Tung Nguyen, Author at Blum Center

Earthquakes, Hurricanes, and Floods: Meet the newest MDevEng professor who’s no stranger to disasters

A new member of the Graduate Group in Development Engineering, Ceferino and his team move in after disasters, working on the ground to understand how and why infrastructure fails — and how governments can build city systems that are better equipped to withstand the next one.

A series of devastating earthquakes struck Turkey and Syria in 2023, killing more than 55,000 people in one of the region’s deadliest natural disasters in decades.

In the aftermath, search and rescue teams struggled to operate after their own equipment was damaged. Hospitals collapsed, forcing injured survivors to travel long distances to access urgent medical care.

According to Luis Ceferino, an expert in disaster risk and modeling, multiple emergency response systems failed at once — including communications, rescue operations, and power infrastructure — disrupting what engineers call the “earthquake survival chain.”

But for Ceferino, this is where the work begins.

An assistant professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at UC Berkeley, Ceferino and his team move in after disasters, working on the ground to understand how and why infrastructure fails — and how governments can build city systems that are better equipped to withstand the next one.

He’s conducted post disaster field research all across the world. His work, including collaborations with institutions like the World Bank, examines risks to housing, hospitals, schools, and energy infrastructure in countries like the United States, Nepal, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, the Kyrgyz Republic, and Peru.

“(My work) gave me a lot of experience to start thinking about these questions, about failures of infrastructure and how they impact access to services that are very important after a disaster,” he said.

“What I’m hoping to do with my work is inform governments of the best ways to invest in making things more resilient.”

Now, Ceferino is bringing that experience to the classroom as one of the newest faculty members to join UC Berkeley’s Graduate Group in Development Engineering.

As a new addition, he invites MDevEng students to participate in his research, mentoring them as they develop their own capstone projects. He also encourages students to take his recurring class, Disaster Risk Analysis: a course that introduces students to modeling extreme events and assessing which infrastructure systems are most vulnerable.

His interest in disasters began in Peru, where he grew up along the seismically active Ring of Fire, a belt of frequent earthquakes and volcanic activity encircling the Pacific Ocean. As a civil engineering student at the Universidad Nacional de Ingeniería in Lima, he witnessed firsthand how infrastructure failures can cut off access to essential services.

That early exposure shaped his focus on disaster prevention, particularly for communities with fewer resources at their disposal.

“In civil engineering, we want to create better technology to improve the resiliency of society to these extreme events. One approach is to make things stronger — but that’s expensive,” he said. “I was very interested in the regional scale: ‘What can you do to make an entire city better if you have limited resources?’”

Over the course of his career, Ceferino has studied disasters ranging from earthquakes in Latin America to hurricanes in the United States.

He noted, however, that fieldwork often changes the way he thinks about how engineers model risk, how communities respond, and how unexpected factors can influence recovery.

After Hurricane Sandy in 2012, he visited flooded neighborhoods in New York and New Jersey. In some coastal communities, flooding caused by the storm meant a sharp drop in home values, and homeowners still had mortgages to pay.

Many residents couldn’t afford to rebuild, and the local real estate market meant that houses couldn’t be sold and families couldn’t relocate, causing conditions in these disadvantaged areas to worsen drastically.

In the following years, the market became depressed. Traditional disaster risk models — which estimate repair costs and timelines based on materials, labor, and available funding — could not fully capture what many impacted families were experiencing.

For Ceferino, the experience highlighted the importance of considering factors outside of engineering, such as economic and market dynamics, into disaster risk analysis — serious impacts of extreme events that go beyond physical destruction.

“There are many instances in which we’re on the field and we talk to people, we see the infrastructure, and we learn new things about the mechanisms that control decision making in recovery experiences and disaster response,” he said. “Oftentimes it’s just different from how we thought.”

Experiences like these have also reinforced for Ceferino the importance of interdisciplinary approaches to disaster response. Engineers alone cannot solve these problems, he argues; economists, policymakers, and educators all play a role in shaping recovery.

Additionally, Ceferino believes that bringing in diverse perspectives can help engineers improve risk models, and also inform policies that guide recovery and prevention.

“If you’re repairing schools, you need someone who will prepare a plan for moving students around to ensure the learning objectives are not lost while you’re repairing infrastructure,” Ceferino said.

That perspective is what drew him to Development Engineering, a program that brings together students in disciplines ranging from global health to AI and data analytics to address the world’s most pressing humanitarian issues.

The MDevEng is a 15-month program that prepares students for careers in social impact. Students take on a number of hands-on projects, including a summer internship and a final capstone project.

In his Disaster Risk Analysis course, MDevEng and other students will learn the fundamentals of modeling disasters and predicting how infrastructure systems respond to extreme events. The class culminates in an open-ended project, where students apply their studies to real-world scenarios.

Last semester, Ceferino advised some MDevEng students with projects spanning risk modeling and disaster impacts — from analyzing how home elevation affects flood exposure in New York to using satellite imagery to track power outages after the Los Angeles wildfires.

In joining the DevEng Graduate Group, he formally supports MDevEng students with capstone projects, where some will have hands-on opportunities to work with Ceferino’s research group.

This coming Fall, students working with Ceferino on their MDevEng capstone will be involved in projects such as modeling non-recovery pathways in coastal communities facing flood risks, as well as studying hospital earthquake response strategies via immersive virtual reality.

He said he is currently focused on integrating into the program’s community and getting to know students, but hopes to eventually expand collaboration by co-advising capstone projects with other faculty.

Beyond the data and modeling, Ceferino sees his DevEng affiliation as an opportunity to join a vibrant, collaborative community.

“I think students just take an idea and give it its own direction, which is amazing,” Ceferino said. “I’m excited to be part of that kind of community and learn more about the students who come through the program.”

How GPP Graduate Yesenia Casillas Rios Molds the Public Spaces She Grew Up With

Casillas Rios, a three-year student fellow at the Blum Center, graduated this May from the Global Poverty & Practice minor. Since high school, she’s been committed to enhancing the quality and availability of public green spaces in her community.

Growing up in Los Angeles’ San Fernando Valley without a backyard, Yesenia Casillas Rios would turn to local parks as a way to get outside, play, and explore her neighborhood.

These communal open spaces “were very crucial to the way I grew up,” she says.

In her senior year of high school, Casillas Rios became more directly involved in her local public spaces when she started doing a volunteer youth program at Black Thumb Farm, a community farm a couple blocks from home. Her end-of-the-year project tracked the impacts of weather on plant growth.

“They taught me a lot about food justice, food sovereignty, and environmental justice in terms of where we lived and how our environment had a lot to do with how we experience our day-to-day lives as low-income, first-generation students,” she said.

The experience set her down a path to UC Berkeley, where the landscape architecture major graduated this month from the Global Poverty & Practice minor, or GPP, which allowed her to stay involved with Black Thumb Farm during college. For the past three years, Casillas Rios has also served as a Fellow at the Blum Center, where she has provided essential administrative and event support for the Master of Development Engineering program.

While looking at colleges in high school, Casillas Rios discovered a Berkeley program that spoke directly to her experiences and interests.

“I found out about landscape architecture and how, as a landscape architect, you could design parks or you can design green spaces,” she said. “That fascinated me.”

It’s an interdisciplinary field, and, once on campus, Casillas Rios looked for other opportunities to interact with people from different disciplines. Landscape architects “care about energy, they care about water, they care about communities,” she said. The Blum Center, she found, fit that description, too.

In her student associate role, she worked closely with then–Assistant Director of Student Affairs Valerie Moss, who introduced her to GPP. The minor had clear parallels with Casillas Rios’ passion for community development.

A lesson in soil and plant health at Black Thumb Farm (Photo by Yesenia Casillas Rios)

“I’ve always liked to learn as much as I can,” she said, “and GPP also has to do with students from all sorts of different interests and backgrounds who are also interested in change, are hopeful for change, and want to learn how we can create that change.”

Her first GPP class, “Global Poverty: Challenges and Hopes,” doubled as one of her major requirements. “‘I’ll give it a shot,’” she remembers thinking. “And I fell in love with the class.” Prof. Sai Balakrishnan’s passion for understanding global poverty inspired her to officially pursue the minor.

Casillas Rios returned to Black Thumb Farm during school breaks to do her practice experience. And this time, she led the high schoolers.

The farm had a community-supported agriculture (CSA) model, and Casillas Rios led these youth in growing a variety of vegetables they would then sell to locals participating in the CSA. On weekends, she taught them what kind of flowers could grow in what conditions and how to arrange the flowers for selling. She also led workshops that the farm put on.

The farm also asked their resident landscape architect to help design a new plot of land they had, two blocks from Casillas Rios’ childhood home. This included interpretive landscape maps to engage the city on the farm’s expansion plans.

The full-circle nature of her journey isn’t lost on her.

“It’s such a beautiful thing,” she said, “I first came in just wanting to have a green space in my community, and now they’re bringing so much back to us — providing so many community workshops, community engagement.”

Earlier this month, Casillas Rios finished up her three years supporting the Blum Center’s programs and activities, and on May 19, she and 32 others from 18 different majors graduated from the GPP Minor.

She credited Moss and one of her GPP professors, Clare Talwalker, with encouraging her to reflect more on her interests, what she chose to do during college and why, and to be more open-minded about what she could pursue academically and professionally.

“It was a pleasure having Yesenia in class!” Talwalker said. “She brought to discussions her investment in understanding how our access and uses of built spaces, including green spaces, intersect with poverty and inequality, and how the design and shaping of landscapes might be socially transformative.

“Her contributions were unique, valuable, and inspiring.”

Over the years, Moss and Chetan Chowdhry, the Center’s Director of Student Programs, had also helped build a feeling of community at the Center by approaching Casillas Rios as more than just a student worker.

“I’ve become so close to them after these three years. It helped me a lot in not feeling so alone in this journey as a first-generation student and going to college,” she said. “I’m not just doing it to do it, like many of us are, but I’m here to do it for a purpose. Feeling reminded of that purpose with those reflections that I was able to have with them was something I’m truly grateful for.”

This summer, Casillas Rios will finish up an internship at a landscape architecture firm and another energy-focused internship at a consulting group. Her plans beyond that aren’t settled, but she knows she wants to eventually attend graduate school and gain more hands-on experiences in and around the landscape architecture space.

She will also be heading back home soon to the San Fernando Valley, and to Black Thumb Farm.

“Every time I’ve gone back on breaks,” she said, “they’re like, ‘You’re going to come back once you graduate; you’re going to take charge of this.’”

Would she?

“Imagine,” she said with a laugh. “You never know. I really don’t know where I’m going to be. But I’ll for sure still be helping them out as well.”

Senior Fellow Spotlight: Sonia Navani and Bridging the Health Divide with Digital Innovation

Through roles with the International Rescue Committee, UNICEF, UNFPA, and Columbia University School of Public Health, Navani spent years building health data systems in conflict and disaster settings. She describes a pattern that kept surfacing across the more than 15 countries she’s worked in: The groups facing the steepest health risks were also the ones least visible in the data systems.

In regions upended by conflict and climate threats, how do you devise health systems and strategies for groups that don’t access formal health systems or show up in existing data?

It’s a challenge that Sonia Navani, an implementation scientist and Blum Senior Fellow, has been working on for decades with refugee and displaced populations.

That invisibility wasn’t random. It largely tracked with what she calls “more granular gradients of poverty — who could reach a clinic early, who showed up late, and who never showed up at all.” As digital health and AI-enabled tools started showing up in some of these settings, Navani says many of them inherited those same blind spots.

But what shifted her thinking wasn’t just who was missing from the data. It was what she was seeing climate change do. In the communities she works in, floods and extreme heat aren’t just making food harder to get — they’re changing what people eat, when they can get it, and how often those disruptions hit.

Navani describes this as going beyond the familiar picture of food insecurity. It’s actively reshaping dietary patterns in communities already stuck in poverty, and driving chronic disease risks that didn’t exist in the same form a generation ago. The health tools being extended to these settings, she says, were designed for more stable situations where diets and environments don’t shift seasonally.

What struck her wasn’t just that the problems were getting worse. It’s that these disruptions are forcing changes in how communities live, eat, and cope — and those changes are visible and trackable, and in some cases connected to things that are low-cost and doable without relying heavily on outside aid.

Navani’s current work focuses on one area where she’s building this out — food-based nutrition for women in early pregnancy — but she says the problem is much bigger than nutrition.

“Communities in poverty are generating observable signals, particularly related to long-term chronic disease risks such as diabetes and asthma, but most existing tools are a mismatch — preconditioned on stability,” she said. “The signals don’t translate into contexts that are anything but stable, and where different aspects of that poverty contribute to whether disease risks compound or not.”

Her response has been to try to build something that goes beyond fixing data shortages. She wants to connect what’s coming out of climate science and biology so that the tools are looking for earlier signs of disease risk — but designed for unstable conditions instead of stable ones. She says this is getting more urgent in communities where health systems aren’t set up for chronic disease prevention, let alone treatment.

A framework she has developed for this purpose she calls Precision Community Health. She describes it as “a translational approach that applies representational learning to identify when deprivation shapes disease risk at a community scale — providing pattern-level profiles for chronic disease mitigation where epigenetic mechanisms are a major influence on disease risk — alongside individual genetic risks.”

So what does that actually look like on the ground? For Navani, putting this into practice meant building a whole process — not just the AI part, but how you get useful evidence out of communities that formal research doesn’t reach, how you connect that to science that works under unstable conditions, and how the results get back to health workers in a form they can actually use.

She founded DHDI, a nonprofit research group, to explore these areas with local civil society partners, from generating data ethically with communities, to figuring out where the real traction points are for preventing disease under climate stress and poverty, to getting support back to women and health workers in ways they can act on.

For Navani and her team, the community comes before any data generation or code. They developed Climate Health Photovox, a 26-session curriculum running with local partners in eastern DR Congo. It’s a digital storytelling program where women learn not just how but why climate events are reshaping local agriculture and food, and what that means for family health.

Using shared smartphones, women document those shifts themselves: photographing local foods, tagging them with local names and seasonal details. Navani describes it as building a visual record of what’s happening through the eyes of the very groups that existing systems tend to miss.

She notes that women who may not own phones but regularly use them within households become participants in shaping both the questions and the evidence — “not as data subjects, but as co-investigators,” as she puts it. The curriculum was designed to stand on its own. Women come away with food and nutrition strategies, smartphone skills, and connections to other communities dealing with similar climate challenges. But the images they share also feed into the AI work, and Navani says that dual purpose is built in from the start.

Of the different health problems where this kind of community-generated data could be put to use, Navani started with nutrition for women in preconception and early pregnancy. She calls it the area where the signals are most clear, the interventions are affordable, and there’s a specific biological window where acting early matters most.

The food images and the image meta-data feed into EpiNu, a proof-of-concept AI system that Navani says was built for the conditions where most tools fall apart — offline, low connectivity, no text input, no self-reporting. The system runs on a micronutrient database her team built specifically for preconception and pregnancy.

Navani explains that standard nutrition data often doesn’t reflect what people actually absorb from food — not just what’s in it. She gives the example of iron in beans: Guidelines list the iron content, but compounds in the food can block most of it from being absorbed.

EpiNu tries to account for that gap. The system is aimed at community health workers, giving them guidance based on what’s locally available rather than general recommendations that Navani says rarely match reality for women dealing with both poverty and climate disruptions.

The focus on early pregnancy, she says, is where the science and the urgency come together. There’s a narrow window early on where what a woman eats can have lasting effects.

“Many women don’t access clinical care until well after those early windows have closed,” Navani said. “In DR Congo, this is showing up in the data — excessive neural tube defects, a largely preventable problem where folate is a major factor. Supplements remain central, but many women receive them too late, if at all. The question is what can be done with food already in the household to unlock more of what these women need.”

The urgency behind this work isn’t abstract for Navani. Darfur remains the clearest example.

In 2004, she helped set up data systems in displacement camps in South Darfur and returned over the following years to support local teams, only to find the same women in the same makeshift shelters under the same conditions.

“They would remember me, which was both amazing and horrifying,” she recalled. “Horrifying because it meant they were still there — the same people, in the same tents made of plastic sheeting. The only thing that changed was the international actors around the table.”

That lesson has only gotten sharper. Darfur is in extreme crisis again.

“If the architectures of aid systems in place for decades have reached their limits,” she said, “then the question is not how to rebuild them in their original form for a world that doesn’t exist anymore, but how to rethink them entirely — and whether the computational tools now available might, for the first time, make that possible.”

At the Blum Center, Navani works with students in computer science, data science, computational social science, developmental engineering, and other fields. She says the projects push students to deal with constraints they don’t usually face.

“Most computational models are built in and for stable, well-resourced environments, then treated as universally applicable,” she said. “Working on EpiNu pushes students to rethink those assumptions — what counts as sufficient data, what ethical data collection looks like under conditions of partial access and shared devices, and what scalability actually means when infrastructure cannot be taken for granted.”

Looking ahead, Navani and her team are expanding their work in eastern DR Congo with larger networks of local partners. The bet, she says, is that building for the hardest conditions first actually makes scaling easier, not harder.

“If you design for eastern DRC and it works, moving into higher-infrastructure settings for communities experiencing poverty is a much shorter leap than trying to go the other direction,” she said. “Most people assume you build for stability and adapt down. We think it’s the other way around.”

‘Making the world a better place’: The fifth MDevEng cohort begins its journey at UC Berkeley

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.

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.

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.”

UC Berkeley and Navajo Tech Join Forces in Summer Engineering Partnership

Initiated by the American Indian Higher Education Consortium (AIHEC), the Alliance’s “backbone,” the collaboration opened doors for Berkeley students to intern at NTU, teaming up with faculty and peers on engineering projects in a month-long program in Crownpoint, New Mexico.

This past summer, UC Berkeley School of Education Ph.D. student Jessica Benally returned to the high deserts of her youth in New Mexico, just an hour away from her childhood home in Tohatchi in the Navajo Nation.

As one of six UC Berkeley students invited to take part in a new groundbreaking partnership program at Navajo Technical University (NTU), she set out to bring Navajo (Diné) culture into the classroom.

By combining Diné astronomy with mathematics, her doctoral project offers students a new way to learn math: looking up at the stars.

“In some math textbooks, students used the image of a ferris wheel that’s half above ground and half below ground (to understand angles),” Benally said. “But a ferris wheel, half above the ground, is not something students really see, so how about using an example of something that they can actually see?”

For her, the answer lies in the skies, where the rotations of Diné constellations like Náhookos Bi’ka’ (Ursa Major) and Náhookos Bi’áád (Cassiopia) seasonally rotate around Náhookos Biko’ (Polaris) reflect the 90-degree increments of the unit circle.

This type of visualization, she said, made math more accessible in her own childhood, and the insight inspired her to start work on STARR, or the Students Tracking Angular Rotation Recorder — a learning tool for teaching students about angles using their bodies and Diné star knowledge.

Beyond studying shapes on a piece of paper, students move their arms and bodies to create and measure angles while “traveling” across constellations in a small planetarium.

Over the summer, she would get the opportunity to further develop the model in New Mexico as part of her internship at NTU, offered through the collaboration between UC Berkeley’s Development Engineering (DevEng) programs and NTU’s Electrical Engineering (EE) program.

The six students part of the summer partnership program — including Benally and five others from the MDevEng program — were invited to NTU’s campus to work with faculty and fellow students on a variety of engineering projects, ranging from solar energy to air quality monitoring.

“In DevEng, we think a lot about under-resourced communities globally, but there are a lot of communities within the U.S. that are also marginalized,” UC Berkeley DevEng Director Dr. Yael Perez said.

“Being able to work with these communities, who are rich in culture but have limited access to other resources, and be part of their daily life for a short period of time, was a powerful experience, especially for students who come from other rich cultures who experienced marginalization elsewhere.”

The partnership took shape back in 2022, when Perez and NTU professor Peter Romine presented the idea of a joint engineering curriculum for Native American students at the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) conference in Minneapolis.

Perez, who also serves as the program coordinator for the Native FEWS Alliance — a cross-institutional initiative to expand participation in Food, Energy, and Water Systems (FEWS) education to all students, including Native Americans — helped put their vision into action.

Students in the program stayed in the NTU dorms, and spent their time outside of engineering exploring the Navajo Nation and learning more about the culture from school staff, according to Kathy Isaacson, Native FEWS Program Coordinator at AIHEC.

“The six students from Berkeley really hit the ground running when they arrived at Navajo Tech,” Isaacson added.

For Benally, the partnership provided a chance to further her work on STARR within the community she aims to serve.

The project’s main goal is to combine different epistemologies, a term referring to “ways of knowing” or the different frameworks we use to understand the world around us. Benally’s curriculum weaves together Diné and western epistemologies, encouraging students to approach mathematics “pluralistically” through cultural storytelling and scientific methods.

The model pairs two students together: one serves as the Sensor, using an arm protractor to “become” each star in a constellation, with their arms forming the rays of an angle. The other acts as the Navigator, using a digital compass to guide the Sensor to the correct star position.

Together, they trace constellations such as the Navajo Big Dipper (Náhookos Bi’ka’), combining cosmology and computation to make math education more engaging.

Traditionally, the Diné people have looked to constellations to track seasonal changes that guide farming, ceremonies, and other aspects of life, while also using them to build cultural philosophies and traditions. Building on this legacy, STARR blends both — along with other mathematical concepts — to help students grasp angles.

Originally, Benally improvised her tools, using a standard arm protractor made with tape and plastic tubing. Through her internship at NTU, she was able to refine the design, learning how to 3D-print protractors and develop more user-friendly compass tools based on participant feedback.

Benally also worked with former NTU student Hansen Tapaha to create “outreach kits” for K–12 students, designed to spark interest in engineering and incorporate technologies used in STARR.

As part of her ongoing work on the project, Benally was able to host two demonstrations of STARR at NTU for local students and staff through the collaboration. She plans to continue collecting data for the project, with the goal of presenting a final product as part of her dissertation.

“It was really amazing to get guidance from faculty expertise,” she said. “Being able to see it put together was really beneficial to making design improvements that will help the participant experience.”

At its core, each internship offered Berkeley students the chance to learn alongside the communities and traditions their work aimed to support, a hallmark of the DevEng mission, which trains students to tackle the needs of underserved populations.

The DevEng programs, which include both a master’s diploma and a doctoral emphasis, combine advanced technology training with human development studies, preparing students for technical problem-solving and cross-cultural collaboration on the world’s most pressing humanitarian issues.

Perez emphasized that the NTU partnership allowed students to put these lessons into practice by listening to and working directly with underrepresented groups like the Navajo Nation.

“Institutions like NTU and other tribal and community colleges are deeply embedded within their communities, which makes them vital partners in any effort toward meaningful, place-based impact,” Perez said. “This really makes DevEng–NTU an exciting addition to the Native FEWS Alliance.”

Many students who participated in the program are still working on parts of their project, which may turn into capstones they can continue developing at Berkeley in the fall semester.

Following this summer’s success, Perez said that they plan to expand the partnership by bringing NTU students to Berkeley and potentially hosting a joint course between the two schools.

She added that they are also looking to extend the invitation to other universities as well.

“Native American communities are very rich in culture and history, and they know what they want to incorporate in their current lifestyles,” Perez said. “It was really great to be part of that conversation.”

For Benally, the summer at NTU was an unexpected homecoming — a return to the high desert where her love for learning began, now enriched by the knowledge and perspectives she gained at UC Berkeley.

World Water Week: Prof. Kara Nelson Talks Water, Waste, and Engineering for Climate Action

World Water Week is an annual conference and global observance focused on tackling the world’s most pressing water-related challenges — urging policymakers and innovators to take bold action on sustainable solutions. This year’s theme, “Water for Climate Action,” highlights the essential role that water plays in reducing greenhouse gas emissions and adapting to a changing climate.

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.

GPP’s Class of 2025 Driven by Compassion, Connection, and Humanity

As this year’s Global Poverty and Practice (GPP) graduates stepped onto the stage to receive their diplomas, they carried with them a hard-earned insight: the injustices they spent years studying weren’t distant or theoretical — they were urgent and unfolding all around them. Their time in the program has prepared them to enter the world beyond Berkeley with a strong sense of purpose, ready to confront poverty in a time of growing global uncertainty.

Earlier this month, friends and family filled Sutardja Dai Hall’s Banatao Auditorium to celebrate the commencement of the GPP minor’s Class of 2025, the 18th cohort of students to tackle poverty by studying the global systems and power structures that sustain inequality.

Director of the Global Studies Program and Chair of the GPP minor Elora Shehabuddin spoke to the significance of this historical moment, with graduates completing their coursework, she said, amid escalating climate disasters, emerging armed conflicts, and the first livestreamed genocide, carried out by the Israeli state against the Palestinian people.

“In every case, you learned to read and think beyond the headlines of mainstream media, to consider the histories of these conflicts and the power dynamics that shaped them, and to center the history of the human beings affected,” Shehabuddin said. “These graduates inspire all of us as champions for social justice, and they represent the best of UC Berkeley.”

This year’s graduating class includes over 30 students representing more than 20 majors. As part of the minor, students completed a personalized practice experience that involved interning or volunteering with a government agency, nonprofit organization, or community group working on poverty issues.

A defining element of the program, the practice experience is designed to help students bridge theoretical frameworks with real-world poverty action, and it held particular meaning for student commencement speaker and legal studies major Johnna Spikes.

With a family history rooted in public service, Spikes spent much of her early life engaged in similar work. She pursued a career in law, working as a paralegal and office manager at the law firm of Haddad and Sherwin. At Berkeley, she deepened her commitment to justice through internships with Legal Services for Prisoners with Children and the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights.

She joined GPP to continue her work in public service, but what she learned reshaped how she approaches that work.

“I entered this minor with an idealistic desire to serve, as I believed that by helping those who are suffering, I’d be fulfilling some noble mission,” Spikes said. “I’ve come to realize that service without connection can become charity. True compassion doesn’t come from a place of distance, it comes from standing shoulder to shoulder, seeing the humanity in each other, and walking forward together.”

She volunteered with Old Skool Cafe, a San Francisco restaurant run by formerly incarcerated, foster care, and at-risk youth. More than just a place to eat, the cafe operates as a violence prevention program, offering job training and meaningful employment.

At Old Skool, she saw firsthand how young people often pushed to the margins weren’t treated as problems to be fixed, but as leaders — shaping the menu, helping run the restaurant, and building the kind of community they wanted to see.

“That’s what love looks like when it is rooted in justice,” Spikes said. “In this work, compassion isn’t a gesture of service, it’s a radical act of kinship grounded in the belief that there is no us and them, only us. The fight against poverty and injustice isn’t just something we choose to do, it’s something we’re here for.”

Similarly, the minor challenged student speaker and civil engineering major Anahita Banerjee to dig deeper in her search for solutions to global inequality. She has extensive experience in global water access, and her fieldwork spans rural India, Peru, and California, where she’s partnered with local communities to develop clean, dependable water infrastructure.

Anahita Banerjee (Photo by Amy Sullivan)

As a GPP minor, she said her daily assignments challenged her to confront global issues by asking tough questions like, “Why is there a housing crisis in the Bay Area? Why does the U.S. have the highest incarceration rate in the world?”

She added that simple answers—blaming things like lack of wealth, infrastructure, or education—wouldn’t cut it. Instead, the program pushed students to keep digging until they uncovered the deeper systems behind these problems: a prison system profiting from forced labor, or policies that force formerly colonized countries to prioritize debt payments over vital infrastructure.

“Yet, I would still call these B+ answers at best, because our homework is incomplete if it remains passive,” Banerjee said. “The most important question that this minor instills in us is, ‘What are we going to do about it?’”

Driven by that same sense of responsibility, she plans to work as a reporter for a nonprofit covering water issues, and then pursue a master’s degree at the University of Oxford in Water Science, Policy, and Management.

Facing her classmates, she expressed confidence that they will all continue to ask these critical questions and strive to “earn that A+.”

“Some of us may continue working with nonprofits, while others will work as doctors, teachers, or social workers,” Banerjee said. “However, all of us will go on to be outstanding members of society and not allow ourselves to turn away from the injustices around us.”

The ceremony concluded with a speech from GPP alumnus Jamal Khan. He graduated as part of the second cohort of GPP students in 2009, and went on to attend Harvard Law School. Since then, he has held positions in both the federal government and politics, including the Obama White House and Kamala Harris’s Senate campaign. He currently serves as an attorney for The Homeless Action Center.

Drawing from his experiences in legal advocacy and direct support for unhoused individuals, incarcerated people, and those facing mental health challenges, he emphasized that dehumanization—whether in the language of war or in the bureaucracies of everyday life—is often the precursor to violence and neglect.

Khan left graduates with a powerful closing message:

“No matter the vantage point from your organization or your role, if you find yourself feeling uncertain or confused, the most important thing you can do with regard to those you’re trying to help, is to remember humanity,” Khan said. “Conågratulations, I wish you all the best. Go out there and do big things, go-getters.”

Author: Tung Nguyen

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GPP’s Class of 2025 Driven by Compassion, Connection, and Humanity

Host and Fellow Responsibilities

Host Organizations

Berkeley Program Director

Student Fellows

Host and Fellow Responsibilities

Host Organizations

Berkeley Program Director​

Student Fellows

Berkeley Program Director