Engineering school receives $100,000 from Gates Foundation

UCLA Engineering has been awarded a $100,000 Grand Challenges Grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation for innovative global health research based on an idea proposed by Peter Lillehoj, a Ph.D. student in mechanical engineering. Lillehoj and his advisor, Professor Chih Ming Ho, will be developing a disposable malaria biosensor based on the SIM card platform. A SIM (Subscriber Identity Module) card is a portable memory chip used in many of today’s cell phones.

 

Malaria is one of the most deadly infectious diseases in the world, causing one to three million deaths annually, mostly in children under the age of five. The goal of the Gates Foundation’s Grand Challenges Explorations initiative is to help scientists around the world explore bold and unproven ways to improve health in developing countries.

 

Learn more at the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science newsroom.