Jakub Tkaczuk

I’m an engineer and researcher at ETH Zürich’s Global Health Engineering group, where I lead a biogas-sensing project and build low-cost instruments and appropriate technology for low- and middle-income countries.

My path here runs through cryogenics and thermodynamics. As a Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellow at CEA Grenoble and NIST Boulder I earned my PhD developing equations of state for cryogenic mixtures of helium, neon and argon — models intended to become thermophysical references. Earlier I studied magnetic refrigeration for CERN’s Future Circular Collider and designed the cryogenic moderator system for the European Spallation Source. Along the way I spent a year at Idiap applying speech-recognition models to tools used by criminal investigators.

Today I care about frugal, open engineering: reliable hardware that works in the field, built as cheaply as possible and shared openly. I’ve supervised around fifty student theses in mechanical engineering and thermodynamics and, as a matter of policy, we publish our hardware theses under a permissive CC-BY licence. A selection of that student work — alongside my own projects — is collected on the projects page.