39 words
Melissa R. Densmore is a PhD candidate at the University of California Berkeley School of Information. She is a co-founder of the De Novo Group, which works to bridge the gap between university research and impact in developing regions.
100 words
Melissa R. Densmore is a PhD candidate in the School of Information at UC Berkeley, and holds a BA in Computer Science from Cornell University, and an MSc in Data Communications, Networks and Distributed Systems
from University College London. Recipient of the 2008 Yamashita Foundations for Change Prize, she has been doing ethnographic fieldwork, systems design, and deployments with the Technology and Infrastructure for Emerging Regions (TIER) research group in Ghana, India, Mexico, Rwanda, and Uganda since 2004. She is currently investigating how the introduction of mobile phone-based forms changes formal and informal social processes around health information management in Uganda.
200 words
Melissa Ho is a PhD candidate in the University of California, Berkeley School of Information, and holds a BA in Computer Science from Cornell University, and an MSc in Data Communications, Networks and Distributed Systems from University College London. Recipient of the 2008 Yamashita Foundations for Change Prize, she now leverages her Silicon Valley experience in design and development of user interfaces and web-based applications in developing regions. Since 2004, she has been actively conducting research (ethnographic fieldwork and systems design and deployment) with the Technology and Infrastructure for Emerging Regions research group (tier.cs.berkeley.edu), an inter-disciplinary project funded in part by the National Science Foundation. As part of this group, she has participated in numerous deployments, including the setup of long distance wireless communications networks for hospitals and universities in Africa and India. Her project in Ghana is an open source tele-medicine application enabling doctor-to-doctor consultation between rural doctors and urban specialists, as well as between doctors in Ghana and their colleagues who have moved abroad (amitatelemedicine.org). In Uganda, she is working on the use of mobile devices for information management in the Uganda OBA project (www.oba-uganda.net). Her research focuses on healthcare and telecommunications infrastructure in Africa, and is funded by the Blum Center for Developing Economies.
Personal Biographies
Melissa Ho is a PhD candidate in the University of California, Berkeley School of Information, and holds a BA in Computer Science from Cornell University, and an MSc in Data Communications, Networks and Distributed Systems from University College London. She is a recent recipient of the 2008 Yamashita Foundations for Change Prize for her work deploying information technologies in Mexico, Ghana, and most recently in Goma, Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda. Her work is rooted in a deep desire reconcile a gifting and geekiness in computer science with a deeply broken heart for the situation of God’s people in Africa. To that end her research is about how to make computer science work in Africa, how to best apply information and communications technology to alleviate poverty, and improve healthcare in developing regions.
