Ashok Gadgil

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. Concurrently, Dr. Gadgil is Director of the Environmental Energy Technologies Division, at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, located next to UC Berkeley Campus. In 2004-05, Dr. Gadgil was the MAP/Ming Visiting Professor in Civil and Environmental Engineering at Stanford. 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 respectively.

In parallel with his research in Indoor Environment, Dr. Gadgil has a long record of innovative solutions to problems in the developing world. He has pioneered the way to accelerate access to compact fluorescent lamps for poor households in developing countries; invented and commercialized a method to affordably disinfect drinking water for poor communities; designed, tested, and then found a way to build, field-test, and disseminate thousands of fuel-efficient stoves to refugee women in Darfur; and invented and is currently field-testing an extremely low cost, robust, and technically reliable method to remove arsenic from drinking water in Bangladesh and nearby regions.

Dr. Gadgil is recipient of numerous awards and honors. In 1991 he was named a Pew Fellow in Conservation and the Environment for his work on energy efficiency. In 1996 he received the Discover Award for the most significant environmental invention of the year, and also the Popular Science "Best of What's New" award, both for his water disinfector. In 2002, he won the World Technology Award for Energy. In 2001 he was one of the 35 top American inventors featured in the book "Inventing Modern America", published by MIT Press. In 2004, he was won the "Tech Laureate" award from the San Jose Museum of Science and Technology, and in 2006 the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry named him as one of the exemplars of the "Spirit of Leonardo da Vinci in modern America." In 2007 he received the "Breakthrough Award" from Popular Mechanics for the Berkeley-Darfur Stove. In 2009 he won the prestigious Heinz Award, which cites him for research, innovation, and humanism. In 2011 Dr. Gadgil received "The European Inventor Award, Non-European countries" for the invention and development of UV Waterworks, a UV water disinfection device which is providing safe drinking water for communities in the developing world.