The results, from the first population-based survey since 2006 to estimate war-related deaths in Iraq and the first covering the conflict’s full timespan, are published Oct. 15 in the open-access journal PLOS Medicine.

The researchers found, with 95 percent certainty, that there were some 461,000 more deaths during the study period than would have occurred naturally, but the actual number could be as low as 48,000 or as high as 751,000. (For comparison, three years after the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, the death toll has been estimated anywhere between 46,000 and 316,000).

Researchers with UW’s Department of Global Health, UW’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, Johns Hopkins University, Simon Fraser University and Mustansiriya University were part of the study team.

The researchers found that for every three people killed by violence during the U.S.-led invasion and occupation of Iraq from 2003 to 2011, two more died as a result of the collapse of the infrastructure that supports health care, clean water, nutrition and transportation.

“Policymakers, governments and the public need better data on the health effects of armed conflict,” said lead author Amy Hagopian, a 91̽��associate professor of global health.�� “Without this information, it’s impossible to assess the true human costs of war.”

Researchers detailed improvements in estimating mortality during the Iraq war�� and emphasize the public health consequences of armed conflict.

More than 60 percent of those deaths were directly attributable to violence while the rest were associated with indirect, but war-related, causes.

To conduct this study, researchers went to 2,000 randomly selected households in Iraq in 100 clusters throughout the country to ensure the sample of households was nationally representative. They asked every household head about births and deaths since 2001, and all household adults about mortality among their siblings. According to survey results, researchers estimated about 405,000 excess Iraqi deaths attributable to the war through mid-2011. Researchers also used secondary data sources to estimate rates of death among 2 million emigrants and conservatively estimate 55,805 total deaths in that group. Only 24 households refused to participate in the study.

Researchers also detail the limitations of their study and the uncertainty intervals, similar to confidence intervals, in their analysis.

The study analyzed death rates before the war and, through surveys and statistical analyses, estimated excess deaths that were above pre-war rates. Deaths attributable directly to violence were primarily from gunshots, car bombs and explosions. Cardiovascular conditions were the principal cause of about half of nonviolent deaths. War-induced excess deaths not caused by violence include those caused by diversion medical care to focus on crisis care, interruption of distribution networks for crucial supplies and the collapse of infrastructure that protects clean water, nutrition, transportation, waste management and energy.

Based on household survey responses, gunshots caused 62 percent of violent deaths, 12 percent came from car bombs, and other explosions accounted for 9 percent. Cardiovascular conditions were the main cause of nonviolent death, accounting for 47 percent of nonviolent deaths over the entire study period. Other common sources of nonviolent deaths included infant or childhood deaths other than injuries (12.4 percent), chronic illnesses (11 percent) and cancer (8 percent).

Deaths increased to twice expected levels at the onset of the war, plateaued briefly at the end of 2003, then rose again to a new peak in 2006. Thereafter, deaths dropped until 2008, when they leveled off and then rose again slightly in 2011.

Previous estimates had covered different periods up to 2006 and arrived at a significant range of findings. Hagopian and colleagues say their new study offers considerable methodological improvements, both with regard to sampling procedures and the amount of data collected from all adults in the households. They also adjusted their results to account for the migration of an estimated 2 million people from Iraq during the war.

“There were two big reasons to do this study: to cover the entire period of the war and to improve on the groundwork laid by earlier studies,” said Gilbert Burnham, professor and co-director of the Center for Refugee and Disaster Response at Johns Hopkins. “By broadening the sources of information we used and by covering the full length of the conflict, this study provides a more complete picture of mortality during the Iraq war.”

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The study is

The study is accompanied by a written by Salman Rawaf of Imperial College London.

(Note: Support for this study came from pooled internal resources by the American and Canadian researchers without external funding. No funding bodies had any role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish or preparation of the manuscript).

The full text of the fifth IPCC report was released today, and 91̽�� atmospheric science professors and were among 209 researchers from 39 countries who were lead authors on the 900-page .

“Warming is unequivocal,” Hartmann said Friday at a news conference in Sweden. He was a coordinating lead author for Chapter 2, Observations of Atmosphere and Surface, which reviews the evidence for global warming in temperature records. Hartmann also helped draft the technical summary and the summary for policymakers, and was in Stockholm last week for the final line-by-line reviews of the 36-page .

“For the most part the conclusions of previous IPCC assessments can be given with even more certainty,” Hartmann commented by e-mail. “The surface of Earth is warming and humans are responsible.”

The new report moves from asking whether warming has occurred, he said, to determining exactly how much warming has taken place since 1750, around the beginning of the industrial age. This assessment also makes more forward-looking statements for policymakers.

“Simpler messages with more clarity can be given about how greenhouse gas release is related to future climate change,” Hartmann wrote.

The report recommends that, to keep temperature change within 3.6 degrees F (2 degrees C) of preindustrial levels, carbon emissions should not exceed 1 trillion metric tons. Without changes that level would be reached by 2040, Hartmann said.

While much of the report fills in the details of previous versions, that’s not a bad thing, Bretherton said.

“I think it is important that the basic conclusions of the assessment, about how much warming (will occur) and patterns of rainfall change in a warmer climate, are essentially identical to the previous IPCC assessments,” Bretherton said. He is a lead author on Chapter 7: Clouds and Aerosols, which for the first time was the subject of a separate chapter instead of being discussed in other sections.

“Clouds and aerosols are the single largest source of uncertainty in simulating the climate change of the next 50 to 100 years,” Bretherton said. Models have a hard time simulating clouds, he said, and it’s not well understood how clouds interact with human-produced aerosols such as pollution haze.

Chapter 7 authors also were asked to take a first IPCC look at geoengineering, a controversial idea to start trying to bury carbon dioxide or reflect sunlight by spraying aerosol particles into the top of the atmosphere. The summary text warns of technological limitations and possible side effects from implementing either of these techniques on a global scale.

This IPCC report was an even bigger undertaking than usual, with almost twice as many scientists contributing as last time.

“Maybe the next IPCC assessment, in 2020 or so, will be a much shorter update requiring a lot less effort from the global climate science community,” Bretherton said. “But I won’t bet on it.”

91̽��faculty members who were not involved in drafting the report first saw the document Friday, when the summary was released to the public. Most agreed that this assessment reaffirms the science while providing some updates on sea-level rise and ocean changes.

“The biggest difference (between this report and the last one) is our confidence in the results,” said , an oceanography professor and director of the UW’s interdisciplinary . “It contains new information about how ice sheets at the poles are contributing to sea-level rise, changes in the chemistry of the ocean through ocean acidification. Also new are discussions of the long-term changes – of a thousand years or more – that we are already committed to” from long-lived carbon emitted since the beginning of the industrial age.

The full text of Working Group I, on the physical basis for climate change, was released Sept. 30. The reports of the other two IPCC working groups, on the effects of climate change and possible mitigation responses, will follow in 2014.

“The IPCC results emphasize the need to get serious about avoiding dangerous interference with the climate system and on preparing – globally, nationally and locally – for the changes already set in motion,” commented , director of the UW’s and co-author of an upcoming report on climate change impacts on the Pacific Northwest.

A full list of UW-affiliated authors on the report is available .

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For more information, contact Bretherton at 206-685-7414 or breth@atmos.washington.edu, Hartmann at��206-543-7460 or dhartm@uw.edu and Snover at 206-221-0222 or aksnover@uw.edu. Hartmann will be in Europe until Oct. 7.

“” is the title of the History Lecture Series featuring four 91̽��faculty, each discussing slavery from a different angle. The lectures will be from 7 to 9 p.m. on Oct. 23 and 30 and Nov. 6 and 13. The first three will be in 130 Kane Hall, the fourth next door in 120 Kane.

Lynn Thomas, professor and chair of the department, said the series notes the 150^th anniversary of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation.

“The core message of the series is that slavery and freedom have been foundational to the making of the United States,” Thomas said. “Not just in the years surrounding the Civil War but over our entire history. A set of four amazing 91̽��faculty will tell this story.”

Oct. 23: , “Ancient Roman Slavery and American Slavery.” Slaveholders from colonial times through the 19^th century in the United States often aspired to emulate Ancient Rome as a civilization. But how did the Romans themselves conceive and institutionalize slavery? And how did their understanding of freedom hinge on the development of a slave system?

Oct. 30: , “Slavery, Race and the Origins of American Freedom.” Slavery was key to European colonization of America, but how could it flourish in the revolutionary world of the late 18th century? Haiti and the United States provide contrasting examples.

Nov. 6: , “Slavery: Antebellum America’s National Institution.” Slavery was not just a southern institution but a national one, and wealth produced by the enslaved helped to deepen the U.S. commitment to slavery in the 19^th century.

Nov. 13: , “Race, Empire, and Post-Emancipation Struggles for Freedom.” Race continued to define access to citizenship even after the U.S. abolished slavery. What have been the limitations and contradictions of emancipation in the decades following the Thirteenth Amendment, and how have different peoples and movements struggled for freedom after emancipation?

for lectures are $5-$10, full series $15-$35. For more information, call 206-543-5790.

A 91̽�� team has developed a versatile platform to simultaneously offer contraception and prevent HIV. Electrically spun cloth with nanometer-sized fibers can dissolve to release drugs, providing a platform for cheap, discrete and reversible protection.

The research was published this week in the Public Library of Science’s open-access journal . The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation last month awarded the 91̽��researchers almost $1 million to pursue the technology.

“Our dream is to create a product women can use to protect themselves from HIV infection and unintended pregnancy,” said corresponding author , a 91̽��assistant professor of bioengineering. “We have the drugs to do that. It’s really about delivering them in a way that makes them more potent, and allows a woman to want to use it.”

uses an electric field to catapult a charged fluid jet through air to create very fine, nanometer-scale fibers. The fibers can be manipulated to control the material’s solubility, strength and even geometry. Because of this versatility, fibers may be better at delivering medicine than existing technologies such as gels, tablets or pills. No high temperatures are involved, so the method is suitable for heat-sensitive molecules. The fabric can also incorporate large molecules, such as proteins and antibodies, that are hard to deliver through other methods.

At a lab meeting last year, Woodrow presented the concept, and co-authors Emily Krogstad and Cameron Ball, both first-year graduate students, pursued the idea.

They first dissolved polymers approved by the Food and Drug Administration and antiretroviral drugs used to treat HIV to create a gooey solution that passes through a syringe. As the stream encounters the electric field it stretches to create thin fibers measuring 100 to several thousand nanometers that whip through the air and eventually stick to a collecting plate (one nanometer is about one 25-millionth of an inch). The final material is a stretchy fabric that can physically block sperm or release chemical contraceptives and antivirals.

“This method allows controlled release of multiple compounds,” Ball said. “We were able to tune the fibers to have different release properties.”

One of the fabrics they made dissolves within minutes, potentially offering users immediate, discrete protection against unwanted pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases.

Another dissolves gradually over a few days, providing an option for sustained delivery, more like the birth-control pill, ��to provide contraception and guard against HIV.

The fabric could incorporate many fibers to guard against many different sexually transmitted infections, or include more than one anti-HIV drug to protect against drug-resistant strains (and discourage drug-resistant strains from emerging). Mixed fibers could be designed to release drugs at different times to increase their potency, like the prime-boost method used in vaccines.

The electrospun cloth could be inserted directly in the body or be used as a coating on vaginal rings or other products.

Electrospinning has existed for decades, but it’s only recently been automated to make it practical for applications such as filtration and tissue engineering. This is the first study to use nanofibers for vaginal drug delivery.

While this technology is more discrete than a condom, and potentially more versatile than pills or plastic or rubber devices, researchers say there is no single right answer.

“At the time of sex, are people going to actually use it? That’s where having multiple options really comes into play,” Krogstad said. “Depending on cultural background and personal preferences, certain populations may differ in terms of what form of technology makes the most sense for them.”

The team is focusing on places like Africa where HIV is most common, but the technology could be used in the U.S. or other countries to offer birth control while also preventing one or more sexually transmitted diseases.

The research to date was funded by the National Institutes of Health and the UW’s . The other co-author on the paper is Thanyanan Chaowanachan, a 91̽��postdoctoral researcher and longtime HIV expert.

The team will use the new Gates Foundation grant to evaluate the versatility and feasibility of their system. The group will hire more research staff and buy an electrospinning machine to make butcher-paper sized sheets. The expanded team will spend a year testing combinations that deliver two antiretroviral drugs used to treat HIV and a hormonal contraceptive, and then six months scaling up production of the most promising materials.

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For more information, contact Woodrow at 206-685-6831 or woodrow@uw.edu.

The study brings to light how the South Asian nation is seeing a change in relations within the household, with both positive and negative consequences for women.

The findings come from a by Rachel Heath, 91̽��assistant professor of economics, released by the World Bank Development Research Group and presented in November at the Northeast Universities Development Consortium at Dartmouth College.

Heath and collaborator Mushfiq Mobarak at Yale University oversaw a door-to-door survey of 1,400 households in 60 villages outside of Dhaka, Bangladesh, in 2009.

The survey asked wives their age and level of education at marriage and first employment, and if they needed their husband’s permission for household purchases. It also asked if they had ever been beaten by their husband, or felt it was acceptable for a husband to beat a wife.

The study revealed that 26.9 percent responded that their husband had beaten them “more than once,” while 8.8 responded they’d been beaten once and .08 percent responded “regularly.”

Heath found that the amount of power a wife brings to her marriage — and how that increases when she gets work — is related to the her risk of domestic violence from her husband.

For instance, if she marries young or with little education or no job, she has little leverage with their husband and “low risk of domestic violence, because the husband gets to implement his preferences anyway,” Heath said.

An outside job increases her power and thus her leverage in the marriage — but Heath’s research shows there is a dangerous downside.

Among women who have five or fewer years of education, the survey showed 39 percent have suffered domestic violence. Among women with five years of education who work, the rate jumps to 45 percent. “More highly-educated women face less domestic violence overall, and the figure does not depend on whether they work,” Heath said.

“If from a very low level her bargaining power improves, that could create conflict — she’s now bargaining with him, and he could try to use violence to win that conflict.”

Heath added that over the long term, education levels are going up and women are marrying later” in Bangladesh. “Once women get to the point where they can survive on their own and they don’t have to stay in really bad marriages, then there isn’t the same risk of increased domestic violence after labor force participation,” she said.

Heath said the Bangladeshi social service infrastructure has few programs supporting women, but the findings could be a message to Bangladeshi policy markets to provide education and counseling for young women new to the workforce.

“What this paper is saying is that we also have to be careful to look for things within the household that might negatively be impacted” by the wife’s increase in status through work, Heath said.

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For more information, contact Heath at 206-543-5796 or rmheath@uw.edu.

Average total rainfall in the area for August is about a half-inch. During this 24-hour period more than 8 inches fell, causing severe damage and leaving 193 dead, hundreds missing and thousands homeless.

“Flash flooding events don’t happen often but when they do they are some of the scariest, most dangerous and quickest natural disasters that can happen,” said , a 91̽�� graduate student in . “But now that we know what types of conditions to look out for, flash flood warnings in remote regions of India might be possible.”

Rasmussen and , a 91̽��professor in atmospheric sciences, studied satellite images and what’s called re-analysis data to piece together what happened to create such a torrential downpour. Their conclusions – including that the flash flood was set off by a string of unusual weather events not unlike those that caused devastating flash floods in Colorado and South Dakota in the 1970s – appear in the Nov. 14 Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society.

They found that on three consecutive days clouds formed high in the mountains to the east over the Tibetan Plateau. By itself, that isn’t uncommon, Rasmussen said.

“What’s different in this case is that there was the unusual wind coming from the east and blowing west,” she said. That helped the clouds clump together and build into a larger storm system capable of creating heavy rain over Leh, which is 11,480 feet above sea level.

At the same time, low-level winds carried in moisture from both the Bay of Bengal and the Arabian Sea. “The storm, forming just up the slope, was able to tap into that additional moisture,” she said.

Typically, such large storm systems don’t have the chance to build because each day as the sun sets, the warm air that has helped the clouds form and lift gets cooler. The clouds then die out in the evening. But during those three days of August 2010, the unusual wind blew through the night, spurring the clouds to continue building into a system capable of heavy rain.

Above-average rain fell on the first two days. Since the region typically gets so little rainfall, the soil doesn’t absorb water well.

“The key is that this happened for three successive days. If the third day hadn’t happened or if the first two days hadn’t set the process in motion, there probably wouldn’t have been such a devastating flash flood,” Rasmussen said.

The situation is reminiscent of weather that caused deadly flooding through the Big Thompson Canyon in Colorado in 1976 and the Black Hills of South Dakota in 1972. In all three cases, large organized clouds gathered high in the mountains and drew moisture up the slope of the mountain into the storms.

The resulting heavy rains are uncommon in mountains, where there typically isn’t enough moisture to cause such dramatic rain. They are also more dangerous than storms in the plains, where water can spread more evenly. In the mountains, the water is funneled into valleys where it accumulates into a narrow space and can form a flash flood.

“A flash flooding-type storm could be moved out onto the plains and simply cause rain across a wide area. But in the right place at the wrong time it can be devastating,” Rasmussen said.

Now that researchers have identified these common elements, including organized clouds high in the mountains on the edge of an arid plain with unusual access to moisture, weather forecasters can potentially warn people who could be in danger if a flash flood happens, she said.

There were some differences between the U.S. floods and the Leh incident. For instance, in the U.S., the storms didn’t move very much. In Leh, for three days the storms moved along the Tibetan plateau but all the rain funneled into the valley where Leh is situated.

In addition to viewing satellite images, Rasmussen and Houze examined data created by using observations of actual conditions to adjust forecasts in retrospect. This re-analysis data included information collected from surface measurements and weather balloons that track things like pressure patterns and moisture in the region. The researchers also recently completed a high-resolution modeling study confirming the findings in the paper.

The National Science Foundation and NASA funded the research.

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For more information, contact Rasmussen at kristen@atmos.washington.edu or Houze at 206-543-6922 or houze@uw.edu.

The , part of the 91̽��’s , will celebrate its 20^th year with a conference and book launch Friday, Nov. 9. The anniversary is particularly significant for the center’s director, James Banks, who experienced racism first hand growing up as an African-American in the segregated south.

He remembers not being allowed to use the public library, despite being an avid reader. He used the “colored entrance” at the movie theater and watched movies from the projection room, where he strained to hear over the rattle of the movie projector.

He was a seventh-grader in rural Marianna, Ark., when the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education case declared segregated schools unconstitutional, and he recalls the decision was met with tension and silence in his community.

His experiences propelled him toward a career seeking equality in education, becoming an elementary school teacher in Chicago and then earning a doctorate in elemen­tary education and social science from Michigan State University in 1969.

“This has been a personal journey,” Banks said. “I felt that even though I escaped this segregated environment, others just as bright didn’t.”

He came to the 91̽��in 1969, the first African-American hired as a faculty member by the College of Education. While the university hired some African-Americans with tenure, Banks was the first African-American to earn tenure at the UW.

Banks helped create the Center for Multicultural Education in 1992 to improve education practices related to diversity issues. It aims to foster better understanding of cultural differences ��among ethnic groups and bolster academic achievement of all students.

Students must be educated “in an environment that reflects the reality of the nation and the world and that teaches them how to get along with each other and how to solve problems in a multicultural world,” Banks said during his in 2005.

Recently reflecting on progress in multicultural education during his lifetime, Banks said he’s seen “tremendous progress,” especially in textbooks. When he was growing up, he said, textbooks included a scant three black people – Marian Anderson, Booker T. Washington and George Washington Carver – and depicted slaves as “happy.”

African-Americans and other ethnic groups now have better representation in the school curriculum. But “it’s not enough,” Banks said. “A big struggle now is that blacks are in textbooks but their stories are told from the white perspective.”

He says that the future of multicultural education is global, as nations including England, France and China face new challenges involving discrimination, religious freedom and diversity. The field of multicultural education is “getting bigger, but it’s not changing the nature of what I do,” Banks said.

This global theme is evident in the center’s . The event will take place in the HUB from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. The university and surrounding educational communities are invited. Email centerme@uw.edu for more information or to RSVP for the conference. A pdf of the conference’s agenda is .

The keynote speaker will be , from Stanford University and a former education adviser to Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. She will talk about her 2010 book “The Flat World and Education: How American’s Commitment to Equity Will Determine Our Future.”

Another session will discuss diversity and educating youth in the humanities and sciences, and an afternoon panel will cover teacher education in Korea, Canada and the United States.

The event will also commemorate the publication of the four-volume . Edited by Banks and published by Sage Publications, the work is intended to be a reference for understanding diversity issues in education around the globe. It provides statistics, case studies, best practices, programs and policies. The carry the print and versions of the book.

“This conference and book launch mark a significant achievement of work in the 91̽��College of Education related to diversity during the last two decades,” Banks said. “The publication of the Encyclopedia of Diversity in Education indicates the extent to which studies related to diversity in education have attained a high level of legitimacy and acceptance both in the United States and in nations around the world.”

Matthew Rogge, a post-baccalaureate mechanical engineering student who presented the project in London, was inspired by years spent working in the Peace Corps.

He began teaching chemistry and physics in Ghana, but ended up spending more than six years building water and irrigation systems in Ghana, Panama and Bolivia.

“We built drilling equipment for our own well, and then built our own pump out of plastic,” Rogge said. “There were a lot of parts that took a fair amount of skill to make.”

He was frustrated by the challenge of making custom parts in low-resource settings.

“I was looking into engineering and I’d read about 3-D printing, and that’s when I decided to go back to graduate school,” Rogge said.

The winning proposal that he presented is to use giant 3-D printers to create composting latrines that are lightweight and use less energy to manufacture than concrete toilets. The machine would also make rainwater catchment components that are specifically designed to fit to rain barrels, unlike current systems where joining available plumbing parts cause leaks and frequent failures.

“I’m super excited,” Rogge said. “This is why I came back to school.”

The contest flew six other teams to London for the finals. Entrants included students, small companies and individuals from around the world. The competition was sponsored by a U.K.-based charity, .

The 91̽��students are all members of the , or WOOF, a 3-D printing student club formed in the last year that has already grown to about 50 members.

“It’s accelerating every day,” said operations director Bethany Weeks, an undergraduate student in mechanical engineering who traveled to London for the competition. Club members will be invited to help test concepts for the new nonprofit, she said, while continuing to learn and experiment with 3-D printing.

The group’s faculty advisers are mechanical engineering professor Mark Ganter and associate professor Duane Storti.

“They’re amazing students,” said Ganter, who watched the winning pitch live with his 91̽��class. “They have a passion, and the judges saw their passion.”

Judges also were impressed by research the students conducted to prove their concept. In July the students from more than 250 milk jugs and then entered it in a Seattle race. That proved they could create objects from recycled plastic and was a test run for their custom-built giant printer, also built from salvaged parts.

“With small-scale printers, the extruders can clog easily,” said Brandon Bowman, who also attended the competition. The huge printer that the students built, named “Big Red,” can not only create larger objects, but it also allows them to print with materials that are not perfectly clean.

The team members will use the prize money to form a nonprofit that will work with in Oaxaca to test their idea. They are looking for more collaborators in the U.S. and overseas.

“I feel lucky to have the chance to start making our ideas into reality,” Rogge said. “There is great potential here to improve people’s quality of life while taking plastic out of the waste stream.”

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For more information, contact Rogge at mprogge@uw.edu or 206-445-0655, and Weeks at washuu@uw.edu.

Timor-Leste, one of the world’s newest and poorest countries, has one of the world’s highest rates of maternal death, and many infants die within a month of birth.

To improve the odds for mothers and their newborns, , a non-profit affiliated with the 91̽��School of Public Health, has launched a first-ever mobile phone project there to send important health messages by text to expectant mothers.

Many women in Timor-Leste live in remote, mountainous villages, lack land lines and electricity, and rarely visit medical clinics. About 70 percent of women give birth at home, and most do it without help from a midwife, according to Susan Thompson, Health Alliance International’s director of Timor-Leste programs. After birth, women are often secluded in the home for up to six weeks.

Mobile phone use has rapidly increased in recent years, offering a new way to reach expectant mothers. Women taking part in the program will receive two messages a week reminding them to take iron pills, eat well and have regular prenatal visits. Women will also be able to call for an ambulance or trained midwife when they go into labor.

The messages, in the local language of Tetum, will be tailored to each woman’s estimated due date. Phones and messages will be in place for six weeks after birth for follow-ups and to help mothers monitor signs of illness in their newborns.

“It’s all about improving the quality and access to maternal care,” said , Health Alliance International’s maternal and child health adviser and a senior lecturer in the school’s departments of and . The mobile phone service will allow health workers to “bridge bad roads and long distances with messages.”

Mobile Moms is supported by a four-year $1.75 million grant from the U.S. Agency for International Development. The first messages are scheduled to be sent out about Oct. 1.

Health Alliance International��is working with the Ministry of Health and , a non-profit agency building the mobile phone platform. The project will be a first of its kind in Timor-Leste, according to Catalpa, and has the potential to change the way people interact with their local health professionals.

Timor-Leste, also known as East Timor, was a longtime Portuguese colony that was occupied by Indonesia. It achieved independence a decade ago. The small island country north of Australia has one of the highest rates of maternal mortality, at 557 deaths for 100,000 births (in the U.S., the rate is only eight per 100,000). In Timor-Leste, more than 2 percent of infants die within a month of birth.

Health Alliance International��has been active in Timor-Leste since 1999, and partners with the Ministry of Health. The organization works to raise awareness about health services, screens movies with messages about family planning, and strengthens skills of district health-care workers. Access to maternal and newborn services has steadily increased since the organization began working in Timor-Leste, Thompson said. So far, nine 91̽��students – from Global Health and the Community-Oriented Public Health Practice programs – have carried out research projects and assessments there.

One of the greatest challenges? The large number of children the typical Timor-Leste woman bears – up to 6 or more. “It’s concerning that many couples don’t understand that spacing their children is healthier,” Thompson said.

The Mobile Moms project ignited the passion of young Seattle-area professionals looking for a global health project to support. The group formerly known as Party with a Purpose – now renamed – dedicated its annual fund-raiser in July to Mobile Moms. More than 700 people attended, raising $20,000 to pay for texting services, said Kristen Eddings, program associate for the Washington Global Health Alliance. (See a of the party.)

The 91̽�� this July and August hosted the first , which brings together computer science, human-computer interaction and design students from the 91̽��and Beijing’s Tsinghua University. Together they spent seven weeks developing ways that technology could be used to address global issues in health, environment and education.

The summer exchange is the inaugural activity of the , which aims to promote closer collaboration between the 91̽��and Tsinghua, one of the top universities in mainland China, on issues of computer science and design.

The World Lab was founded by , a 91̽��professor of computer science, and colleagues at Tsinghua, after Landay spent a sabbatical year living in Beijing and working at Microsoft Research Asia.

“In China I saw a lot of excitement and rapid development in computing,” Landay said. “But I also saw ways that China and the U.S. could learn from one another.”

Landay read about economic competition between China and the U.S. But he felt an opportunity and a need for collaboration.

“The world is facing these really important problems in terms of the environment, health and education,” Landay said. “Those problems are felt acutely by the U.S. and China, and both countries need to be part of the solutions. I wondered: ‘How could we attack those problems in a cross-cultural, human-centered way to come up with innovative solutions?'”

During the summer program, 11 Chinese graduate students and nine 91̽��students took classes and worked together on group projects.

Last week in the Allen Center they presented their prototypes apps, which included a social-networking tool to donate materials and view ; an armband that prompts people to ; and a tool to help parents be more closely involved in many aspects of their .

The projects were developed by teams of four students, about evenly split between Chinese and Americans, and with an equal mix of design and technical expertise. By the third week of the program each team had created a project concept video, and at the end of the program teams pitched their ideas along with a finished prototype and a high-quality video. Though many of the ideas were nonprofits, each team included a business plan.

Cultural differences shaped how the students developed their ideas and how they chose to present the products. For example King Xia, a 91̽��student majoring in computer science and business administration, said the 91̽��students saw a dandelion as a weed, while the Chinese explained that it’s seen as a sign of hope.

Combining these two world views was a primary goal of the program.

“These are the two largest economies,” commented Richard Tong, a former Microsoft engineer who is a managing partner at Ignition Capital and gave a presentation on pitching ideas for commercialization. “Building a true world product means that you have to understand both very well.”

Students encountered some language barriers, but the primary differences were in communication style.

“The Chinese were always trying to be polite, and the Western people are more straightforward,” said Yu Xin, a student from Beijing who is starting a 91̽��master’s program in Human Centered Design and Engineering. “It was kind of hard at first, but gradually we learned how to express our ideas.”

The Chinese students lived in dorms on the 91̽��campus along with a representative of the , a nonprofit that helped organize the exchange. The summer program was funded through grants from Microsoft, Intel, Google and Nokia.

Six of the nine 91̽��students will travel to China in September to present their projects at Tsinghua University and in Beijing’s 798 art district.

Next year, Landay hopes to run a similar exchange in China, where American students would travel to spend six to eight weeks in Beijing. He hopes the World Lab will develop into a close collaboration between the 91̽��and Tsinghua University, potentially offering dual degrees and eventually having a shared space.

“I hope that this becomes a permanent research institute that works jointly on these types of grand-challenge problems,” Landay said.