Ashok Gadgil
Ashok Gadgil (born November 15, 1950, in Mumbai, India)[1] Is the Andrew and Virginia Rudd Family Foundation Distinguished Chair and Professor of Safe Water and Sanitation at the University of California, Berkeley.[2] He is a Faculty Senior Scientist and has served as director of the Energy and Environmental Technologies Division at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.[3]
Gadgil specializes in heat transfer, fluid dynamics, and technology design for development. He has substantial experience in technical, economic, and policy research on energy efficiency and its implementation - particularly in developing countries. Three of his best-known technologies for the developing-world are "UV Waterworks" (a simple, effective, and inexpensive disinfection system for drinking water), the "Berkeley-Darfur Stove" (a low-cost sheet-metal stove that saves fuelwood in internally displaced person's camps in Darfur), and ECAR (ElectroChemical Arsenic Removal) for removing arsenic from water.[3] Gadgil advocates for immediate and strategic action on the part of the research community to apply current scientific knowledge to address world-wide issues relating to climate change.[4]
Education[edit]
Gadgil holds a physics degree from the University of Mumbai, an M.Sc. in physics from Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, and an M.Sc. (1975) and Ph.D. (1979) in physics from the University of California, Berkeley.[5] After completing his Ph.D. he spent 5 years working for a non-profit in India before returning to Berkeley.[6]
Career[edit]
Gadgil Is the Andrew and Virginia Rudd Family Foundation Distinguished Chair and Professor of Safe Water and Sanitation at the University of California, Berkeley.[2] He also has been distinguished professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. At Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) Gadgil is a faculty senior scientist, and former director of the Environmental Energy Technologies Division[3] (2009–2015).[7] From 2012 to 2022, Gadgil was the faculty director of the Development Impact Lab at UC Berkeley. He has taught graduate courses at UC Berkeley since 2006[8] addressing topics such as “Design for Sustainable Communities,” and “Technology and Sustainability”.[9]
Gadgil has served as editor of the journal Annual Review of Environment and Resources since 2009.[10]
Gadgil and Paul Gertler were the founding editors of the Open Access journal Development Engineering, first published by Elsevier in 2016.[11][12]
In 1998 and again in 2006, Gadgil was invited by the Smithsonian Institution's Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation to speak at the National Museum of American History about his life and work.[13]
In September 2022, Springer published an Open Access graduate-level textbook Co-Edited by Gadgil, Introduction to Development Engineering: A Framework with Applications from the Field, freely downloadable from the Springer website.
Documentaries[edit]
Ashok Gadgil is featured in Irena Salina's feature documentary Flow: For Love of Water (2008)[26][27] and Michael Apted's award-winning 1999 documentary Me and Isaac Newton.[28]