Author: Tung Nguyen

When Longyu Gong describes life in Shanghai, China, she doesn’t just talk about the scenery but about connection, or rather, the lack thereof.    

“It’s a very beautiful, modern city,” Gong said. “But people aren’t interacting with their neighbors or building an identity together.”  

She would know — she studied urban communities at Tongji University in Shanghai, a city of more than 20 million residents that moves as quickly as it grows. The skyline is sleek and the streets are busy, but daily life, she explained, often feels disconnected. 

Some of that, Gong believes, comes from the stress of work, but more deeply, it’s about design — the structure of the city itself isn’t made to encourage people to communicate or spend time together.

That absence of connection, Gong believes, is as much an engineering problem as it is a social one, and it’s what brought her to UC Berkeley’s Master of Development Engineering program.

This August, Gong joined 27 fellow students at Blum Hall to kick off orientation for the fifth-ever cohort of the MDevEng program.

Together, the cohort brings experience spanning data science, medicine, material science, policy, and more, and will spend the next 15 months in an intensive program that blends technical training with human-centered development courses — preparing them for careers in social impact, entrepreneurship, design, and sustainability.

Between introductions, group exercises, and the occasional jet lag, students heard a recurring message from orientation speakers like Blum Center Faculty Director Dan Fletcher and DevEng chair Kara Nelson: pursue curiosity and take charge of your own learning.

“Berkeley is very much a university where initiative and self-motivation get you the most,” Fletcher said. “Berkeley is very much a smorgasbord, a buffet, and you need to figure out what it is you’d like to learn and what experience you’d like to have.”

The vital work of Development Engineering has grown more challenging and more essential in light of recent federal funding cuts and shifting government policies that have affected academia as a whole, according to Fletcher.

During the orientation, he addressed these challenges upfront, reminding students that there will always be a need for their work, even as newfound obstacles arise.

“The work we’re trying to do here is aimed at making the world a better place,” Fletcher said. “The needs are there, and the ability of each of us to make a positive impact is still there, so we can’t be dissuaded.”

His message resonated with the new students, many of whom are already eager to apply their skills to pressing global issues. Among them is Noam Anglo, who plans to focus on Healthcare Transformations during his time at Berkeley.

Born in the Philippines and raised in Canada, he studied mechanical engineering at the University of Calgary. In the years that followed, he moved through industries as varied as healthcare, robotics, and entrepreneurship, yet something about the work felt incomplete.

“I’m an engineer and I want to do engineering, but I just needed to figure out how to apply that in the context that is most meaningful to society,” Anglo said. 

That search for meaning brought him to Berkeley. Building on his roots in the Philippines, Anglo hopes to work with underserved communities around the world — from Southeast Asia to sub-Saharan Africa — and to find ways for technology to “distribute power to individuals.”

None of the other programs he considered offered the blend of technical rigor and social purpose he was looking for, until he found Development Engineering. 

At Berkeley, Anglo hopes to explore new fields such as agroecology and sociology, while also studying sanitation systems with Prof. Nelson, an expert in safe water and sanitation for resource-limited environments. He sees the MDevEng program as a place to learn how engineering can directly solve humanitarian problems around the world.

Anglo said the community has already made an impression, as he is surrounded by classmates who take initiative and think big — an environment radically different from the one during his undergraduate years. 

The energy, he said, has pushed him to aim higher and see new possibilities for how engineering can serve society.

“Even in the week before classes, I’ve met so many people who are really stubborn and try to think long term about the social impact they can make in their careers,” Anglo said. “I want to meet more of those kinds of people.” 

Sharing that drive is fellow MDevEng student Alejandro Rodriguez, who is equally passionate about bridging the gap between technical innovation and social impact.

With a background in biomedical and industrial engineering from the Universidad de los Andes in Colombia, Rodriguez said he began to notice a troubling disconnect between the priorities of the engineering industry and the real needs of the communities affected by its work.

He emphasized that technical expertise alone isn’t enough to address society’s most pressing issues; engineers must also grasp how their work impacts society, politics, and people’s daily lives.

That conviction is what ultimately led him to the MDevEng program, where technology and social impact meet by design.

“I think that this program really cares about its application and how we impact society,” Rodríguez said. “It really cares about how we can help.”

As part of the program, he hopes to strengthen his skills in technology tools and policy intervention, and is particularly interested in using data to understand real-world social dynamics through his chosen concentration, AI & Data Analytics for Social Impact.

Rodríguez, alongside the rest of the new cohort, will spend the next three semesters tackling technical challenges, collaborating across cultures, and working on community-driven projects — culminating in a summer internship and a capstone project that puts their ideas into practice.

With opportunities to test those ideas through initiatives like the Blum Center’s Big Ideas Contest, students will take what they learn in the classroom and apply it to social and humanitarian projects around the world.

“You’re embarking on a journey,” Fletcher told the cohort. “We hope to empower you to make the kind of positive change that you want to make in the world.”

 

World Water Week is an annual conference and global observance focused on addressing the world’s most pressing water-related challenges — calling on policymakers and innovators to take action on sustainable water solutions.

This year’s theme is “Water for Climate Action,” which aims to address the crucial role that water plays in global efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and the effects of climate change.

To understand how water-infrastructure innovations can combat poverty and address a changing climate, we spoke with Prof. Kara Nelson, a water infrastructure expert who also serves as the chair of the Development Engineering programs.

What water-related DevEng projects are you working on right now?

One of the biggest threats to clean drinking water in the world is the unsafe management of human waste, because a majority of the planet still doesn’t have access to safe ways of disposing of their fecal waste.

We’re trying to work at one of the root causes of the problem, so we’re working on strategies to collect, contain, and process human waste to then actually create value with it.

One of the ways we can do that is through a really cool toilet design which separates urine and feces. We can then take the urine and make fertilizer from it.

In a lot of regions of the world, fertilizer is also in limited supply — either because of a lack of availability or because it’s not affordable — so through this project, we can create a local fertilizer product that farmers can use to increase crop productivity.

The main place that we’ve been working to understand the practical aspects and feasibility of this approach is in Kenya.

Why do so many parts of the world still struggle to access safe drinking water?

We think that this approach to capturing urine and producing fertilizer from it can make sense in high income, as well as middle and low income contexts around the world.

What communities would this project be serving?

There are easily a billion people in the world that this solution could work for, but it would very much need to be adapted to the local context.

For example, we’ve been designing the full solution for a context like San Francisco, where people rely on flush toilets. We’re thinking about the technology needed for making the fertilizer that would be designed for spaces like the basement of an apartment building in the Bay Area.

So this is a solution that I think can be appropriate for any community in the world, but things like the user interface are going to be designed specifically for the local context.

This year’s theme for World Water Week is “Water for Climate Action.” How does your project aim to combat climate change?

This sanitation research has many ties to climate change, and it’s trying to address different dimensions of the climate crisis.

One of those dimensions is that if we could produce fertilizer locally from human waste, it would mean that farmers could use less synthetic fertilizer, and synthetic fertilizer is one of the most carbon-intensive products in the world.

All of the fertilizer that’s currently made makes up about two percent of the carbon footprint in the world, so if we could eliminate the production of that synthetic fertilizer, it would reduce global carbon emissions by two percent, which is huge.

Another dimension is that in communities across the world without access to flush toilets, developing waterless solutions — through nonflush adaptations of our solution — that are acceptable to users offers a great way to address growing water scarcity.

Because of climate change, more and more of the world’s population is going to live in regions with severe water scarcity, and one of the most water-consuming activities in the United States is flushing toilets.

We take water that’s of drinkable quality, and we flush it down the toilet. If we can develop solutions for sanitation that use no water or use less water, that is going to help us adapt to a dryer and warmer climate.

As DevEng chair, what role do you see Development Engineers playing in the push for climate action?

We always need to be thinking of ways in which any type of water infrastructure contributes to the climate crisis. We need to be asking ourselves how we can reduce those impacts, and then, how we can also develop infrastructure that is adapting to a changing climate.

Water solutions for conditions we have today may not be adequate 10, 20, or 50 years from now, so we need to be planning for the inevitable.

Even if all of us were able to eliminate carbon emissions today, there’s enough momentum from all the historical greenhouse gas emissions that the climate is going to change, and the most marginalized are going to experience the greatest impacts from climate change.

So, we really need to be prioritizing solutions for vulnerable communities around the world, and that’s part of the framing for our Development Engineering programs and curriculum.