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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.

Kara Nelson conducts research on the detection, removal and inactivation of pathogens in drinking water, wastewater, and sludge, as well as the identification of pollution sources and impacts on surface waters. A major focus of Professor Nelson’s work is the development of low-cost, effective treatment technologies in developing countries. She currently advises research projects in the United States, Mexico, India, Sri Lanka, and Morocco. Nelson has demonstrated a safe and inexpensive way to dramatically increase the amount of recycled wastewater that can be produced at treatment plants in California - by simply increasing the flowrate of the water through existing sand filters (see http://www.coe.berkeley.edu/forefront/spring2005/nelson.html). She is elucidating the photochemical and photobiological mechanisms by which sunlight can inactivate pathogens, with key implications for natural surface waters as well as low-cost methods for drinking water and wastewater treatment. She has invented a low-cost method for disinfecting drinking water at households in developing countries using UV light, and are now field testing the technology in Mexico and tsunami-affected regions of Sri Lanka (joint between Civil Engineering and Energy and Resources, along with Dan Kammen).

Isha Ray’s research interests are the politics and economics of access to water in developing countries, technology and development, common property resource management and social science research methods. She has research experience on problems of drinking water as well as irrigation management in India, Sri Lanka, Turkey and Mexico. She also has extensive work experience in the non-profit sector on sustainable rural development in India, and on international water-and-development problems. Professor Ray serves on the advisory committee of several water and development related NGOs and on the editorial committee of Annual Review of Environment and Resources.