More Efficient Cookstoves for Haiti: In The Lab with Katee Lask

November 28, 2011

A blog post by Liz Boatman, graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, for the Berkeley Science Review:

Just up the hill at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, a handful of UC Berkeley graduate and undergraduate students congregate in warehouse-like Building 60 each week to cook up two gallons of rice and beans, flavored with salt and garlic to taste. The students aren't especially hungry for this typical Haitian meal (in fact, they're probably a bit tired of it at this point)–they're conducting experiments on cook stove efficiency. Arguably, they are doing some of the most important research currently being carried out at Berkeley, all in a facility that is a far cry from what we usually think of as a high-tech engineering laboratory.

The team is part of the research group of Ashok Gadgil, professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) at UC Berkeley. One of his students, Katee Lask, recently gave me a tour of the group's laboratory and spoke to me about their current efforts toward helping Haitian refugees.