Prof. Kammen and Prof. Hernandez win the cross-campus 2021 CITRUS Seed Award 2021
The Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society and the Banatao Institute (CITRIS) announce the recipients of the 2021 CITRIS Seed Awards. Competitive teams from the University of California campuses at Berkeley, Davis, Davis Health, Merced and Santa Cruz submitted 47 proposals for innovative, early-stage projects that emphasize collaboration across two or more institutions. This year, thanks in part to external philanthropic support, 13 teams were selected to each receive a one-time award of up to $60,000 for interdisciplinary work. The selected proposals address grand challenges, including climate resilience, digital health innovation, next-generation technology policy, and automation and the workforce.
Principal Investigators, Professor Daniel Kammen (Lead PI, UC Berkeley) and Associate Professor Rebecca R. Hernandez (UC Davis) won the grant for the project: The power of health in Africa: A novel data collection approach for analyzing how distributed energy systems support vaccine cold chain resilience, which will be used to support research by Ph.D. student Samual Miles. Health care provisioning and basic services in the Global South rely heavily on affordable and reliable electricity, and a lack of data on power quality and reliability hinders efforts to address the temperature-dependent supply chain, or cold chain, of COVID-19 vaccines in Africa. By using outlet-level power sensors and a robust collection methodology, this project will systematically gather high-quality information on health centers’ uptime. Efforts will focus on locations in Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo and will characterize the energy needs at various scales of health services. By collecting and monitoring spatiotemporal data continuously, this project can help electrification planners better rationalize infrastructure deployments and assist health sector professionals in identifying cold chain vulnerabilities.
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