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Student Spotlight: Ashley Murray
Student Spotlight Directory
ERG PhD student, Ashley Murray (seated), interviews farmers in Pixian, a peri-urban district of Chengdu, China. |
The FuNan River runs through the urban core of Chendu. |
Sewage canal in the urban core of Chengdu. |
A wetland for wastewater treatment that was recently built in Chengdu. |
"Sustainable Sanitation in China"
The Energy and Resources Group (ERG) at the University of California, Berkeley is one of those rare outlets in academia where you will fit right in if you are both a scholar and an activist. “ERGies” find themselves tackling some of the world’s greatest technical, social, and political challenges – often all at the same time – on local, national and international scales. Ashley Murray, a PhD student in ERG feels right at home.
Ashley’s PhD research focuses on promoting sustainable sanitation in developing urban areas. Around the globe, more than 2.6 billion people lack access to basic sanitation, resulting in almost 2 million deaths due to diarrhoeal disease every year. Ashley believes that the challenge of providing access to the unserved demands a new approach to sewage management: a shift away from conventional wastewater treatment that has high capital, operation and maintenance costs, is energy intensive, and is traditionally designed to dispose of treated wastewater, to an approach that emphasizes low-cost, environmentally benign treatment solutions, and which maximizes the extent to which sewage and its treatment byproducts are reused. To that end, Ashley’s dissertation work includes: 1. the development of a sustainability indicator framework to measure the sustainability of wastewater treatment infrastructure with respect to the local environmental, economic, social and political context; 2. the development of a planning and decision-making tool for urban sanitation infrastructure that approaches sewage from the perspective that it is a resource.
Solid waste clogs irrigation canals in Pixian.
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A farmer carries buckets with which to irrigate his fields in Pixian. |
For her research, Ashley spends much of her time in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan Province in Southwest China. There she will apply her sustainability indicator assessment to existing wastewater treatment infrastructure in the urban core, and she is testing her planning framework to provide recommendations for new infrastructure in peri-urban areas on the outskirts of the city. While in the field, there is no typical day for Ashley; she goes from surveying farmers about their water demand in rural areas outside of Chengdu, to meeting with the head of the Chengdu Water Bureau and designers at the Southwest Planning Institute, to presenting the merits of using sewage sludge in cement to representatives from the Environmental Protection Bureau, Ministry of Construction, and the government operated engineering consulting firm.
Ashley completed her undergraduate degree at Bates College in Lewiston, ME and got a Masters in Environmental Engineering at Berkeley before coming to ERG for her PhD. Since coming to Berkeley she has been actively involved with Engineers for a Sustainable World-Berkeley, serving various board positions including President, for three years. During her tenure, she initiated the Haath Mein Sehat safe water and hygiene education project in the Bheram Slum in Mumbai. Ashley is also passionate about local sustainability and has been working with Students for a Greener Berkeley to improve environmental stewardship on campus.
8/31/07
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