From Fukushima to Bayview: RadWatch, DoseNet, and the Evolution of Student-Driven Radiation Science as Community Partnership

Bio:

Ali Hanks is a Lecturer and Project Scientist in the Department of Nuclear Engineering at UC Berkeley, where she directs RadWatch and teaches E11, a hands-on radiation detection and electronics course she designed and has taught for seven years. She holds a PhD in experimental high energy nuclear physics from Columbia University, where she worked on the PHENIX experiment at RHIC, and completed postdoctoral research at Stony Brook before joining Berkeley. Under her direction, RadWatch has grown from a small campus monitoring effort into a multi-faceted program encompassing environmental sensor networks, gamma-ray spectroscopy, community sampling campaigns, and annual summer research internships for high school students. Her current work with All Things Bayview includes remediation oversight at the former Hunters Point Naval Shipyard and community-driven air quality monitoring in the Bayview neighborhood of San Francisco. Ali’s work sits at the intersection of radiation detection, science education, and environmental justice, with a focus on building authentic research experiences that connect students to the communities around them. She will be joining the faculty at the University of Notre Dame as an Associate Teaching Professor this summer.

Abstract:

What became RadWatch began in 2011, when students and faculty in UC Berkeley’s Department of Nuclear Engineering, initially under the name BRAWM (Berkeley Radiological Air and Water Monitoring), set up air sampling and environmental monitoring systems in response to the Fukushima Dai’ichi nuclear power plant accident. The effort started largely out of scientific curiosity, but the team quickly recognized a broader need: the Bay Area public wanted independent, locally collected data and, just as importantly, help understanding what the measurements meant. That realization shaped everything that followed. What started as crisis response grew into an ongoing environmental radiation monitoring program, anchored by a rooftop air sampling system that remains one of the more unique university-operated platforms of its kind, alongside continuing studies of radionuclide and heavy metal concentrations in fish and other environmental samples.

This talk traces RadWatch’s evolution from those early days through the development of DoseNet, a distributed environmental sensor network designed, built, and maintained by students, and into the program’s growing role in community-facing environmental justice work in San Francisco’s Bayview–Hunters Point neighborhood.

A central thread throughout has been the involvement of students at every level. Over the past eight years, RadWatch has hosted high school summer interns alongside undergraduate researchers, offering a pipeline into hands-on radiation detection, data analysis, and instrumentation development. These students have contributed not only to campus-based monitoring but increasingly to community-driven projects, from deploying sensors in schools and public spaces to supporting independent environmental sampling in communities with legacies of contamination.

The Bayview work, conducted in partnership with the community organizations such as All Things Bayview, serves as a case study in what this model can look like when it matures. Current efforts include technical support for community-led sampling of parcels undergoing development at the former Hunters Point Naval Shipyard, and the surrounding neighborhoods, and a community air quality monitoring program funded by the California Air Resources Board. Both projects are grounded in the principle that affected communities deserve access to independent scientific expertise, and that university programs are well positioned to provide it when the work is structured around genuine partnership rather than extraction.

The talk will reflect on what has made RadWatch work as an educational and community model, what has been difficult, and what comes next as the program’s leadership transitions and its community partnerships continue to deepen.