In 2011, the CDC reported diabetes afflicted 25.8 million people in the United States. This disease can be controlled by strict blood serum glucose level monitoring, but the gold standard fingerstick test is painful and must be done multiple times every day. The team is developing a colorimetric sensor that could provide an inexpensive, non-invasive test for determining the level of glucose in the patient’s blood, providing a painless alternative to the fingerstick testing method. By developing a novel phage matrix material and smartphone sensor analyzer, the team hopes to create a non-invasive point-of-care sensor that can identify the concentration of these compounds on the patient’s breath and accurately report the patient’s blood glucose levels.
Due to state budget cuts, many California public high schools have cut their college counseling programs. As a result, many high school students have limited access to information regarding college admissions. This is most prevalent in underserved and impoverished areas of the state. There are many bright and talented students who are capable of succeeding at top universities but lack information and guidance. The Phoenix Scholars aims to fill that gap. The program will provide one-on-one mentorship between UC Berkeley students and high school seniors throughout the State of California to provide them with personalized help. The Phoenix Scholars will strive to provide a constant source of support for mentees through the whirlwind that is the college application process.
Berkeley Engineers and Mentors (BEAM) is planning a program to develop, test, and implement project-based learning (PBL) curriculum in local schools. PBL is a nation-wide educational movement that aims to expose students to real-world challenges while emphasizing teamwork, communication of ideas, self-discovery, student-initiated learning, and creative approaches to problems. BEAM wants to join this movement by first pioneering a classroom curriculum model for PBL teaching that BEAM can implement in its own sites and then ultimately compile into an easily-utilized “BEAM Box” for broader use.
CloudCreations will be the platform through which innovative and effective educational tools can work together simultaneously and seamlessly. This platform is for students to collaborate, create, and compete. The collaboration will occur inside and outside the classroom and will be customized for students depending on whether or not they are in class and what they are specifically collaborating on with their friends and classmates. The creation will occur mostly outside the classroom where students will be able to vote on the most useful resources submitted by students. The platform will allow students to create videos, infographics, example problems, helpful scenarios, problem solution walkthroughs, etc.
The three main functions of the LuxWalk application are as follows. First, students can input their origin and destination on an app built into the application to find the safest route to walk, produced through an analysis of past crime data and the degree of street lighting. Second, students can also track the Night Safety shuttle and campus-funded Community Service Officers through the BearWalk program to gain estimates on when and where they can plan to dispatch a shuttle or officer. Third, students can connect to the application through their Facebook accounts, to see which friends are checked in at their location and are walking to the same geographical area. Ultimately, LuxWalk serves to connect students with information about Berkeley neighborhoods, campus-facilitated night safety programs, and fellow students in their community who can facilitate safety in numbers while traveling at night.
PowerTower is an all-in-one compact energy harvesting unit that will provide communities around the world with pasteurized water, electricity for small devices, and instant flowing hot water. Much of the third world is currently living without many of the necessities taken for granted such as running hot water, electricity, or safe water. PowerTower will allow people living in rural communities to do things as crucial as charge cell phones and have clean water. The technology will be delivered through a cross subsidization model based on a domestically profitable product using the same technology called the PowerShower. This technology is inexpensive, not susceptible to weather conditions, and makes use of an energy source already widely utilized in the third world.
The eradication of malaria is hampered by the ability of current diagnostic tools to detect very low-density infections in asymptomatic patients. In response to this, the aim is to employ loop-mediated isothermal amplification (LAMP), an innovative and novel technique to test for asymptomatic malaria. This low-cost technique is faster and more accurate compared to currently employed diagnostic tests. In Kenya, the aim is to (1) conduct a hotspot identification campaign using LAMP techniques to detect the malaria parasite, and (2) build capacity to ensure sustainability and local participation in the hotspot identification campaign. Results of this hotspot identification campaign will become an essential tool in future anti-malaria interventions.
Anti-malarial pills are among the most highly counterfeited drugs in Africa. Malaria kills between 1 and 3 million people every year, with 90% of those deaths in Africa. This reduces productivity in Africa by $12 billion and devastates local economies. The project aims to identify counterfeit anti-malarial drugs by developing a new technique to detect the concentration of artemisinin (the active ingredient) in these pills. Due to the prevalence of counterfeit drugs that have minimal amounts of this active ingredient, identifying its concentration in a pill has become important. The innovative aspect of this technique Spot-It!, is that it achieves the challenging task of measuring the concentration of active ingredient by combining two elementary methods, Thin Layer Chromatography (TLC) and a simple chemical reaction.
4.6 billion people across the developing world lack adequate treatment of their feces and urine. ElectroSan will apply electrochemical cells that recover nitrogen from human urine. This product will be used to disinfect human feces and produce income as a fertilizer, making sanitation affordable in low-income communities like Mukuru, an urban Nairobi slum. This intervention can catalytically improve public health and environmental quality by treating and creating value-added products from waste.
