BEST Labber Julia Kramer (PhD student), Abhimanyu Ray (MEng student), and Karan Patel (MEng student), along with Betsy McCormick (MBA student, Haas School of Business) won First Place in the Global Health category in the Big Ideas contest for their proposal, Visualize: Saving Lives with Training for Cervical Cancer Screening. The proposal was partially developed through a capstone project in DevEng 200: Design, Evaluate and Scale Development Technologies, as part of the new designated emphasis in Development Engineering, and was part of a select group of projects awarded from over 200 submissions.
Julia is also part of a Berkeley crowdfunding campaign that ends October 15, so please donate and support an end to cervical cancer in Ghana and around the world.
Some quotes from the article from the Blum Center:
Prompted by funding and recognition from the Big Ideas@Berkeley contest, a group of Cal students headed by Mechanical Engineering graduate student Julia Kramer is seeking to establish a sustainable training program called “Visualize” for midwives in Ghana. In a country where only five percent of women have been screened for cervical cancer, Visualize aims to create a system in which midwives receive the essential skills and tools to perform a visual inspection of the cervix with acetic acid (vinegar). The inspection method, known as VIA, is a low-cost and effective way to screen for cervical cancer, but it is not widely used in Ghana and other countries due to a lack of training and awareness.
At Berkeley, Kramer teamed up with fellow Mechanical Engineering and Haas School of Business students Abhimanyu Ray, Karan Patel, and Betsy McCormick, to develop the midwife VIA training concept. Visualize’s faculty advisors include public health professional Kyle Fliflet and Mechanical Engineering Professor Alice Agogino, who is chair of the Development Engineering graduate group.
The project will be running a fundraising campaign from September 14 until October 14, with a “soft launch” on August 31. For more information, go here: crowdfund.berkeley.edu/