Christine Lee (2008)
Fellowship Year: 2008
Academic Background: UCLA - Ph.D. - (Civil & Environmental Engineering)
Christine M. Lee is a PhD student in Civil and Environmental Engineering at UCLA. She received a BS in Chemical Engineering and minored in English as an undergraduate, also at UCLA. Lee is currently developing a biosensor that can rapidly measure bacterial water quality. This sensor can not only become a tool for continuous water quality monitoring but can also be an instrument for adaptive sampling, helping identify hotspots of bacterial contamination. Christine has been interested in technology accessibility issues since joining Engineers without Borders at UCLA in 2004. BOOTUP, which she founded in 2005, is based on refurbishing donated equipment in computer-building workshops for underresourced high school students, who were able to keep these computers. Thinklab! was a vision of a fellow EWB officer; she helped design and implement this project, which consisted of refurbishing and donating laptops to a children’s center, El Buen Samaritano, in Jocotenango, Guatemala. Since Guatemala, Christine has supported and assisted in other projects abroad, traveling to Bangladesh to help investigate arsenic contamination of groundwater. As a student at the Center for Embedded Networked Sensing, a multidisciplinary research center, she is also extremely interested in bridging connections between different fields of science and engineering. Most recently, she encouraged the Center to apply sensor research in assisting the sustainable building and practices movement at the UCLA campus. She also has many other interests outside of her work - including reading (novels and graphic novels), writing, biking, and yoga.
Expertise: Engineering / Chem / Toxicology