen can understand who currently represents them and how they can run for office. People enter their address on BallotPath’s website where they can see all of their elected representatives, from dogcatcher to President, and how they can replace these officials. The BallotPath team intends to leverage its working prototype for California into a network of universities across the country that will collaborate to curate the data. By first building the prototype to function for Contra Costa County, then covering all of California, BallotPath plans to raise additional capital to go national and then open the API to paying customers.
(Note: This project originally won in the Big Ideas “Conflict & Development” Category)
PINVoice
PINVoice is a communication platform that tackles the problem of wage arrears experienced by construction workers in China with an Interactive Voice Response system. By acting as a virtual intermediary between labor supplier subcontractors and construction workers, PINVoice allows labor supplier subcontractors to reach a much wider range of workers beyond current geographic constraints, and allows workers to connect with many more labor supplier subcontractors. The platform allows workers to diversify their employment options and not be limited to labor supplier subcontractors serving large contractors; through the platform, workers will also have access to small construction or renovation jobs with higher and more timely pay. Also, as a proxy though not a substitute for a written labor contract, the system will allow workers and subcontractors to use the IVR system to record a verbal agreement about terms of employment, which PINVoice will store on the platform for later review should disagreements about salary terms occur.
AfroArt East Africa: Artist Stories
The urban arts centers of Nairobi, Kigali, Dar-es-Salaam, and Kampala are hubs for thousands of young and established visual artists, many of whom work in collectives or group studio spaces. The work coming out of East Africa is radiant and intelligent — it reveals slices of contemporary life from incisive, humorous and optimistic perspectives. It also varies widely in form; from painting, sculpture, and assemblage, to installation, photography, and digital media. Through on-the-ground fieldwork, this project plans to launch a one-month intensive documentation project in Summer 2015 to collect stories from the East African urban arts centers of Nairobi, Kigali, Dar-es-Salaam, and Kampala. These materials will be used to produce a series of short videos. The videos, photographs, and interviews will be presented together on the AfroArt East Africa website (www.afroart.us). An expansion of this project in the future will be used to assemble the short videos into a feature-length documentary, which will be presented in the United States, film festivals and other relevant venues.
Gyaan
Gyaan is an ecosystem for collaborative, inquiry-based, leveled reading that merges task-based and storytelling approaches to increase reading comprehension in early-stage readers. To build reading comprehension for early readers in an informal, collaborative, accessible way, the project will create a system that levels texts from existing mobile libraries and recommends them based on the reader’s ability. Within the reading experience, the system will model a Guided Reading lesson with various tasks that check comprehension and encourage collaboration and conversation. These tasks and the comprehension skills and strategies, which they seek to strengthen, will align to one or two sub-tasks tested in the Early Grade Reading System (EGRA), and the system will have the option to integrate with existing mobile assessment technologies for continuous monitoring of performance on these tasks.
(Note: This project originally won in the Big Ideas “Mobiles for Reading” category)
Art to Heart: Addressing the Empathy Blind Spot of the Cal Community
Using a three-pronged approach, the project will address UC Berkeley’s empathy blind spot on homelessness by connecting the stories and voices of those who identify with homelessness and poverty and the experiences of the student community with these populations. The first prong, the visual campaign, will include posters displayed on campus about homeless and low-income individual’s stories and perceptions. The second prong, the visual project, will include a film depicting homeless and low-income individuals’ journeys as well as students’ experiences working and interacting with these underserved communities. Finally, the third prong, the education series, will include a sequence of seminars on these issues and a working partnership with varying student organizations on framing and speaking about these issues.