Karen Cheng, a third-year medical student at Boston University, has received a $3,500 grant from the Clinton Global Initiative University, an initiative of the Clinton Foundation, for her work in preventing the spread of disease-causing viruses such as Zika.
Cheng said she received the grant for developing a device that automatically dispenses larvicide into rooftop water tanks, commonly used in developing countries like Brazil, where disease-carrying mosquito species like Aedes aegypti and Aedes albopictus lay eggs.
“What happens right now is that the Brazilian government is actually having health administrators or health officials go household to household and they dispense the larvicide by hand,” Cheng said. “You can imagine that this type of dispensing mechanism is not efficient, nor is it cost-effective.”
Cheng said the project originated at the Zika Innovation Hack-a-thon at Massachusetts General Hospital in 2016, where her team won “Most Implementable Solution” for their automatic larvicide dispenser.
Ronald Corley, the director of the BU National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratories, said Zika often presents mild symptoms, if any, but causes problematic side effects like neurologic defects in infants with affected mothers and the development of the autoimmune disease Guillain-Barré syndrome in adults.
“For the longest period of time, until the most recent outbreaks, Zika wasn’t considered a serious illness, but it certainly is now because of the side effects,” Corley said. “Many people are lucky and don’t have symptoms, but for other people it can be quite devastating.”
Corley said that while using pesticides to eliminate infected mosquitoes known as “vectors” can be very helpful in the short term, many experts are focusing on different methods of stopping the spread of viruses in the long term, as mosquitoes can develop a resistance to pesticides.
“What people are looking at are what we call vector interruption strategies,” Corley said, “which are strategies to try to modify the mosquito in such a way as to prevent it from effectively transmitting the virus to a new person who has been bit by the mosquito.”
The money for Cheng’s grant came from the CGI U Innovation Fund, which was launched in 2016 to “support and feature the most effective, high-impact student innovators and entrepreneurs from around the world,” CGI U Senior Manager of Partnerships Alyssa Trometter wrote in an email.
Trometter wrote that Cheng’s grant represented part of $50,000 CGI U has awarded to student leaders focusing on issues in education, environment, peace and human rights, poverty and public health.
“Through the Innovation Fund, CGI U is supporting students with critical seed funding to launch their projects that are, like Karen Cheng’s, addressing what they see as the most pressing challenges facing the world today,” Trometter wrote.
Cheng received the Innovation Fund grant in 2016 and attended the CGI U meeting at Northeastern University in late 2017.
Cheng said she used the grant money to purchase prototype components and develop a testing setup for the dispenser, which is currently still in its beta-testing phase.
Cheng said she hopes her device will both save lives and alleviate the stress on public health workers.
“We hope that it will save lives … That is the primary goal of this device,” Cheng said. “The second one is this will, in the long term, hopefully create a more efficient and more cost-effective method for governments like [that of] Brazil to promote their public health efforts,” Cheng said.
Several students said Cheng’s achievement demonstrated not only her hard work, but also her compassion and global awareness.
Decontee Gardea, a freshman in the College of Arts and Sciences, said she thinks Cheng’s work is admirable, but that it says more about Cheng herself than about BU.
“If you work hard, you deserved it,” Gardea said, “I don’t think it’s about the institution, but more about the student with the drive for it.”
Ellie Roy, a CAS freshman, said she thinks Cheng’s work in preventing the spread of diseases like Zika shows a global awareness that goes beyond consuming simply what is represented in the news media.
“I’ve heard a little bit about [Zika], when it was more in the media, last year,” Roy said, “… but I know it’s still an issue now and the media isn’t covering it as much.”
Warren Partridge, a sophomore in CAS, said he likes the fact that a student from BU had the drive to use her knowledge and skill for the greater good.
“That’s a really awesome reflection of the BU community,” Partridge said. “I think it is cool that a student from BU carries this motivation to help and use their passion for good.”
Shaun Robinson contributed to the reporting in this article.
Jennifer Small is a junior in the Boston University College of Communication, majoring in journalism and minoring in media science. She is one of the Co-Campus News Editors for Spring 2023.
