Noam Anglo is part of the MDevEng Class of 2026.       

What brought you to Berkeley’s MDevEng program?

My background is in mechanical engineering, and I’ve always been motivated by making an impact on the world. For a long time I thought that mechanical engineering — something that I was really interested in, had a lot of skills in, and really enjoyed in terms of designing stuff — I thought that alone was the contribution I wanted to make to society.

But after working for several years, I realized that there is more to it than that: There had to be intentionality between the projects I chose, I had to be reaching the right people, I had to be actively asking questions about where exactly my work was going. Fundamentally, the reason that I went to Development Engineering was because I didn’t know how to ask those questions properly and I didn’t know where to find answers.
 

What DevEng projects are you working on right now?

The first is BahaWatch, which is going through multiple iterations right now, but currently is an open platform for flood sensing and early warnings in the Philippines. That project started entirely out of DevEng C200 because we had an opportunity to pitch our own project there and find our own project partners in the class, and I happened to know somebody in the Philippines that I wanted to work with. I reached out and we drafted a project together, and now it’s a Big Idea.

I’m also working with Dr. Amy Pickering at her lab, iterating on the in-line chlorination system work she’s doing, which is really cool because this is really the first time I’ve been able to use my mechanical engineering skills in these more traditional development contexts. It’s been a real exercise, both positively and negatively, in applying the principles that we learned: I’ve had to ask myself social and ethical questions about who’s on the other end of my designs, while in previous projects my work had just been asking technical questions and finding technical answers.

When you’re not pursuing social impact, what are your hobbies?

When I moved to the Bay, I wasn’t really into bikes, but it’s hard not to fall in love with cycling here — partly because of the weather but also because a lot of the really big players in biking started here. There would be many detractors to this, but one could argue that mountain biking as an industry started in the Bay Area. 

I’m really into cycling, and when I’m not studying or working on DevEng projects, my main thing I got into at Berkeley is volunteering at BicyCal, the bike repair shop under Sproul Hall. We fix people’s bikes and we also teach people to fix bikes through a DeCal.

In some ways, it’s quite grounding. For example, with Dr. Pickering’s work and my work at BahaWatch, it can be hard to talk to the people on the other end because they’re in the Philippines and Nigeria and Kenya. But the principle of Development Engineering is to have that constant communication with your community, and at the bike shop, I’m always directly in front of the person I’m trying to benefit.