Congratulations to Dr. Alberto Bilenca (Department of Biomedical Engineering and a member of the Ilse Katz Institute for Nanoscale Science and Technology), who has been awarded the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Grand Challenges Explorations Round 6 Grant Award.  

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation announced that, out of 2,500 submitted proposals from approximately 100 countries, 88 grants of US$100,000 each have been awarded to researchers from 25 countries to explore bold and largely unproven ways to improve global health. This is the third grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation that has been awarded to an Israeli researcher and the first to a researcher from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.

Grand Challenges in Global Health is a family of grants programs that focuses on one unifying purpose; to overcome persistent bottlenecks in creating new tools that can radically improve health in the developing world.

Dr. Alberto Bilenca will develop a cell phone imaging system that can non-invasively detect malaria parasites in the blood. The system uses a polarized red laser pointer to illuminate tissue, such as a fingertip, and a zoom lens and polarizing filter on existing cell phone cameras to create images that depict hemozoin crystals in blood following malaria parasite infection and micro-obstructions in the circulatory system that result from the infection.

As an awardee of Phase I, Dr. Bilenca is now eligible to submit an application to Phase II of the Grand Challenges Explorations Round 6 Grant Award, which will grant funding of up to $1,000,000 distributed over 2 years.

Further information can be found at the Foundation website: http://www.grandchallenges.org/MeasureHealthStatus/Topics/CellPhoneApps/Pages/Round6.aspx.