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Duane teaches environmental planning and policy, infrastructure planning, environmental impacts of energy systems, land use planning, environmentally sustainable community development, and the impacts of urban development on fragile natural systems. He is particularly interested in how institutional structures can be modified to address competing social values. He is therefore studying law and legal institutions in greater detail, since they dominate decision-making in the modern administrative state. His primary institutional focus is domestic, but has also worked in or traveled in over thirty countries and has supervised graduate students in over a dozen other countries. He has published on a wide variety of topics from electricity regulation in California to community participation in ecosystems 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.

A principal research activity of Inez Fung is the carbon dioxide cycle. Fung’s lab uses details of the atmospheric CO2 distribution (e.g. the difference in hemispheric loading, the changes in the seasonal amplitude over time), together with atmospheric transport models to deduce the location of the carbon sink. Fung hypothesizes that the terrestrial biosphere of the northern hemisphere may be as important as the oceans as a repository for anthropogenic CO2. Another research focus is the dust cycle. Fine dust particles lofted from arid surfaces are transported long distances. While airborne, they reflect sunlight, but may, depending on their sizes and composition, absorb terrestrial radiation. When deposited to the surface oceans, the iron in the dust may be the critical limiting micronutrient for marine productivity in some ocean regions. To tackle this problem, she is combining mineralogic information about soil particles, satellite and in-situ observations, atmospheric circulation models and ocean biology models to gain an appreciation of the many roles of dust.