Gillings lab at UNC wins $8.5M for USAID clean water initiative

A clean water program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has won a new award worth up to $8.5 million, the university announced Monday. The program traces its origins to a gift made by Quintiles founder Dennis Gillings and his wife, Joan.

The funding will be used to expand a project to bring clean drinking water and improved sanitation to homes in Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam. The five-year award comes from the U.S. Agency for International Development.

The program is called Water, Sanitation and Hygiene Enterprise Development – or WaterSHED. It is a joint effort between UNC's Gillings School of Global Public Health, the Kenan-Flagler Business School and the Kenan Institute-Asia.

UNC says in a statement that its researchers will search for ways to increase the use of water filters in homes that lack clean drinking water in order to help reduce diarrhea and related diseases that kill nearly 2 million children a year. They will also investigate ways to achieve financially sustainable, scaled-up access to safe water sources. These include harvested rainwater, improved sanitation and greater practice of personal hygiene.

The USAID award will be managed by UNC’s public health school. The principal investigator is Mark Sobsey, the Kenan Professor of Environmental Sciences and

Engineering.

The award grew out of the Carolina Global Water Partnership, one of the first Gillings Innovation Laboratories funded through a $50 million gift to the public health school from Dennis and Joan Gillings.

Dennis Gillings, a former UNC professor, launched and built Durham-based Quintiles into the world’s largest contract research organization. CROs run clinical trials on drug candidates for pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies.