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.
Life after dissertation: What’s next for degree candidates?
Political Science doctoral student Jason W. Blakely reflects on his intellectual growth at Berkeley, dissertation writing, and gratitude.
Asian Sorority Creates New Graduate Fellowship
The Sigma Omicron Pi Sorority, Inc., Fund for Graduate Fellowships will be used to support high-achieving female graduate students.
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.
Berkeley leads the way in NSF fellowships
The National Science Foundation fellowship is a crown jewel of graduate student awards. And Berkeley students lead the nation in capturing these prestigious and highly competitive grants. Here are 6 of this year’s recipients.
Inspired by the Intersection Between Science and Humanities
Jessica Ling, Ph.D. candidate in English, was awarded the Yoshiko Uchida Endowed Scholarship, which assists Asian graduate students who want to become writers. With the help of her fellowship, Jessica is pursuing research on the nineteenth-century novel.
The assignment of a lifetime
Peter Soler, a chemical engineering grad student, with the help of an NSF research fellowship, is helping build an artificial kidney that may be a game-changer for two million patients.
M.F.A. Graduate Bridges Place and Art
The new Bay Bridge is still more than a year away from opening, but it’s already inspiring the art of Amanda Hughen, M.F.A. ’03. Hughen and her frequent collaborator, Jennifer Starkweather, created a series of abstract prints, paintings, and drawings that reflect the past and future of the Bay Bridge. Titled “Approach, Transition, Touchdown,” the [...]
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.
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.
Fellowships: do people here get them? People do.
Many apply, but few are chosen. Are any of those few from Berkeley? It’s unpredictable, but yes, it definitely happens. Here are some recent cases in point.
‘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.
