Abstract: Somebody once said, “What a damn fool can do for a dollar, an engineer can do for a nickel.” Thinking about cost as an engineering constraint brings new life to ideas. This is what makes the difference between an idea influencing a hundred people or a billion. With our planet literally teeming with problems (ecological, health and social), it’s time to take cost constraints into serious consideration. As physicists, we like to make stuff. We use these skills (and field work) to design solutions for extremely resource constrained settings, specially in the field of global health. I will discuss our current work from field diagnostics to high-throughput vector ecology and hands on science education and talk about it’s implication in a global context. I will also discuss outcomes, and lessons from a global experiment - Foldscope (a 50 cent origami microscope); where we shipped 50,000 origami microscopes around the world (130+) countries enabling curious users to discover and explore the microscopic world surrounding them. 

About the Speaker: Manu Prakash is an assistant professor in bioengineering. He leads a curiosity driven research group, focused on technological interventions in extreme resource-poor settings, tackling global public health problems. A physicist and a prolific inventor, his inventions include a 50 cent “print-and-fold” paper microscope, a $5 chemistry lab, a computer that works by moving water droplets in a magnetic fields, and Oscan, a 3-D printed smartphone add-on that helps diagnose oral carcinomas responsible for 40% of cancer-related deaths in India. Professor Prakash has been distinguished as a Frederick E. Terman Fellow (2011-2013), a Pew Scholar (2013-2017), a top innovator under 35 by MIT Technology Review (2014) and in the Brilliant 10 by Popular Science (2014). Born in Meerut, India, Prakash earned a BTech in computer science and engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur before moving to the United States. He did his master’s and PhD at MIT before founding the Prakash Lab at Stanford.

Abstract: The interactions between biological and cultural processes are critical determinants of human health. Successful public health programs must therefore be based on a synthesis of biological and anthropological research. By disentangling the impacts of behavior and biology on human health, we can update health care objectives and practices. Human movements and shifts in settlements across short and long time scales can result in misallocated health care resources and inefficient response to crises. I develop methods to quantify changing human population sizes and distributions to improve resource allocation in both routine health care settings and crisis response. This ranges from assessing health care system capacity for stable populations to outbreak control through vaccination and rapid response following population-scale disruptions due to natural disasters or political instability. This approach is also valuable in informing predictive mathematical models of human interactions and demographics to provide insight into a broader spectrum of human health issues. Here, I demonstrate these concepts specifically for the transmission and prevention of infectious diseases and access to health care in low-income settings ranging from rural Africa to urban America. 

About the Speaker: Nita Bharti is a Branco Weiss Society in Science fellow with an interdisciplinary background in Biology (PhD) and Anthropology (MA). She is a visiting scholar at Stanford’s Woods Institute of the Environment with a research associate appointment in the Biology Department and Center for Infectious Disease Dynamics at Penn State University. Her research integrates methods across social and natural sciences to identify and solve problems in human health, often in low-income settings. In addition to academic researchers across a wide variety of disciplines, her collaborators frequently include outreach and non-profit organizations as well as local authorities on public health and safety.

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Joon Nak Choi is the 2015-2016 Koret Fellow in the Korea Program at Stanford's Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC). A Stanford graduate and sociologist by training, Choi is an assistant professor at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. His research and teaching areas include economic development, social networks, organizational theory, and global and transnational sociology, within the Korean context. He recently coauthored Global Talent: Skilled Labor as Social Capital in Korea which he developed the manuscript from 2010-11 while he was a William Perry postdoctoral fellow at APARC.

This event is made possible through the generous support of the Koret Foundation.

In 2006, the Chinese Government introduced a massive block grant program for rural compulsory education, similar to that of Title I grant in the United States. Central government provided block grants with add-on requirement to provincial governments based on total number of pupils, average per pupil spending in that province, and a cost-sharing plan that favors the economically backward provinces. Provincial governments then distributed the grants along with its own share to county government using a similar formula to cover school operating expenditures, free tuitions, and conditional cash transfers for boarding students.

While there have been plenty research on whether the program has buttressed the financing of rural education or crowded out local financing, little is known about its effects on the enrollment and education attainment of rural children after a decade  (Shi, 2012; Chyi & Zhou, 2014; Lü, 2014). This paper fills this glaring gap by using matched household survey data and county school expenditure data between 2000-2011 that were made available to researchers for the first time.

Our identification strategies are composed of three parts. First, we take advantage of the exogenous variation in the rates of cost-sharing in the two-step allocation process of the block grants to estimate “Intention to Treatment” effects of the whole program. Secondly, we compare counties receiving different proportion of subsidies from central government in a difference-in-difference framework. Thirdly, we use the IV-DID strategy that instruments the county-level education spending with the exogenous variation in the planned allocation of the grants.

Dr. Wei HA is currently Research Professor in Education Policy and Leadership at the Graduate School of Education and a faculty associate at the Institute of Education Economics at Peking University. Prior to joining the Peking University, he worked as policy specialists at UNICEF and UNDP for seven years in the United States and Africa. During his doctoral study at the Harvard University, he also served as a consultant at the World Bank. He has conducted research in a wide-range of fields including education economics, public health, migration, and development economics. His current research focuses on the impact evaluation of key national education policies in China such as the Rural Compulsory Education Finance Reform, and China’s efforts to build “World Class Universities” through the 211 and 985 Projects. He also examines the interaction between education and major social transformations in China such as the massive labor retrenchments at State-Owned Enterprises in the late 1990s and rising housing prices in urban China. Dr. Ha received a dual BA in Economics and Political Science and MA in Education Economics from Peking University and his PhD in Public Policy from Harvard University.

This event is cosponsored by the Rural Education Action Program (REAP).