Ashok Gadgil
Ashok Gadgil (born November 15, 1950 in Mumbai ) is an Indian physicist who deals with questions of energy policy, renewable energies and energy saving.
Gadgil studied physics at the University of Bombay with a bachelor's degree in 1971 and a master's degree at the Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur in 1973 and at the University of California, Berkeley , with a master's degree in 1975 and a doctorate in 1979. From 1988 he was at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Environmental Energy Technologies Division). He is the Andrew and Virginia Rudd Family Foundation Professor of Safe Water and Sanitation at Berkeley in the Civil and Environmental Engineering Faculty.
He developed cheap, environmentally friendly technologies for the common people of the third world, such as the Darfur oven and techniques (UV Waterworks, UVW) for clean drinking water with disinfection by means of UV radiation from a 40 watt UV lamp, for example with a car battery could be operated. The motivation for this arose on the occasion of a cholera epidemic in South Asia in 1993, and he presented the first 60 watt UV lamp in 1996. For this he received the Global Innovation Award in 2012 and the Prince Sultan bin Abdulaziz International Prize for Water (Creativity Prize 2010–2012).
He developed efficient stoves following a request from the US Agency for International Development (USAID) in 2004. The existing stoves were inefficient and women in Darfur risked rape while collecting firewood or had to trade firewood for food. This led to many years of development work, whereby the ovens should be cheap and locally producible. The Berkeley Darfur furnace was also adapted to regional customs.
His laboratory also developed methods of arsenic decontamination for drinking water in India and Bangladesh, where this is a major problem.
As a physicist, he had also dealt with general relativity, numerical hydrodynamics and applied mathematics.
In 1981 he was a visiting scientist at the Tata Energy Research Institute in New Delhi and from 1980 to 1983 at the CNRS in Paris.
In 2015 he received the Leo Szilard Lectureship Award . He is a fellow of the American Physical Society . In 2014 he was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame .
Web links
- Gadgil Lab
- Website at UC Berkeley
- Biography at WIPO
- Ashok Gadgil, the humanitarian inventor, IEEE Spectrum
- Gadgil et al. a. Stove Solutions, 2013
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Gadgil, Ashok |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Indian physicist |
| DATE OF BIRTH | November 15, 1950 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Mumbai |