Danny Wilson’s PhD Research in the News: Quantifying the Crisis – Cooking Contributes to Millions of Deaths Around The World

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Danny Wilson’s doctoral research was recently the subject of a Seeker (Discovery Communications) news article and video (Global Issues, Nov. 15, 2016).

Danny’s dissertation was titled: “Quantifying the Crisis of Cooking: Next-Generation Monitoring and Evaluation of a Global Health and Environmental Disaster”. After graduation from UC Berkeley in Mechanical Engineering with a minor in Development Engineering, Danny accepted a position as  a postdoctoral researcher at the Lawrence Berkeley National Labs. His PhD advisors were Alice M. Agogino and Ashok Gadgil. Danny is a former Fulbright Fellow and National Science Foundation Fellow.

Excerpt: Millions of people die each year from diseases linked to cooking in their homes. How can cooking cause such a deadly global health crisis? Nearly half the people on Earth use wood or coal to cook their food, and every year three to four million people die from illnesses related to fuel used for cooking.

“People burn these inefficient fires usually in their home,” Danny Wilson, a development engineer at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, told Seeker. “They’re producing a lot of smoke, it’s as if you were barbecuing right there in your kitchen. And they’re doing that three times a day, every day.”

The improved “cook stoves are designed to really satisfy two important needs for people,” Wilson told Seeker. “One is to reduce the amount of fuel that people have to burn to cook their food, then the second objective is to reduce the amount of smoke that people are exposed to.”