Karin Mason graduated from the MDevEng program in 2025.
Where are you working nowadays?
I currently work at GiveWell — a nonprofit that finds and funds interventions and programs in global health across water, nutrition, malaria, and vaccines, amongst other areas — as a research project manager on the water portfolio. My role sits at the intersection of project management, research, and grantmaking. Day-to-day, this means managing a multi-million dollar portfolio of water quality projects, writing grant reports, supporting grantees through implementation challenges, and desk research on water quality interventions. Alongside this, I’m also consulting for the Edible Schoolyard Project, where I’m designing a climate-resilient food-systems curriculum for sixth graders, which is currently being piloted with a small group of students.
A project I’m especially excited about is expanding GiveWell’s research agenda beyond chlorination and point-of-use water treatment. WASH is a massive sector, and we currently focus solely on water, and more specifically water quality. I’m helping to develop strategies and research questions that could open up funding opportunities in water infrastructure and access to safe water more broadly. I’m also in the early stages of coordinating a qualitative research project examining what happens to communities when a major funder exits. It’s a massive question that has become increasingly relevant due to aid cuts, and I’m excited to be working on this as it brings so much of what I learned in Critical Systems of Development directly into practice: thinking carefully about power, dependency, and what “development” actually looks like for communities on the ground.
How did your experience in the MDevEng program, whether specific courses, mentors, or internship, prepare you for your current work?
My time in DevEng honed my ability to evaluate development interventions technically, and arguably more importantly, gave me a critical lens to interrogate them politically and socially. Classes like DevEng C200 (Design, Evaluate, and Scale Development Technologies) and CE105 (Design for Global Transformation) showed me how challenging it is to go from idea to implementation, and I hope that I bring this understanding into my relationships with grantees. Data science coursework also built up my technical ability to read and interpret data in service of real decisions. I worked at the Center for Effective Global Action (CEGA) throughout the program, and I think this experience has really stood to me at GiveWell; I gained deeper knowledge of development economics, know-how on grant-funded research, and a network of evidence-based researchers and practitioners.
But I think what DevEng and Berkeley more broadly gave me was adaptability: being able to enter a new subject matter, ask (hopefully good, often bad) questions, and build knowledge and (maybe one day) expertise from there. Like many others, DevEng 202 (Critical Systems of Development) and getting to work with Dr. Khalid Kadir on my capstone project was a formative part of my DevEng journey. This class alongside many critical conversations with fellow DevEngers and undergraduate students through teaching GPP 115 (Global Poverty & Practice: Challenges & Hopes) helped to improve my ability to analyze issues from multiple perspectives, which feels more important than ever as I now sit on the funding side of development.
But I think what DevEng and Berkeley more broadly gave me was adaptability: being able to enter a new subject matter, ask (hopefully good, often bad) questions, and build knowledge and (maybe one day) expertise from there. Like many others, DevEng 202 (Critical Systems of Development) and getting to work with Dr. Khalid Kadir on my capstone project was a formative part of my DevEng journey. This class alongside many critical conversations with fellow DevEngers and undergraduate students through teaching GPP 115 (Global Poverty & Practice: Challenges & Hopes) helped to improve my ability to analyze issues from multiple perspectives, which feels more important than ever as I now sit on the funding side of development.
