Engineers and Inventors: Ashok Gadgil and His Three World-Changing Inventions

Ashok Gadgil is an engineering professor at UC Berkeley. But in his spare time, he’s come up with solutions for water, cooking, and energy quandaries, improving lives from the Sudan to India.  We came across this fantastic article about the little known Dr. Gadgil and his inventions.

This is a great article on an engineer who has developed not one, but two things that are changing the world.  He’s working on a third.

An engineer at the University of California, his first major accomplishment was convincing developing utilities to invest in energy-saving devices.

His second project was to develop UV Waterworks, a device that supplies clean drinking water to almost 5 million people per day.  The device is super-simple and can be repaired and maintained by people in far-flung villages and produce drinkable water for mere cents.

Now Gadgil has received the  Lemelson-MIT Award for Global Innovation  for his work  on a device that allows rural women to cook with less firewood.  It seems like a trivial device at first, but it was inspired by the plight of women in Darfur, who had to leave the safety of their camps to look for firewood and were systematically assaulted when caught.  The idea was to cut down on their need for firewood, and increase the safety of the women.

“Everybody has to be able to participate in a future that they want to live for. That’s what technology can do.”
Dean Kamen