The new, completely revised website of the Environmental Energy Technologies Division, EETD, of Lawrence Berkeley National Lab went live yesterday evening. Please check it out and bookmark it!
Last year, Dr. Ashok Gadgil put together a team to help reduce violence against women, and environmental damage, at the Darfur refugee camps. Begun as the result of a request by the U.S. Agency for International Development, the intention was to reduce the need for refugees (mostly women) to forage for fuelwood increasingly farther away from the relative safety of the camps by introducing energy-efficient cookstoves.
Background on this project is available at Berkeley Lab’s news webzine.
Dr. Ashok Gadgil writes on his team’s progress :
“We have raised $8,000 of a minimum $10,000 needed. Despite very modest funds, we have pushed forward, and completed the next iteration of the design, and currently an engineer from the Bay Area, Brian Tachibana, is in Khartoum getting 50 stoves of this design built locally for field testing. The field test will lead to final tuning of the design after feedback from the refugees. Then we will produce 5000 stoves (if the feedback does not require major redesign, as we hope it won’t). We hope to begin that phase of the work before end of December 2006.”
For reports on the progress of the Darfur Cookstoves project, check the project website:
http://darfurstoves.lbl.gov/
For those interested in donating to this effort, hit the “Donations” tab on this site’s top page.
Christina Galitsky, a researcher in the Lab’s Environmental Energy Technologies Division, has been named one of 35 top innovators in science and technology under the age of 35 by MIT’s Technology Review magazine. She was also honored as Humanitarian of the Year. The honorees are selected by the editors in collaboration with a panel of judges from institutions such as Boston University, Hewlett-Packard Labs, Livermore Lab, Caltech, and Applied Materials. Galitsky has worked with EETD scientist Ashok Gadgil on energy-efficient cookstoves for Darfur, and an inexpensive method to remove arsenic from drinking water. She also led the development of the BEST winery tool for improving the energy efficiency of California’s wine.
Read about the awards: http://www.technologyreview.com/TR35/
Technology Review magazine’s feature story on Galitsky’s humanitarian work: http://www.technologyreview.com/TR35/Profile.aspx?trid=469″