Short, dated notes from our projects — what the team saw, screened, and learned, tagged by program across our work in global health.
Read the note A field note from the SCOPE Symposium at Stanford — schistosomiasis control through a One Health lens. Snail-scooping on the Oyan River, aquaculture in Senegal, low-cost diagnostics, and a puzzle built to teach the parasite to schoolchildren.
Read the note An Idea Garden note on the “valley of death” in healthcare innovation — and Project Prana’s plan for a globally sourced problem bank that pairs real clinical needs with the innovators who can solve them.
Read the note An Idea Garden note on a portable, 3D-printed slit lamp paired with a smartphone — the published evidence that it works, and a 2026 plan to validate it in a real Houston clinic workflow.
Read the note Nigeria Field Notes, Part II. From the Ogun State Ministry of Health to the western edge of the reservoir at Imala Odo — community permissions, smoked-fish shops, and a first survey of the freshwater snails that carry the disease.
Read the note Nigeria Field Notes, Part I. Notes from the first days in Abeokuta: a room full of motivated researchers, a market-floor experiment to pick the right phone for the Foldscope, and the urgency of doing this work now.
Read the note A lab note on the search for the simplest possible schisto filter — reusable nylon mesh, acrylic coverslips, and a string of dinner-napkin ideas, weighed against the constraints of materials, durability, and optics.
Read the note Through a friend of a friend, a vial of Schistosoma haematobium eggs travels from a UCSF freezer, to a Bay Area lab, and all the way back to Houston. The story of how an unexpected connection put the exact specimen our diagnostics need into our hands.
