2008 Thomas I. Yamashita Prize - Winner  

Melissa Ho is a Ph.D. student in UC Berkeley’s School of Information. She develops innovative information technologies that can be used to help the world’s poor and to improve the delivery of health care in developing regions of the world. In 2004, she worked at Intel Research Berkeley helping to develop a delay-tolerant technology vital for getting internet connectivity to villagers in rural India. While in India, she helped set up remote eye care clinics for Aravind Eye Hospital. She then traveled to Mexico while working on a class project to set up low-cost Linux-based computers for schoolchildren. In 2005, she worked on building high-bandwidth connections between the universities in Ghana in order to foster dialog, the sharing of information, and improved education in those communities. In 2006, she began to focus on improving healthcare delivery to Sub-Saharan Africa and began working on the Ghana Consultation Network, which links 80 doctors in 4 hospitals with their diasporic counterparts and helps to build the capacity and quality of doctors trained in Africa. Melissa’s research focuses on identifying the real needs of the world’s poorest and the ways innovative network technologies can be used to significantly address these needs, in addition to understanding the combination of institutional, political, and cultural factors necessary to create truly sustainable solutions.

2008 Thomas I. Yamashita Prize winner Melissa Ho, Ph.D. student in UC Berkeley’s School of Information. From left to right: Sam Ho (brother), Sam Ho, Sr., Cathy Ho, Melissa Ho, Dean AnnaLee Saxenian (advisor), John Chuang (friend).

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To view a video of the "2008 Thomas I. Yamashita Prize" Award Ceremony and Reception click here(350MB)

2008 Thomas I. Yamashita Prize - Honorable Mentions

Yvette Mari Robles is Director of the Bayview Hunters Point Mobilization for Adolescent Growth in our Communities (BMAGIC), a youth violence prevention collaborative comprised of 50 community-based organizations and stakeholders in the Bayview/Hunters Point communities of San Francisco. BMAGIC seeks to support the communities most highly impacted by crime by creating and maintaining a unified roadmap to social change that advances the educational, economic, and juvenile justice of underserved youth and their families. As Director of BMAGIC, Yvette has helped to build the capacity of community-based organizations, for example, by providing a series of trainings on fundraising, financial and personnel management, outreach and organizing, and strategic planning, and by leading the effort to design, fund, recruit and staff a new Computer Technology Center at the local YMCA. She also launched a ground breaking new program, “Direct Connect,” inside the Youth Guidance Center, with detained boys and young men from the Bayview/Hunters Point communities.

Lina Hu comes from the industrial city of Wuhan, situated in the heart of China. In Baigou, three hours from Beijing, Lina established a night school where she and fellow students taught English, computer skills and labor law to young migrant workers from rural China. She invited migrant workers to Tsinghua University and organized conversations between workers and students to encourage better understanding among students of what it means to be a migrant and to publicly affirm the contributions of migrant workers to the university community. She also collaborated with a labor organization in Beijing, “Facilitator,” to host a photo exhibition of migrant worker struggles at Tsinghua University. Lina is currently a graduate student in Sociology at UC Berkeley, where she continues to practice and write about sociological interventions.