Search: Faculty directory, Water Quality and Management

Ashok Gadgil received an award from San Jose’s (CA) Tech Museum of Innovation, which honors people who use technology to help humanity, for developing a water purification system that kills bacteria with ultraviolet light. The system, called UV Waterworks and marketed by WaterHealth International, Inc., is used daily by about 300,000 people in Mexico, the Philippines, and several other countries. Several systems will soon be installed in his native India. Money is currently being raised to install the system in tsunami-stricken regions of Sri Lanka and India. His invention appeared in Forbes Magazine in 2003. Ashok Gadgil is also developing a cheap and effective way to provide safe drinking water to 60 million Bangladeshis who live under the specter of arsenic poisoning. His idea is to create arsenic filters from coal ash, the fine gray powder that piles up at the bottom of furnaces at all coal-fired power stations, waiting to be discarded. Although still in the investigational stage, Gadgil’s technique would involve coating the ash with a compound that attracts arsenic, filling teabag-sized pouches with the powder, and distributing the filters throughout the countryside, one per family per day. Water drawn from any one of the millions of contaminated wells that dot Bangladesh could then be poured through the filter and safely consumed. Gadgil has numerous publications spanning the areas of drinking water efficiency and indoor air quality.

Harrison Fraker is an award winning architect and Founding Partner of the Princeton Energy Group. Recently, he led an initiative to design three transit-oriented neighborhoods for Tianjin, China, a city of 11 million. The idea in this design is not just green buildings but whole systems, encouraging officials to integrate planning for power, water, waste and transportation for better environmental results. Fraker teaches design studio and architectural internship program and current research activity includes affordable manufactured housing, urban design, sustainable development and ecological design.

Michael's research in economics has focused largely on aspects of modeling individual choice behavior, with applications to demand forecasting, inducing conservation, environmental regulation and economic valuation. He is a leading authority on the methodology of non-market valuation using techniques of both revealed and stated preference. A team of two dozen prominent experts led by professors from the California Climate Change Center released a new report in early 2006 on the economic implications of meeting global warming emissions reduction targets established by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2005. The governor's goals include reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions to 2000 levels by the year 2010, and to 1990 levels by 2020. "Managing Greenhouse Gas Emissions in California," the first report in a series of economic and technology assessments, finds that just eight policy strategies can take California halfway to the governor's 2020 targets, while increasing the Gross State Product by approximately $60 billion and creating more than 20,000 new jobs.