PureMadi Officers

President: Rebecca Kelly, MD

Rebecca Kelly is a pediatric resident at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and graduate of Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine. Rebecca graduated from the University of Virginia in 2013 with majors in Biology and Psychology and got involved with PureMadi in 2011 because of her premed and global health interests. She traveled with the student team on a grant from the Center for Global Health to South Africa to help start filter production at the Mukondeni Filter Facility in the summer of 2012. She traveled to South Africa again in the summer of 2014 to work with the Mukondeni Facility as well as help start up the Dertig Facility. Rebecca can be contacted at rkk4bs@virginia.edu.

Treasurer: Molly Tyeryar

Molly Tyeryar lives in northern Virginia and works in IT Consulting. She graduated from the University of Virginia in 2012 with a BA in Economics. Molly traveled to South Africa in the summers of 2010, 2011, and 2012; participating in the ceramic water filter facility feasibility study, construction, and start-up. Molly looks forward to all of the PureMadi successes to come and hopes to return to South Africa in the future. Molly can be contacted at mtyeryar@gmail.com

Website manager: Veronica Son

Veronica Son works in Colorado as a a civil engineer for the City of Boulder. She graduated from UVA in 2016 with a bachelor's degree in Civil and Environmental Engineering. She has been involved with PureMadi since 2013 and has studied the efficacy of the filters and MadiDrops at the university labs in Charlottesville during the school year. She has been to South Africa during the spring and summer of 2014 to perform follow-up studies on the point-of-use water filtration technologies. Veronica can be contacted at vs7bm@virginia.edu.

South African Liaison: Nkosinobubelo Ndebele (Nkosi)

She is a native of Bulawayo, Zimbabwe. She graduated as valedictorian from the National University of Science and Technology in Zimbabwe in 2014 with a degree in Environmental Science and Health, motivated by the lack of both clean water and support for environmental issues back in Bulawayo. Nkosi came to PureMadi after completing a one-year internship for a Bulawayo-based NGO called Dabane Trust where she learned about water purification technology with a focus on sand abstraction systems. Nkosi can be contacted at kosinobubelondebele@live.com

Board Members

James A. Smith is the Henry L. Kinnier Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Virginia.  He has BS and MS degrees in Civil Engineering from Virginia Tech and a PhD in Civil Engineering from Princeton University.  He has been a member of the faculty at the University of Virginia since 1992 and has also worked as a research hydrologist for seven years with the U.S. Geological Survey.  For the past 10 years, his research, service, and teaching activities have focused on technologies to improve developing-world water quality.  He has conducted extensive research on metal-ceramic point-of-use water treatment technologies in both the laboratory and field (Guatemala, South Africa) settings.  In partnership with Dr. Rebecca Dillingham, he founded PureMadi in 2011, and he has actively been involved with the development and testing of ceramic technologies in households in Limpopo Province, S. Africa since 2008.

Rebecca Dillingham, MD/MPH is the Director the University of Virginia’s Center for Global Health. Dr. Dillingham’s faculty positions are in the Division of Infectious Disease and International Health and in Public Health Sciences. Dr. Dillingham has led the development of global health training across UVa’s campus as the director of the UVa Framework Program in Global Health which is supported by the Fogarty International Center of the National Institute of Health.

Pamela B. Kelly has been a corporate finance attorney at Latham & Watkins, LLP. for the past 27 years. She has a BA in Economics and Psychology from the University of Virginia and a JD from the University Of California Los Angeles School Of Law. She was an adjunct professor of law at the UCLA School of Law for 10 years. At Latham & Watkins, she practiced in the areas of corporate finance, negotiated acquisition, and emerging company and public company representation. Her corporate finance expertise included: public and private debt offerings, equity offerings, representation of issuers, institutional investors and investment banks. Pamela is also a member of the Board of Trustees at Echo Horizon School. She and her husband Peter first visited South Africa in 1996 and fell in love with the people and the country. In 2006, they took the first step toward making a positive difference in this place they had grown to love. Pamela and Peter made gifts to the University of Virginia to endow an interdisciplinary project in Limpopo Province, South Africa, eventually leading to the formation of PureMadi.