Fenix International

September 30, 2010

Jonas Ketterle, a top mechanical engineering student at Stanford University, and his colleague Mike Lin, a sustainable-design lecturer at Stanford and Yale, are studying how 150 million people in developing countries make do using electricity from hacked car batteries.

An estimated 1.5 billion people worldwide live without dependable electric power. In places like Kenya, lead-acid batteries are affixed to bare wires and used to charge cellphones, radios and lights. By collecting baseline data on how these batteries are used, the two researchers hope to show that an improved battery system can hasten rural electrification.

But Mr. Ketterle, 23, and Mr. Lin, 28, struggle to pay for their research. The grant-making structure of their field and of the institutions in which they were trained means that small-scale research grants of less than $50,000 — the kind that could support new researchers with untested, independent ideas — are limited. That is where Eureka Fund comes in...

Link to Full Article by VICTORIA SCHLESINGER