PhD student receives two grants for a campus restoration project
Dylan Chapple’s project, “Fitting Plant to Space,” will measure soil characteristics and landscape factors at each site along the campus’s Strawberry Creek before planting new vegetation. The project will engage 500 volunteers.
J-School student wins WHCA Scholarship and meets President Obama
Angela Hart, a student in the Graduate School of Journalism, was a recipient of the 2013 White House Correspondents Association (WHCA) Student Scholarship. In April, Hart attended the WHCA awards dinner in Washington D.C. and a luncheon with President Obama.
Minh Dang, MSW ’13, named by White House as a Champion for Change
Recognized by the White House as a Champion of Change, Dang has become nationally known for fighting the commercial sexual exploitation of children — helping many heal the pain and shame associated with it.
Charlotte W. Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Fellows chosen
UC Berkeley doctoral candidate Roi Livne and alumna Elham Mireshghi were among 22 fellows selected to receive a Charlotte W. Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship.
J-School student wins Dorothea Lange Fellowship
Molly Oleson, a student in the Graduate School of Journalism, is this year’s winner of the Dorothea Lange Fellowship, on the merits of a five-photograph submission.
Brett Fellow explores LGBT theology and Filipino queerness
Second annual award from the Philip Brett LGBT Fund, to support a Berkeley graduate students pursuing LGBT-related scholarship in any field, is made to Ethnic Studies Ph.D. student Darren Arquero.
Meet the Winners of the 2013 Distinguished Fellows Video Contest
Earlier this year, we asked winners of the Berkeley, Chancellor’s and a few other fellowship programs to submit short videos about why they chose Berkeley for graduate study. See what they had to say.
Berkeley Alumna Frances Arnold Wins National Medal of Technology and Innovation
With a 1985 Berkeley chemical engineering Ph.D., Frances Arnold is now a professor at Caltech and finding ways to produce fuels that can help lower carbon dioxide emissions. Her work brought her a medal from President Barack Obama in February.
Ms. Cowan gets a Una Fellowship — and, for one brief evening, Una’s necklace
Although from a small high school in Kentucky that was not academically oriented, Sarah Cowan applied to top colleges around the country, utilizing “a tenacity and hunger than overshadowed fear, uncertainty, and perhaps common sense.”
Brett Fellowship’s Numero Uno seeks an Italian Studies Ph.D.
The first-ever fellowship award from the Philip Brett LGBT Fund was made this spring by a faculty committee choosing from a highly competitive field of 19 applicants. The winner was Chris Atwood, a Ph.D. student in Italian Studies. He is currently working on his dissertation, which is entitled: “‘Wanting Home’: Italy, Same-Sex Desire, and Narrative.” [...]
Berkeley Academic Senate’s 2012 top honor goes to former chancellor Robert Berdahl and professor-alumna Marian Diamond
At a dinner in May, the UC Berkeley Division of the Academic Senate gave its highest honor, the Clark Kerr Award, to two people with high-profile connections to the Berkeley campus, Robert M. Berdahl, who was Berkeley’s eighth chancellor, and Marian C. Diamond, professor emeritus of integrative biology and a world-renowned brain researcher.
GSIs (and their mentors) are central to Berkeley’s teaching mission
Dear Graduate Students, As the spring semester drew to a close, I enjoyed several opportunities to celebrate great teaching by graduate students. At the Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor Award ceremony on the first of May at International House, we acknowledged the excellent work of 276 GSIs, out of the more than three thousand GSIs who [...]
Out of thousands of dedicated GSIs, 276 are named especially outstanding
Their departments nominate them, a GSI-related faculty committee selects them, and colleagues, family, and friends come together to honor them in a commencement-like ceremony. What it all means is that they’re already pretty darn good teachers.
GSI honors for a dozen new ways of helping people learn
These 12 people, in some ways the crème de la crème of this year’s top graduate student instructors, have effectively, and often cleverly, identified, addressed, and documented a teaching problem they encountered and, for the benefit of all, told how they solved it. Read, for instance, how Sonja Schwartz reinvented the bean jar.
The key to totally surprising a mentor: no leaks
So far, nobody’s let the cat out of the bag, so the surprise has been total in every case. Despite Berkeley’s long tradition of protest and California’s reputation for spontaneity, faculty members here simply don’t expect to be interrupted by outsiders while they’re teaching a class. When it dawns on them that the invasion brings unexpected but happy news for them personally, decorum goes out the window.
Sociology’s Nazanin Shahrokni receives a Woodrow Wilson Women’s Studies Dissertation Fellowship
Nazanin Shahrokni, a doctoral candidate in sociology at Berkeley, has been awarded one of six national 2012 Woodrow Wilson Women’s Studies Dissertation Fellowships. Shahrokni’s dissertation is titled “Gender Segregated Spaces: Traversing the “Public” in the Islamic Republic of Iran.” Since its establishment in 1979, the Islamic Republic of Iran has made efforts to segregate urban [...]
Grad alum Ricardo Cortez, now at Tulane, wins the prestigious Blackwell-Tapia Prize
Tulane University math professor Ricardo Cortez, who is internationally regarded as a leading researcher in fluid dynamics and mathematical modeling, has been chosen as the 2012 recipient of the Blackwell-Tapia Prize, which will be presented in November. In 2010, Cortez received the Distinguished Undergraduate Institution Mentor Award from the Society for Advancement of Chicanos and [...]
Berkeley doctoral candidates Mont Allen, Robert Harkins, Bruno Reinhardt, and Bharat Venkat win prestigious Newcombe Fellowships
Out of a field of 550 applicants, 21 winners of the 2012 Newcombe Fellowship were just announced, and Berkeley graduate students won four, nearly a fifth of the total.
Mentoring comes of age at Berkeley
Not all aspects of a dean’s job bring smiles; it’s hardly possible to please everyone all the time. That said, there are events during the year that irresistibly bring a smile to my face, and make a lot of people very happy indeed. The most highly anticipated of such events are just around the corner: [...]
Grad-student-led project gets a first prize in the Big Ideas @ Berkeley contest
Acopio, a social venture that translates from the Spanish as “harvest,” picked up the $10,000 first-place prize in the Big Ideas scaling-up category, which helps previous contest winners advance existing projects. The information technology-based, development venture aims to improve the circumstances of rural, small-hold coffee farmers and cooperatives in Latin America. Led by Berkeley graduate [...]
Cal grad student John Osborn and undergrad Reginald James win two of the first AP-Google Journalism and Technology Scholarships
Of the half-dozen students selected to receive the new scholarships, two will use them at Berkeley, one pursuing a graduate degree, the other an undergraduate — together comprising one-third of the first awards, if you’re counting.
Google’s Eric Schmidt and two other grad alumni receive high Cal Alumni Association honors
The magnitude of what the faculty and the students did back then still makes Schmidt reflective. “The consequence of our research,” says the self-confessed former nerd, with “our” meaning all those physicists and semiconductor-makers and others, “is that another five billion people will join the global conversation. That’s billion with a b.”
From the Berkeley garage of Laura Stachel and Hal Aronson, a solar initiative that saves lives
We last reported on doctoral candidate Laura Stachel in 2010, when she won the Graduate Student Award for Civic Engagement at the Chancellor’s Awards for Public Service ceremony in 2010 and also became a Bay Area winner of the Jefferson Award for public service. The news website Berkeleyside has caught us up on what’s been happening [...]
Meet the Winners of the 2012 Distinguished Fellows Video Contest
Meet the winners of the 2012 Distinguished Fellows Video Contest: First Place: Jeremy Chase Crawford. Second Place: Arturo Cortez. Third Place: Kristina Kangas. Winners received conference travel awards in the amounts of $1,000, $500, and $250, respectively.
