Young Innovator Profile: Christina Galitsky

Nearly three years ago, Christina Galitsky joined a team of scientists who had been asked an urgent question: Was it possible for researchers at California's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), where she is an engineer, to devise an expedient method for the displaced of war-torn Darfur to cook their meals?

For the more than 2 million people uprooted by Sudan's genocidal civil war since 2003, it is a life-and-death question. "The refugee women," says Galitsky, "had long ago exhausted supplies of wood near the [refugee] camps. As a result, they were forced to move farther and farther into the surrounding country in a search for cooking fuel."

In 2005, Galitsky and physicist Ashok Gadgil, an LBNL senior scientist, proposed a solution: a highly energy-efficient and portable cookstove, one that, Galitsky says, would "sharply reduce the need for refugees to leave the camps."

But Gadgil and Galitsky then had to persuade the refugees to use the stove — a sheet-metal cylindrical contraption 61 centimeters high and 36 centimeters in diameter. Galitsky and Gadgil went to Darfur in November 2005. Galitsky's job was demonstrating the stove to the wary women, who were used to balancing pots on stones over a wood fire, as their ancestors had done for centuries. She was able to show that in the new stove, making a pot of assida, the dough-like Sudanese staple of flour, oil, and water, used only half as much wood.

In 1999, after earning a master of science degree in chemical engineering from the University of California-Berkeley, Galitsky opted out of a PhD program to put her training to immediate, more practical use. "I wanted to work on problems that had a direct, profound impact on people's lives," she says, "things like clean water or clean air, things we need just to live."

The impact was even more direct in Darfur, where refugees appear to like the stoves. "We're hoping news of the stove spreads even more by word of mouth in the camps," Galitsky says, "which is the way most things like this have to work." Late last year, when 50 Sudanese families were given an opportunity to buy the stoves — at $2.50 apiece — every one of them took it.

This article is excerpted from "Hot Idea" by Neil Henry, a professor of journalism at the University of California at Berkely, and originally appeared in SMITHSONIAN, October 2007.

The opinions expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the U.S. government.