Innovating Technologies for the Poorest 2 Billion

Professor Ashok Gadgil, Division Director of Environmental Energy Technologies, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

Professor Ashok Gadgil who is Division Director of the Environmental Energy Technologies Division at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) will be giving a talk at the Cavendish on the work at LNBL and how technology innovation can improve the lives of millions of people.

Abstract

Professor Gadgil will start with a brief summary of the current thinking at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory on the climate change problem, and their efforts to contribute to its management

He will then describe two recent technology innovate.ons intended to improve the lives of tens - possibly hundreds - of millions of people among the poorest 2 billion people on the planet.  Both technologies have emerged in the last few years from focused, goal-driven research by teams of creative, hard working researchers in his laboratory and in the field. The Berkeley-Darfur Stove is an inexpensive fuel-efficient biomass stove for displaced women and girls in Darfur, Sudan. The second technology, ECAR (Electrochemical Arsenic Remediation), affordably removes arsenic from groundwater supplies used for drinking water in Bangladesh and neighboring regions.

He will close the presentation with the six key lessons that he has learned from his work in technology innovation.

Biography

Ashok Gadgil is the Andrew and Virginia Rudd Family Foundation Distinguished Professor of Safe Water and Sanitation in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley.  He is also Director of the Environmental Energy Technologies Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Dr. Gadgil was the MAP/Ming Visiting Professor, Civil and Environmental Engineering at Stanford (2004-05).  He received his B.Sc. degree in Physics from University of Mumbai, M.Sc. in Physics from IIT Kanpur, and Ph.D. in Physics from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1971, 1973, and 1979.

Dr. Gadgil has a long record of innovative solutions to problems in the developing world, including: pioneering access to compact fluorescent lamps for poor households in developing countries; inventing and commercializing a method to affordably disinfect drinking water in poor communities; designing, testing, and disseminating thousands of fuel-efficient stoves to refugee women in Darfur; and inventing and field-testing an extremely low cost and robust method to remove arsenic from drinking water.

He has won numerous awards including: the 5th Prince Sultan Bin Abdulaziz International Prize for Water (2013);the Zayed Future Energy Prize and the 2012 Lemelson-MIT Award for Global Innovation (2012); European Inventor Award (2011); the Heinz Award (2009); “Breakthrough Award” from Popular Mechanics for the Berkeley-Darfur Stove (2007). Earlier this year he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering – one of the highest honors in the engineering profession.