News
October 7, 2020 | Pratt School of Engineering
Safe Hygiene for Everyone, Period
Women and girls who menstruate are disproportionately affected when access to safely managed sanitation is lacking. Duke ECE engineer Sonia Grego and the team at the Center for WaSH-AID want to change that.
September 18, 2020 | Pratt School of Engineering
Reclaiming Water from Waste
Washing our hands with soap and running water for at least twenty seconds helps prevent the spread of pathogens. For areas of the world where water is scarce, ECE faculty member Brian Stoner and his colleagues at WaSH-AID are reclaiming usable water from an unlikely source.
May 18, 2020 | BBC CrowdScience
Does My Toilet Make Sense?
Despite being a universal need, talking about our toilet use and the infrastructure that aids us remains somewhat taboo. Whilst sectors like telecommunications and computing have undergone rapid transformations over the past century, the flush toilet and wastewater system have mostly remained [...]
May 6, 2020
Talking Chemistry in the time of COVID-19
Although a visit to the Duke University Center for WaSH-AID was not in the cards, researcher Lena Trotochaud, Ph.D., recently found a way to share her expertise with a group of more than 40 curious high school students from Westhill High School in Syracuse, New York. Through Skype-a-Scientist, a [...]
April 13, 2020
India Engineering Field Testing team to Share COVID-19 Recommendations
In response to the Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic, the Duke Center for WaSH-AID, through our India Engineering Field Testing project (India EFT), is working to share evidence-based recommendations with partners and community members to prevent the spread of COVID-19. We are sourcing [...]
April 3, 2020 | Duke University Pratt School of Engineering
Duke Engineer Wins Carnegie African Diaspora Fellowship
Edgard Ngaboyamahina, a research scientist in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering’s Nanomaterials and Thin Films Lab and a member of the Duke Center for Water, Sanitation, Hygiene and Infectious Disease (WaSH-AID) team working to “Reinvent the Toilet,” has been awarded the [...]
February 25, 2020 | North Carolina Health News
Can a better toilet save lives? Duke researchers hope so.
University researchers are sharing more than $200 million in grant money from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to develop small-scale sanitation systems. An estimated 4.2 billion people worldwide lack safe human waste disposal systems.
February 17, 2020 | Pratt School of Engineering
Off-Grid Sanitation Systems Show Promise in Global Testing, Despite Toilet Paper Sabotage
In two new papers published in the journal Science of the Total Environment, engineers from Duke University report on results from the first large-scale, real-world field trials of critical components of their off-grid sanitation system.
February 4, 2020 | Bass Connections
Smart Toilet Saves Vital Health Data from Getting Flushed
Some of the most important information about our health comes from an unexpected and decidedly icky source. Our daily excreta (yes, the feces and urine we flush away every day) can actually tell us a lot about our health and help us monitor our bodies for disease. A Bass Connections Team is working [...]
January 29, 2020
Fecal Sludge Drying
Fecal sludge is persnickety, to say the least. Team member Katelyn Sellgren joined a panel of experts for a webinar to explore the difficulties researchers face in the drying of fecal sludge and to discuss potential solutions to these challenges. Fecal sludge is pathogen-rich and drying mitigates [...]
December 9, 2019
Rethinking Sanitation
On World Toilet Day, Center for WaSH-AID co-director and Duke professor Jeffrey T. Glass sat down with Juosie Loo at BFM89.9 - the Business Station - in Malaysia, to discuss headway being made to provide safe and effective sanitation to the 4.2 billion people who still lack this basic necessity.
September 6, 2019 | The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Scientists sent people to the moon. Can they reinvent the toilet?
A globe-trotting team of researchers have been given a $13.5 million budget and 39 months to sort through the prototypes and remaining challenges of the Gates Foundation Reinvent the Toilet Challenge.
August 30, 2019
An Unexpected Homecoming
For Research Scientist Edgard Ngaboyamahina, PhD, MBA, the path to building local capacity in his home country of Rwanda started with, of all things, a two-day trip to Indianapolis. We sat down with Edgard to learn more about his work at the Center for WaSH-AID, his newly formed company Simbuka, and the story of his homecoming after being away for almost 30 years.
August 28, 2019 | American Chemical Society
The Toilet Gets a Makeover
How chemistry is helping to solve the sanitation crisis in low-resource areas.
July 31, 2019 | Georgia Tech University
Reinvented Toilets Could Provide Safe Sanitation for 2.5 Billion People
Nicknamed G2RT - Generation 2 Reinvented Toilet - and supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, a new multi-year initiative will bring the dispersed efforts of the original Reinvent the Toilet Challenge together to focus on demonstrating prototypes of a single user reinvented toilet (SURT) that can be afforded by the world’s poorest.