IEEE Spectrum - North American - March 2015 - 45

Ashok Gadgil
ieee member

65
aGe

Environmental engineer,
Lawrence Berkeley National
Laboratory and UC Berkeley
occupation

Berkeley, Calif.
location

He's devoted his career to identifying
technologies to benefit the most
vulnerable-and then inventing them.
hero moment

national, a company that specializes in providing drinking water to
rural areas. To date, about 5 million people have benefited from
Gadgil's system, which has saved
1,000 or more lives per year.
"It's good," Gadgil says. "It needs
to go to 500 million."
the water purifier was just a
start. In 2004, the U.S. Agency
for International Development
(USAID) asked Gadgil to help
design a more efficient stove for
the millions of refugees living in
camps in the western Sudan region
of Darfur. Traditional woodburning stone fireplaces are inefficient, and women must risk their
safety to hunt for firewood or else
trade their food rations for fuel.
"I d id n't w a nt to de sig n a
stove for Darfur," Gadgil admits.
"People had been designing fuelefficient stoves for 30 years. So
I said, 'Here are some stoves.
Why don't you get some and test
them?' " Instead, his USAID contact asked Gadgil to test the stoves
himself. It soon became apparent
that none of them was enough of
an improvement, so Gadgil led the
development of an entirely new
design: the Berkeley-Darfur stove.
Now on its 14th iteration, the
Berkeley-Darfur stove burns less
than half the wood or charcoal of
a traditional stone fireplace, boils
water almost twice as fast, reduces
CO2 emissions by over 1.5 metric
tons per year, and saves the average fam- Located in the hills above the UC
ily in Darfur the equivalent of US $300 Berkeley campus, Lawrence Berkeley
per year in fuel. Getting from version 1 National Laboratory commands a gorto version 14 involved focusing on what geous view of San Francisco and the
the refugees needed and wanted. The Golden Gate Bridge. The land here would
stoves were modified to make them likely be packed with multimillion-dollar
cheaper and simpler to manufacture homes if it weren't instead devoted to
locally; refugees receive them for free, "bringing science solutions to the world,"
while local villagers can buy the stoves as the lab's slogan puts it. Gadgil's stove
for US $20. About 40,000 of them are lab is housed in a small shed that used to
now in use in Africa.
store radioactive materials. It sits behind
photoGraph by

Gabriela Hasbun

a thick concrete wall intended to protect
nearby buildings from stray radiation.
When we stop by, three grad students
are measuring smoke-particle distribution with lasers. The stove is now being
adapted for use in Ethiopia, Haiti, India,
and Mongolia. More generally, Gadgil
and his team are trying to find ways to
reduce particulates, carbon monoxide,
and other toxic emissions by a factor of
10. These emis- | co nti n u e d o n pag e 58

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