Pat McArdle is the former editor of Solar Cookers International's Solar Cooker Review and now serves as SCI's technical advisor. She is a long time advocate of sustainable, renewable energy, and a global promoter of integrated solar thermal cooking technology. She is a retired senior U.S. diplomat, who’s last overseas posting was in northern Afghanistan, where she served as political advisor to a British Army infantry unit.
It was during her year in Afghanistan that she began to build and promote the use of solar cookers. After returning to the U.S. from Afghanistan in 2006, she served for more than five years as a member of the board of directors of Solar Cookers International. She also served as a board member and the president of Washington, DC-base Solar Household Energy.
Pat's award-winning novel Farishta, inspired by the year she spent in Afghanistan includes a sub-plot that involves solar cooking. Farishta was published in hardcover and e-book by Penguin/Riverhead Books in June 2011. A paperback version was released in 2012 and an audiobook version in 2015. Farishta received the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award Grand Prize for General Fiction and the San Diego Book Award. You can read more about Pat’s activities at: http://solarcooking.wikia.com/wiki/Patricia_McArdle.
Prior to her twenty-seven year career with the U.S. Department of State, Pat served for three years as a U.S. Naval officer at a remote communications base in Morocco and for two years as a Peace Corps volunteer/health educator in Paraguay. Pat graduated from the University of New Mexico and received an MBA from the Thunderbird School of International Management. She is the author of numerous articles on solar cooking and the co-author of the Jewish World Watch Solar Cooker Project Best Practices Manual. Her YouTube Channel ‘solarwindmama’ includes more than twenty videos on solar cooking and other energy efficient cooking technologies used in different parts of the world. Pat can be reached via her website: www.patriciamcardle.com