Aquaya Institute
Aquaya is a research organization focused on the study and promotion of innovations to prevent waterborne disease. Aquaya believes that reducing the global burden of waterborne disease requires progress in three fields:
- Technology development
- Delivery models
- Impact measurement
Role in the project
Aquaya is developing and managing field pilots of the Aquatest system with government authorities, water suppliers, NGOs and community water groups in both urban and rural settings in all of the major developing world regions. Through these field pilots, Aquaya will explore the application of the Aquatest system in a range of water management contexts and will assess the role of new testing technologies in improving water quality management.
Aquaya is managing the Aquatest field studies and data collection and analysis.
Aquaya is also responsible for Aquatest networking and dissemination activities in the USA.
People involved
Ranjiv Khush
Member of the management board
Ranjiv is the co-founder of the Aquaya Institute. He is a microbiologist and immunologist. Before joining Aquaya, Ranjiv was a Diplomacy Fellow funded by the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He was based in the Office of the Science and Technology Advisor to the U.S. Secretary of State. Before joining the Department of State, Ranjiv held a Research Scientist appointment in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at the Stanford University School of Medicine.
Ranjiv has degrees from the Universities of California at Davis and Santa Cruz, and was a Postdoctoral fellow at the Centre National de Recherché Scientifique in Paris. Ranjiv has also worked at an agricultural biotechnology company and taught medical microbiology for four years.
Matt Ball
Matt researches mobile and web-based tools for water quality monitoring and data analysis. Before joining Aquaya, Matt worked at a Bay Area startup where he developed systems for analyzing and managing environmental sensor data. Prior to that he worked as part of an Engineers Without Borders team to perform needs assessments and deploy technology alongside local NGOs in Uganda and Bolivia.
Matt holds a BSE in Civil and Environmental Engineering from Duke University.
Zarah Rahman
Zarah Rahman is a program officer at the Aquaya Institute. Prior to joining Aquaya, Zarah worked as a researcher at the Hanoi School of Public Health and at the Clinton Foundation in Vietnam through the Henry Luce Scholars Fellowship.
Most recently, she was supported by the National Geographic Young Explorers Program and the Seven Fund for Global Poverty Alleviation to study the ecological and social impacts of logging and palm plantation development in Aceh, Indonesia.
Zarah speaks Vietnamese, Hindi, and Indonesian and has a degree in Development Studies from Brown University.