|
Student Spotlight: Joshua Apte
Student Spotlight Directory
 PHOTO/M. GADGIL
ERG PhD Student,Joshua Apte.
|
 In-your-face exposure: no escape from motorcycle exhaust in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.
|
"Exposure to Vehicle Air Pollution in Developing World Cities"
Josh Apte is a PhD student in the Energy and Resources Group at the University of California, Berkeley. Josh’s research explores the air quality, health, and climate change implications of the current rapid adoption of motor vehicles in developing world cities.
Private vehicles constitute one of the fastest growing sources of local air pollution in most developing world cities. However, population exposure to vehicle air pollution is not well quantified in many of these cities. Josh’s dissertation research uses quantitative modeling techniques to better understand the relationship between vehicle emissions, urban form, and population exposure to vehicle air pollution. This work can help inform estimates of the health costs of motorization, which are often of more pressing local concern than greenhouse gas emissions.
One key challenge to measuring the impacts of vehicle emissions lies in the design of ambient air pollution monitoring systems of developing world cities, which are often deliberately sited to avoid being influenced by nearby roadways. However, in many cities populations spend large amounts of time in close proximity to roads while commuting, working, and shopping. These near-roadway environments represent a potentially large source of air pollution exposure that is not adequately captured by ambient air pollution monitoring systems. Working with Professor Bill Nazaroff in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Josh is using air pollution models and high-resolution data sets to quantify the importance of air pollution exposures in near-roadway microenvironments.
Field trial of solar WLED flashlights, Kutch District, India, 2007.
|
 Measuring light output distributions of an Indian kerosene “Petromax” lantern at UC Berkeley.
|
Josh’s research interests are rooted in his passion for sustainable development, something he shares with many fellow ERGies. Beyond his dissertation research, Josh is part of an interdisciplinary team of students exploring the potential for inexpensive energy-efficient lighting devices to replace unsafe and costly fuel-based lamps, the only source of light for over 1.5 billion people worldwide. In collaboration with the NGO Sahjeevan and firm AuroRE, Josh and his teammates conducted a field test of WLED lighting systems in a set of rural villages in Gujarat state, India in 2007.
Josh has benefited greatly from ERG’s diverse and supportive intellectual environment. In addition to working with ERG’s stellar students and faculty, he’s been able to collaborate with scholars in Berkeley’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Public Health, and City and Regional Planning. He’s also grateful for financial support from two Hindi Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) fellowships and a Graduate Student Researcher (GSR) position at the Energy Biosciences Institute. He is currently funded by an EPA STAR Graduate Research Fellowship.
Josh completed his MS at ERG in 2008 and has an Environmental Science degree from Brown University. Prior to coming to Berkeley, Josh worked as a research associate in the Building Technologies Department at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, where he developed models to estimate the savings potentials of a variety of energy-efficient building technologies. He has also advised WalMart on strategies for increased consumer adoption of compact fluorescent lamps (CFLs) and worked with WaterHealth International in the installation of community safe water drinking systems in rural Andhra Pradesh state, India.
3/09
|
