I started a non-profit in 2007 when I was 20 years old that has grown to provide 5 communities in rural Ecuador with clean drinking water. I have also engaged in lab research in the USA to find better ways to treat drinking water, identifying new treatment technologies designed to be practical and affordable for low income settings around the world.
Muisne, Ecuador. This rural area with 30,000 inhabitants has been a second home for me since I first went there in 2006. Muisne is a town of intense natural beauty: seven kilometers of untouched beach, palms and mangroves lining the shoreline, rich fishing zones and farmland. It is also home for a community of people with passion and determination to live the best lives possible, but who have experienced a great deal of hardship and suffering. Muisne's population dies 10 years younger than the average for Ecuador as a whole. They lack medical care, clean drinking water, and sanitation. Since getting to know Muisne and its people, I have worked there alongside local people to find ways to improve their health and their lives.
I don't want to see young people dying of acute diarrheal illnesses in Muisne because of a lack of clean water. I want Ecuador's children to grow up strong and healthy, without chronic parasitic infections that drain their bodies of nutrients and hinder their physical and intellectual development. I want to see Ecuador as a whole become self-sustaining in manufacturing clean water products and providing its people with clean water.
Hometown: Baltimore, MD
Education: BA, Yale Univerity, 2008, magna cum laude; MD candidate Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine (expected graduation 2013)
Work Experience: Founded Water Ecuador in 2007, a non-profit corporation registered as a 501(c)3 in the USA and as a non-profit foundation in Ecuador. Water Ecuador is devoted to providing people in Ecuador with clean drinking water. We have constructed five drinking water treatment systems in two provinces of Ecuador (Esmeraldas and Manabi Provinces). These water systems use processes of sediment filtration, activated carbon filtration, and UV sterilization to produce completely clean drinking water. Each system can produce enough water for up to 500 people per day. The water costs only about one cent ($0.01) per liter and the water sales provide the revenue we need to pay a salary to each water system manager and for the cost of replacement supplies. Through these sales, the water systems are fully self-sustaining entities that provide not only clean water but local employment in the towns they are located. We have found that people who drink water from Water Ecuador's water systems get diarrhea only 48% as often as people who use other water sources. This means many illnesses prevented and probably lives saved.
Research Experience: Studied Solar Water Disinfection (SODIS) and modifications to improve the SODIS protocol for use in low income settings in a laboratory in the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Research study was awarded the W. Barry Wood Prize in research at Johns Hopkins.
