Berkeley’s writing requirement? Bold vision, endless revision.
College Writing Programs at Berkeley is, for the record, a singular proper noun. And no, that will not be on the final exam. There is, for the record, no final exam. Even in R1A, a required class for every Berkeley undergrad who hasn’t passed the state’s standardized writing-placement test, students spend the semester compiling [...]
A Passport to Opportunity
Françoise Tourniaire Ph.D. ’84 has an adventurous spirit—except when it comes to the cold. That’s how Tourniaire, as a young math student from France, happened to land at UC Berkeley for a yearlong study-abroad program in 1979. Berkeley got the nod over chilly Cornell.
‘Search the literature’ gets a whole new ease from a doctoral student
Aditi Muralidharan, a doctoral student in computer science, has changed the nature of literary scholarship by introducing something like human intuition to the process of searching via computer, thereby shrinking what used to take days and months to mere minutes.
Panoramic views of the Costa Rican cloud forest (and Ph.D. research) from a Berkeley-plus team
Greg Goldsmith has his head in the clouds. But the Berkeley graduate student is also firmly grounded in today’s reality: the Central American cloud forests he loves are threatened by global warming.
LBNL director Paul Alivisatos (Ph.D. ’86) wins the Wolf Prize in Chemistry for 2012
Paul Alivisatos, director of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and a UC Berkeley professor of nanotechnology, has won the prestigious Wolf Foundation Prize in Chemistry for 2012.
Decoding Physical Differences, With Help from a Vital Fellowship
At UC Berkeley, Lori Glenwinkle examines how animal genomes evolve in response to environmental changes. An essential fellowships gives her the intellectual freedom to explore these new paths.
Thinking beyond the score: music Ph.D. student is here thanks to the Ausfahl Family Fellowship
Jamie Apgar says he owes his “whole presence at Berkeley” to the Ausfahl Family Fellowship Fund. It enabled the Baltimore native to return to his studies, after performing professionally following his 2009 graduation from Yale.
Saul Perlmutter Ph.D. ‘89 wins the Nobel Prize in Physics
Talking about the discovery that led to the prize, Perlmutter said in a press conference that it was “the slowest aha moment you’ve ever heard”
Berkeley students win a sizable share of environmental fellowships
In August, the Robert and Patricia Switzer Foundation announced the winners of its half-million dollars worth of environmental fellowships and grants for 2011. There were 20 of them around the United States, master’s and Ph.D. students. Four — a fifth of the total — are pursuing studies at Berkeley.
Celebrating Joe Duggan’s epic career as teacher, scholar, and dean
On June 30, Duggan handed over the reins of his associate deanship, having previously retired in 2005 from his formal teaching duties in two departments. Read a tribute to his long and distinguished career, view a slideshow of the decades, see messages from his colleagues and former students — and add your own message, if you like!
Steps to success, or how the fellowship was won
Sending in all those applications can pay off, and sometimes we hear about it. Case in point: Ph.D. student Vasundhara Sirnate was selected for a $30,000 award. She tells us how that happened.
Big Man On Campus: Robert Reich at Berkeley
Physically one of the smallest people on campus, Robert Reich has a vast list of accomplishments, a huge national reputation, and an ego to which none of that particularly matters.
Charlie Yeh
Bringing an engineer’s expertise to the diagnosis and cure of health problems, the Taiwanese Ph.D. student chose UC Berkeley, which has a joint program in bioengineering with UCSF Medical School, to launch a career that will seamlessly combine his interests in biology and engineering.
The Peace Corps is very Berkeley
In the half century since the Corps was founded, UC Berkeley has supplied more volunteers than any other university in the U.S. — over 3,400 in more than 120 countries.
Grad-student archaeologist returns to coal country to aid a vibrant movement
Brandon Nida wants to save a mountain — coal-rich Blair Mountain, in West Virginia, where thousands of coal miners battled a private army and federal troops in the largest labor insurrection in U.S. history
Earth-shaken ’89 cal grad student now leads the fix of the broken Bay Bridge
Marwan Nader (M.S.’89, Ph.D.’92 CE) was walking outside Davis Hall when the earthquake struck. Twenty-two years later, he’s the lead design engineer of the new portion of the Bay Bridge.
Impatience helped produce Unix — and, eventually, some big honors
It only took 40-some years, but Unix pioneers Ken Thompson (a Berkeley alum) and Dennis Ritchie have waited — and continued to breathe — long enough to receive a major international honor for their creation. They were announced in January as 2011 recipients of the Japan Prize.
Optometry’s cheerful greeter
This jolly bronze of optometry pioneer Meredith Morgan, seasonally attired at the end of last year, is normally capless — but equally genial — as it stands at eye level, day in and day out, in the lobby/reception area of the School of Optometry’s Minor Hall clinic.
Michael P. Wilson, (M.P.H. ’98, Ph.D. ’03) Wins Coveted Switzer Prize
Michael P. Wilson has been a member of the Switzer Network since receiving a Switzer Foundation fellowship in 2002. He is on the cutting edge of the emerging field of green chemistry. A product of the environmental health sciences program at the School of Public Health (M.P.H. ’98, Ph.D. ’03), he has been a research scientist at the school’s Center for Occupational and Environmental Health since receiving his doctorate.
Ellie Schindelman
Earlier, the “prize patrol” had (also with GSI connivance) snuck into a computer-lab setting on the third floor of Haviland Hall, where public health lecturer Ellie Schindelman was team-teaching a class on using video for public health leadership and advocacy.
Gary Sposito “ambushed” with honors
Environmental Science, Policy and Management professor Gary Sposito is not fond of having his picture taken. When a friendly deputation (including his GSIs and departmental chair, colleagues, and staff and, oh, God, a photographer) invaded his Wheeler Hall classroom earlier this month to surprise him with an honor, his first impulse was to cross his arms in front of his face, not like a perp-walked mob boss, but more reminiscent of an exhausted exorcist facing the ultimate evil.
From the Berkeley school to the New York school
New York painter Norman Kanter B. A. ‘54, M. A. ’55 has been enjoying his views of lower Manhattan since renovations took place on his loft in Tribeca, where he’s lived and worked for more than 40 years. The project, says Kanter, led to some surprising revelations.
Student Profile: Rachel Preminger
Rachel Preminger fell in love with classics during a required humanities course as a first-year student at Reed College. “The lessons you learn are so portable,” she says. “It’s not about memorizing facts but learning how to think.”
Student Profile: Dan Fahey
An environmental and health crisis ravaging the Democratic Republic of the Congo has long been overlooked, says Dan Fahey. Despite years of bloody conflict, the region “wasn’t on the radar of the international community,” says Dan, a Ph.D. candidate in Berkeley’s Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management.
