Bryan Lohmar
Economist, Economic Research Service at the US Department of Agriculture

Len Ortolano
Professor, Stanford Civil Engineering
Author, Environmental Regulation and Impact Assessment

Leonard Ortolano is the UPS Foundation Professor of Civil Engineering at Stanford University. His background is in environmental and water resources planning and management. Ortolano has published extensively on various aspects of environmental regulation in China. He is author of Environmental Regulation and Impact Assessment (John Wiley & Sons, N.Y., 1997), a widely used textbook. Ortolano's ongoing research concerns environmental policy implementation, and much of it centers on the implementation of regulations for air and water pollution control in developing countries. 

Chi-yuen Wang
Professor, UC Berkeley Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences

Chi-yuen Wang is a Professor of the Graduate School in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley.   He received his Ph.D. in Geological Sciences from Harvard in 1964 and became a faculty member at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1967. During the last twenty years he has been doing research and teaching on aspects of hydrogeology, including fluid migration in sedimentary basins and the hydrologic processes during earthquakes. More recently he has became involved in research on China's water resources and traveled extensively in China's Northwest to study water resources in the region.

Thomas Weis
Technical Director, LifeStraw©

Craig Criddle
Professor, Environmental Engineering and Sciences

Craig Criddle is interested in the environmental engineering, science, and science literacy needed for clean water, clean energy, and healthy ecosystems. His research focus is environmental biotechnology.  He is best known for large interdisciplinary field projects, studies of microbial ecology in bioreactors, and work on microbial transformations of persistent contaminants.

Sangya-Sangam Tiwari
PhD Candidate, UC-Davis Civil and Environmental Engineering

Sangam Tiwari is a PhD candidate at the University of California, Davis in the Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering. She holds a master's degree in environmental engineering from the University of California, Davis. Sangam's research interests focus on the development and testing of
inexpensive and sustainable household level water treat systems in developing countries. Her current research focuses on lab and field testing of the intermittently used slow sand filter to improve water quality and health in rural Kenya. In addition to the work in Kenya, Sangam has assisted with water quality assessments in India and Ecuador.

Isha Ray
Assistant Professor, UC Berkeley Energy and Resources Group

Isha Ray is Assistant Professor at the Energy and Resources Group, UC Berkeley. She has a BA in Philosophy, Politics and Economics from Oxford University and a PhD in Applied Economics from Stanford University. Before joining the ERG faculty, she was an analyst on farm economics and institutions at the Turkey office of the International Water Management Institute, and then a Ciriacy-Wantrup Postdoctoral Fellow at UCB's Geography Department. Professor Ray's research interests are water and development; technology and development; common property resources; and social science research methods. Her international research projects focus on access to water and sanitation for the rural and urban poor, and on the role of technology in improving livelihoods. Her research in California is focused on methods to elicit public perceptions of energy and climate change policies. She teaches courses on research methods in the social sciences, water and development, and technology and development. In addition to research and teaching, she has extensive past and ongoing experience in the non-profit sector on international development- and freshwater-related issues.

James Wescoat
Professor, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

James L. Wescoat Jr. is professor and head of the Department of Landscape Architecture at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.  In fall 2008 he will become a professor in the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at MIT.   His research focuses on water in environmental design in South Asia and the US.   In South Asia, he co-directed the Smithsonian Institution's Mughal Garden Project in Lahore, Pakistan with colleagues in the Pakistan Department of Archaeology and the University of Engineering and Technology-Lahore; and a USEPA-sponsored project on the potential effects of climate change in the Indus River Basin with the Pakistan Water and Power Development Authority.  Over the past decade he has worked on research and conservation projects involving historical water systems in Agra, Gujarat, and Rajasthan, India.  In the U.S. he has conducted water resource policy studies in the Colorado River and Great Lakes basins; and comparative studies of international water resources management.  Recent book publications include Water for Life: Water Management and Environmental Policy (Cambridge, 2003) with geographer Gilbert F. White; and an edited volume on Political Economies of Landscape Change: Places of Integrative Power (Springer, 2007). 
 

Jeffrey Albert
Fellow, Watson Institute of International Studies at Brown University
Co-founder, Aquaya Institute

Jeff Albert is a water resource specialist and a co-founder of the Aquaya Institute, a San Francisco-based nonprofit research and consulting organization dedicated to reducing the global burden of waterborne disease. Before joining Aquaya, Jeff was an American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) fellow at the US Environmental Protection Agency's Global Change Research Program. From 2002 to 2004, he was a lecturer in Geological Sciences and Environmental Studies at Brown University, and he has also taught at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies and Columbia University's Center for Environmental Research and Conservation (CERC). Jeff received his Ph.D. from Yale in 2002, and from 1999-2001 he was employed in the Water Quality Division of the Israel Water Commission, an agency within the Israeli Ministry of National Infrastructure. While a AAAS Fellow, Jeff was a 2005 recipient of the Environmental Protection Agency's Bronze Medal for his work on drinking water in response to the Indian Ocean tsunami. His current work at Aquaya is focused on the dissemination of innovations in water supply and water treatment to vulnerable populations in low-income countries, with field projects in Kenya, India and Indonesia. Aquaya's work is supported by the Lemelson, Mulago, Open Square (formerly Agora), Bill & Melinda Gates, and Procter & Gamble Foundations, as well as by a consulting practice with such clients as the World Health Organization and CARE. Aquaya works closely with an array of research and implementing partners, including the University of California, Berkeley, the University of Bristol, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Dian Desa Foundation in Indonesia, among many others.

Dr. Mamadou Diallo
Director of Molecular Environmental Technology
Materials and Process Simulation Center
California Institute of Technology

Dr. Diallo's research interests and program focus on the characterization and multiscale modeling of nanoparticles and colloids in natural and engineered environmental systems.  Since 2000, Dr. Diallo has been leading the development and implementation of a collaborative research program in Nanoscale Environmental Science and Technology (NEST) between (i) the Materials and Process Simulation Center of the Beckman Institute of the California Institute of Technology and (ii) the Department of Civil Engineering at Howard University.  This program is currently funded through grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Department of Energy (DOE) and the National Water Research Institute. 

Dr. Olgica Bakajin
Ph.D. Physics, Princeton University, 2000
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

Dr. Bakajin's research interests include nanoscience and nanotechnology, especially as applied to molecular transport through structures commensurate with molecular size; molecular separation methods; microfluidics; protein folding kinetics; and applications of micro and nanotechnology to biosecurity and medicine.

Dr. Meng Lean
Principal Scientist and Area Manager,
Hardware Systems Lab/Microfluidics

Dr. Lean (PhD, EE) has a background in development of multi-physics algorithms and models from first principles and using them to guide design and fabrication of hardware prototypes for industrial applications. His recent work is in development of distributed MEMS actuators for electro-kinetic transport, separation, and pumping for lab-on-chip and portable devices in proteomics and bio defense. Some examples include traveling wave high-speed high resolution protein separation, bio concentration and enrichment cells, portable non-contacting surface spore collectors, biomimetic planar microlens array for detection, and micro-separation of neutrally buoyant particles. Current interests are in development of high throughput membrane-less filtration for neutrally buoyant suspensions in water purification and deionization of brackish water. 

Maggie Montgomery
PhD Candidate, Yale University

Maggie is a third year doctoral student in the Environmental Engineering Program at Yale University studying water, sanitation, and public health in developing countries. Her specific research focus is investigating the effectiveness of water, sanitation, and hygiene interventions in reducing trachoma in rural Tanzania. Trachoma is a blinding disease that affects 100 million people and is most prevalent among children and women in poor communities in rural Africa and Southeast Asia. The disease is nearly 100% preventable. Maggie recently returned from 9 months of fieldwork in Kongwa, Tanzania where she led a team collecting data on water, sanitation, vector, and geographically linked factors associated with transmission. Maggie’s research is in collaboration with various groups, including the World Health Organization, involved in the global campaign to eliminate blinding trachoma by 2020.

Karen Levy
Post-doctoral Scholar, Anthropological Sciences, Stanford University

Karen Levy is the Lang Postdoctoral Scholar in the Department of Anthropological Sciences at Stanford University.  She studies how environmental change affects the distribution and spread of infectious diseases, with a particular focus on diarrheal disease and drinking water quality.  Much of her work is carried out in northern coastal Ecuador, where she carries out research on the community health effects of road-building.  She has worked on issues related to the impacts of environmental change on human communities in California, Mexico, Micronesia, The Philippines, Mongolia, and Guatemala.  She teaches two courses at Stanford: Issues in Water, Health, and Development (Winter), and Ethical Debates in Environment & Health Policy (Spring).  She earned her Ph.D. in Environmental Science, Policy, and Management at U.C. Berkeley in 2007, and also has an M.P.H. in Epidemiology from U.C. Berkeley's School of Public Health.

Gary Schoolnik
Professor of Medicine (Infectious Diseases) and of Microbiology and Immunology
Senior Fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment

Professor Schoolnik, a member of the Stanford University faculty for 25 years, is Board Certified in Internal Medicine and Infectious Diseases and currently practices each of these subspecialties. He received his post-M.D. clinical residency training at the Massachusetts General Hospital where he was both Medical Chief Resident and Instructor in Medicine at Harvard Medical School. Prior to assuming his Stanford faculty position in 1981, he served for three years at the Rockefeller University in Manhattan as both Attending Physician and senior research fellow. Besides his clinical and teaching responsibilities at Stanford Medical School, Professor Schoolnik directs a large research laboratory focused on the discovery of new drugs, vaccines and diagnostic agents for the treatment and prevention of infectious diseases. He currently directs 10 post-doctoral Ph.D. fellows and receives research support (>one million USD per year) from the National Institutes of Health, the Ellison Foundation and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. He directs the genomics core facility for the Gates Foundation. He has published over 200 original research articles and book chapters and was one of two founding editors of the leading microbiology journal, Molecular Microbiology. He is an inventor of six issued patents (US Patent Office). He serves on numerous national and international advisory bodies including the National Advisory Council of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases; and the international scientific advisory board of Fudan University in Shanghai. In the private sector he is a co-founder and chair of the scientific advisory board of Osel, Inc, chair of the scientific advisory board of Gangagen, and is a member of the scientific advisory boards of Apollo Science, Inc, SynVax, Inc. and AstraZeneca, Bangalore R&D.

David Klaus
Fellow, Stanford Institute of Design

David Klaus is a Design Fellow at the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford (dschool.stanford.edu).  He co-teaches Entrepreneurial Design for Extreme Affordability (extreme.stanford.edu), a multidisciplinary, graduate-level project course where students design and implement solutions to problems facing the world's poor.  Water-related projects have been part of the course for the last four years, including water harvesting and storage, water pumps, and other irrigation products.  David has also worked in Africa and Asia on water and irrigation projects.  He has worked on the design of two different human-powered irrigation pumps and spent a summer in Asia transitioning the prototypes into full-scale production.   The pumps are now the most popular line of treadle pumps in Myanmar/Burma, and are beginning to be exported to other countries around the world.

Kurt Kuhlmann
Co-founder, Meridian Design
Chief Technology Officer, Design for the other 90%

Mr. Kuhlmann has over 20 years’ experience working with circuit design and the marriage of analog circuitry with embedded control. Kurt’s work history includes tours of duty with Raytheon, MITRE, and Microchip. As CTO of LRI, Kurt holds multiple patents on LED-based lighting systems, and a patent on shape memory muscle actuator control.

He is also the co-founder of Meridian Design.  The AquaStar™ UV Portable Water Purifier is the first directly-marketed product offered by Meridian Design. A low-cost solar-powered version of the AquaStar™ UV Portable Water Purifier is also being developed, in cooperation with IDE, for use in the third world where water-borne illness ends the lives of over two million people each year.

Netika Raval
Fellow, Digital Vision Program
Founder, KnowledgeGames

Netika Raval is a Fellow at the Digital Vision Program, Stanford University and Founder of KnowledgeGames, an innovative experiential game-based educational module on water issues. The methodology focuses strongly on linking virtual simulation to field testing and problem solving. She decided to focus on simulation games because technology or money are not enough to affect change in people – one has to affect change in behaviour of people by including them as co-designers of appropriate technology in a fun and interactive way for easy and wide spread adoption. She has been the founding board member of Network of Indian Professionals (NetIP - Bay area chapter), board member and patron of India Community Center (ICC) and President of Asha for Education. In 2006, she traveled through 4 states and 10 cities in India for 6 months living on less than $2/day to connect with community issues, experience real challenges faced by the common person and understand practical local community based solutions.