Dr. Kathryn Ely spoke about Quench and Connect, an organization she founded to bring clean water and educational resources to Ugandan schools. A well-known structural biologist, she also showed some of her protein structures, which are just visible at left.
In developed nations, access to clean water is taken for granted. However, the World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that, worldwide, as many as 800 million people lack access to clean water and around 2 billion people live in regions that have no sanitation systems. Water is fundamental for many basic human needs, including cooking, bathing, and agriculture, while lack of clean water can cause a range of health problems such as diarrhea, bacterial or parasitic infections, and other gastrointestinal disorders.
Dr. Kay Ely, the founder and Executive Director of Quench and Connect, was the speaker at our September 14, 2017 meeting. Quench and Connect has dual goals of bringing, clean, safe, and readily accessible water to schoolchildren in Uganda as well as to provide educational tools that will enhance the academic achievement of these students. By installing borehole wells on the campuses of secondary schools, Quench & Connect is able to fulfill the first goal of increasing access to clean water. The Ugandan contractor DRACO, Ltd. drills these boreholes 150-200 feet below ground level to access aquifers to facilitate water delivery via a sealed pipe to surface hand pumps. Village residents receive instruction on how to maintain the well so that they can maximize the expected 10-15 lifetime of the boreholes. Since Dr. Ely founded Quench and Connect in 2010, the project has helped install one dozen borehole wells in schools throughout Uganda. These clean water sources have dramatically improved school attendance by decreasing the frequency of water-borne illnesses that keep children out of school.
Dr. Ely is a well-known structural biologist whose group solved the three-dimensional structures of proteins involved in signaling pathways that are important for maintaining cell structures and eliciting immune system responses (you can catch a glimpse of these protein structures in left of the pictures). Such structures are critical for understanding the mechanism of these proteins and for the development of targeted therapies for diseases in which these proteins play a role. Her scientific background helped fulfill the second goal of Quench and Connect: providing educational resources to Ugandan schools. To that end, Quench and Connect has donated both scientific equipment and teaching tools to allow Ugandan students to learn about modern scientific theories and techniques.
Quench and Connect is a non-profit entity that is staffed entirely by volunteers. Neither Dr. Ely nor the Board of Directors receive compensation for their work to ensure that nearly all of the funds donated to Quench and Connect go to improve the health and education of students in Uganda.