Amy Pickering is an environmental health engineer and works as a research associate at Stanford University in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and at the Woods Institute for the Environment. She combines social science, microbiology and engineering to study ways people in low-income countries can access safer water and better sanitation. People living in the developing world are often exposed to higher levels of bacteria and other germs, usually because of contaminated water and poor sanitation conditions. Pickering tries to reduce the spread of disease by travelling to areas with poor water quality and studying why people are getting sick and coming up with low-cost and low-tech solutions that can help minimize illnesses. She also runs research studies to test and evaluate how effective various interventions are at preventing the spread of disease. Pickering spends about 20% of her time in the countries in which she works and the rest at Stanford. Pickering has an undergraduate degree in biological and environmental engineering from Cornell University and a masters in environmental engineering with an emphasis on water quality from University of California, Berkeley. She completed a Ph.D in the Interdisciplinary Program in Environment and Resources at Stanford University. This career spotlight video is featured in our Engineering Is: Cleaning Poop from Drinking Water e-book. The e-book explores the science and engineering principles behind one of Amy Pickering's projects-- a device that purifies drinking water in Dhaka, Bangladesh. The e-book includes videos, interactives and media making opportunities. You can find our other e-books at http://kqed.org/ebooks.