The most highly anticipated of such events are just around the corner: commencements, a burst of successful achievements by all the students being rewarded for their hard work with prestigious degrees. Those come along in mid-May.

But we just held — on April 18 — an event that kicks off the feel-good season for  those of us affiliated with graduate programs: a celebration of the value and excellence of individual faculty members who are outstanding mentors of graduate students.  This is the sixth consecutive year that we’ve presented our mentoring awards together with the Graduate Assembly and its complementary awards for faculty.

The elapsed years demonstrate that these awards have staying power.  In fact, they’re a very tangible part of a larger trend on our campus.

Mentorship has gained an ever higher profile  at Berkeley, as more and more faculty members find ways to help more and more students in academical, professional, and even personal spheres — and are recognized for the qualities of above-and-beyond dedication and caring that fuel that vital activity.

George Breslauer, the Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost of the campus, made that clear to the audience at our April 18 event: “Let me tell you what a different institution this is from back when I arrived 41 years ago.  I think the campuswide Distinguished Teaching Award, which had only just been inaugurated a few years before that, may have been the only such recognition event on the campus.”  Since then, more teaching awards have been established and,  in the last decade or so, they’ve been joined by mentoring awards and the ceremonies that celebrate them.  Events like this, Breslauer continued, “reinforce the kind of behavior that we value as a community.  Recognition is not just receiving in the mail a letter of thanks.  Recognition is most powerful as a community-building exercise when it is done in front of others, when others see the acknowledgment being offered and celebrated.”

Just before EVCP Breslauer spoke, Elizabeth De La Torre, Campus Affairs Vice President of the Graduate Assembly, expressed the GA’s thanks to his office for a commitment of funds that will underwrite their Faculty Mentor Awards for the next five years.  Breslauer then gave even better news: that he would extend the funding to ten years.

I’ll list here the winners honored at our ceremony.  (More extensive coverage will follow next month, with pictures and words from the recipients and some of those who nominated them.)  They are:

The Distinguished Faculty Mentor Award (presented by the Graduate Assembly)

• Alastair Iles, assistant professor, Environmental Science, Policy, and Management
• Teresa Caldeira, professor, City and Regional Planning
• Craig Moritz, professor, Integrative Biology

The Sarlo Distinguished Graduate Student Mentoring Awards  (presented by the Graduate Division, established with a grant from the Sarlo Foundation of the Jewish Community Foundation)

Sarlo Award for Senior Faculty

• Nancy Lee Peluso, professor, Environmental Science, Policy, and Management
• Bernd Sturmfels, professor, Mathematics

Sarlo Award for Junior Faculty

• Jake Kosek, assistant professor, Geography

In closing the ceremony,I shared more good news about two mentoring-related developments.

The first: over the last year I collaborated with the Associate Vice Provost for the Faculty  and others to put in place new “Guidelines for the Evaluation of Graduate Student Mentoring in Faculty Performance Reviews.”  This means that quality mentoring, which had not been accounted for in any formal way, will now be  more properly considered in faculty performance reviews.

The second: this summer we’re piloting a new program that will take the model of faculty mentoring of graduate students one step further.  It will pair advanced graduate students with undergraduate students to work together on research projects of mutual interest.  The program is called SMART, which stands for Student Mentoring And Research Teams.  We’ll start with 20 teams in two departments, History and Physics, and SMART will cover stipends, research supplies, conference travel, and the like.  Assuming this summer goes well, we hope to double the pilot program in size for the summer of 2013, with funding from generous supporters.

As you can see, mentoring is a rising star at Berkeley. Its effect is great students made even better.

Best wishes,

Andrew J. Szeri
Dean of the Graduate Division

Chartotte W. Newcombe

The Charlotte W. Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship is the largest and most prestigious such award for Ph.D. candidates in the humanities and social sciences who are addressing questions of ethical and religious values.  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.

Brief information about Berkeley’s winners:

Mont Allen, who also received his bachelor’s degree in geography from UC-Berkeley in 1993, is a doctoral candidate in art history and examines the extinction of mythological imagery in ancient Roman funerary art in his dissertation The Death of Myth on Roman Sarcophagi.

Robert Harkins is a doctoral candidate in modern world history. His dissertation, The Politics of Persecution: Religious Conformity and Republican Obedience in England, 1553-1603, examines the political and social legacies of religious violence in early modern England.

Bruno Reinhardt and Bharat Venkat are both doctoral candidates in anthropology. Reinhardt looks at the overlap of charisma and pedagogy in Ghanaian Pentecostal-Charismatic Bible schools in Tapping into the Anointing: Power, Pedagogy and Ecclesiology in Ghanaian Bible Schools.  Venkat’s dissertation, Moral Failures: Co-Infected Histories and the Diagnostics of Disease in South India, examines the shifting morality of medical diagnoses in southern India.

Each 2012 Newcombe Fellow will receive a 12-month award of $25,000.  The Charlotte W. Newcombe Foundation continues the late Mrs. Newcombe’s lifelong interest in supporting students pursuing degrees in higher education. It has awarded scholarship and fellowship grants totaling over $50 million since 1981.  Mrs. Newcombe died in 1979.  As of 2010, when the Newcombe Foundation itself was honored for distinguished service, 98 colleges and universities had received major grants, and each year, between 800 and 1,000 students received scholarships for more than $1,000.The Fellowships are administered through the Woodrow Wilson Foundation.

Balloons, a certificate, and, oh yes, ten grand: the Acopio team is awarded the Big Ideas “Scaling Up” Grand Prize by contest sponsors Virginia and Andrew Rudd. The students are Iris Shim, on the left, and Ariel Chait and Paul Goodman on the right.

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 students Ariel Chait, Paul Goodman and Iris Shim, the team is developing cost-effective data-management tools designed to enhance the business operations of farmers, strengthen their influence and increase access to finance and markets. The students identified a key challenge to small coffee growers: information.  They software helps track details about the coffee growers’ harvests and business transactions, replacing a hodgepodge of paper-based records and countless handwritten receipts. The software runs on PCs and mobile phones, and the team has designed a data workflow that does not rely on connectivity, as Internet connectivity is often unreliable in the locations where the coffee growers work.

Chait and Goodman are both second-year students in the School of Information’s Master of Information Management and Systems program; Shim is an MBA student in the Haas School of Business.

• Read more about Acopio, the students, and the contest
• More about Big Ideas @ Berkeley

John Osborn

The students were selected by a committee of digital media leaders from applications across the country.  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.

The grad student is John Osborn, 29, of the Graduate School of Journalism.  Osborn did his undergraduate work at Humboldt State University.  He has worked at the North Coast’s Times-Standard,  the Eureka Reporter,  and he founded the political news blog “Reporta.” Osborn’s project will use real-world data from campaign trails, finance and voting records to produce a news game called The Candidate.  On his extensive resume, Osborn describes himself in six words: data nerd, political junkie, newsgame dreamer.

Reginald James

The undergraduate is Reginald James, 30, a junior who is studying political science and African-American studies.  James is a graduate of Laney College in Oakland and the College of Alameda. He founded the campus newspaper Harambee, which later expanded to community colleges throughout California, and he currently hosts The Black Hour, an internet radio show. He’s won awards from the Bay Area of Black Journalists Association and Journalism Association for Community Colleges. His project will include a hyperlocal news site targeted at the African-American community on the Berkeley campus.

The Online News Association, the world’s largest membership organization of digital journalists, administers the new scholarship program. The other four winners, two graduate students and two undergraduates, are studying at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Northwestern University, the Georgia Institute of Technology, the University of Minnesota.

Top: Engineering dean Shankar Sastry M.S. ‘79, M.S. ‘80, Ph.D. ’81, applauding his grad school classmate, Alumnus of the Year Eric Schmidt M.S. ’79, Ph.D. ’82. Their host was Karen Leong Clancy ’76, president of the Cal Alumni Association. Bottom: Winners of the association’s Excellence in Achievement Award, left to right, Julia Chang Bloch ’64, a former Peace Corps volunteer who became the first U.S. ambassador of Asian-American origin; and two doctors with Cal graduate degrees, Susan Desmond-Hellmann M.S. ’88, chancellor of UCSF, and Barbara Staggers ’76, M.P.H. ’80, a physician at Children’s Hospital in Oakland. (Photos: Peg Skorpinski)

“If you want to know more, Google me.”

The Cal Alumni Association’s awards were announced well in advance, including by us, and the actual presentations came off without a hitch on March 24, one day after the University of California turned 144 years old.

A self-confessed former nerd was honored as Berkeley’s Alumnus of the Year, the association’s tip-top award: Eric Schmidt M.S. ‘79, Ph.D. ‘82, Google’s executive chairman and former CEO.

“I was a very nerdy student, a programmer,”  Schmidt said to the banquet audience at the association’s Charter Gala.  He rode a motorcycle back then, with leather jacket and helmet, to counterbalance his image toward cool.

Coming to Berkeley was part of what Schmidt calls his “relatively inchoate idea to go to California because I thought the weather would be nice — which it is.”  And the electrical engineering and computer science faculty members were some of the best in the country. He liked the idea that here, instead of learning only theoretical stuff about computer science, he could “do things, make things happen, literally writing code to change the world.”

He also absorbed something he didn’t expect.  “I learned something much more fundamental.  I learned something about tolerance and diversity and respect.  All of us, going through the system, might not have know that.  People aren’t born knowing this stuff; you learn it from an institution that has this in its core values.”  He’s proud to say now “that I care about those values as much today as I did when I was 21, when I learned them at Berkeley.”

He has nothing but praise for the pioneering faculty in his field back then, and his fellow grad students.  With the latter he endured “timesharing” on the few available computers — mostly between 10 p.m. and six a.m. for students, “and I can tell you that the food on Northside at four in the morning has not improved — it’s still bad!”  Despite some primitive aspects, it was a heady time, associating with people who are now legends.  “I was part of a team that was led by a fellow named Bill Joy [M.S. ‘79], that ultimately created what is known as Berkeley UNIX, which is the progenitor of much of the technology that you use today and is now seen pretty much everywhere.  We essentially built the architecture of what you know today as the internet, at Berkeley.”

The magnitude of what the faculty and the students (who, of course, became alumni) did back then still makes Schmidt reflective.  “The consequence of our research,” he says, with “our” meaning all those physicists and semiconductor-makers and others, “the consequence of what we did, is that another five billion people will join the global conversation.  That’s billion with a b.”

Schmidt has a sense of commitment to the world that he says “came out of seeing what happened when you put everybody together in a university like Berkeley. “ It was possible to see that “there’s something more important than the specific problems or the specific research, that you do it to make the world a better place.”

He asked his audience to think about Berkeley not as a state university or even as the top research university in the U.S. (“at least by the rankings I’ve seen recently”), but rather “think of it as a global institution that has a responsibility to take the principles of diversity, tolerance, entrepreneurship, innovation, and, most importantly, free speech — most importantly free speech — and take that to the rest of the world that has never seen it, never had the opportunity.”

He had one further request:   “I want you all to fight for learning.  It is the answer to the problems that are true in the world today.  Every one of them is ultimately solved by a learning answer, and understanding answer, a tolerance answer.”

He thanked them for what is “probably the most significant honor I’ll ever get, because it ties my whole life together.”

Also among the honorees

Two alumnae with Berkeley graduate degrees received the association’s Excellence in Achievement Award at the same event.

An oncologist and biotechnology leader, Susan Desmond-Hellmann M.P.H. ‘88 was named one of the world’s seven most “powerful innovators” and “a hero to legions of cancer patients” by Forbes magazine. During her 14 years at Genentech, where she became head of product development, the company became the nation’s leading producer of anti-cancer drug treatments, including Avastin and Herceptin.

“My training in the master of public health program gave me a valuable set of skills in epidemiology and biostatistics that I have used throughout my career in both clinical practice and drug development,” Dr. Desmond-Hellmann says. “I hope that this knowledge and the decisions that it has informed has ultimately benefited many patients.”

Desmond-Hellmann was named to the Biotech Hall of Fame in 2007 and has been listed frequently among Fortune magazine’s Top 50 Most Powerful Women in Business.  Since 2009, she has been chancellor of UC San Francisco, a national center of biomedical research and innovation. She is the first woman to lead that campus.

An authority on the psychosocial and psychobiological needs of adolescents, and a physician at Children’s Hospital & Research Center Oakland, Barbara Staggers B.A. ’76, M.P.H. ‘80 saw Cal for the first time when she was four years old and knew she wanted to go to school here, because “I knew I would get the best education in the world.”

Staggers grew up in Oakland and has devoted much of her life to studying and helping high-risk urban youth in her home town. She co-founded and internship program, Faces for the Future, to inspire and support minority students interested in pursuing careers in health care. She is also a co-founder, medical director, and driving force behind the Chappell Hayes Health Center, a nationally recognized school-based health clinic at West Oakland’s McClymonds High.

— Dick Cortén  

Video of Eric Schmidt’s acceptance speech

Photos of the 2012 Charter Gala

Social entrepreneurs Laura Stachel and Hal Aronson: helping to save lives in developing countries with their solar suitcase invention. A former obstetrician, she has a Cal M.P.H. and is pursuing a doctorate; he's a Cal grad with a UCSC Ph.D.

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 since.  It tells us that

…the city of Berkeley took time to honor two of its citizens. Laura Stachel and her husband Hal Aronson were issued with a proclamation and words of praise from Mayor Tom Bates and Councilmember Linda Maio, among others, at the April 3 meeting of the City Council. The following night, PBS Newshour ran an eight-minute segment on the couple’s work (watch it below). Six months ago, Diane Sawyer introduced Stachel as“Person of the Week” on ABC World News Tonight. Also in October, the pair appeared on CBS after winning the Nokia Tech Awards as part of the San Jose Tech Museum Tech Awards.

Such plaudits have come to the couple, who live with their kids near College Avenue in south Berkeley, because they are literally helping to save people’s lives on a regular basis, and are doing so through a combination of smarts and sheer determination.

Stachel and Aronson’s brainchild was to create a portable “solar suitcase” which is able to provide light to hospitals that face chronic power shortages — a situation many healthcare clinics in developing countries face on a daily basis. Having the lights go off during surgery can mean the difference between life and death. The situation can also be critical if you have to wait for daylight to break in order to begin an urgent operation.

Stachel, who practiced as an obstetrician before a back injury led her to change course and pursue a doctorate of public health at UC Berkeley, saw this first-hand when she traveled to Nigeria in 2008. She quickly realized that helping the hospital get reliable power would be as valuable to the doctors there as her medical advice.

“My clinical skills were useless without there being basic infrastructure,” she says.

Stachel admits she was not aware of the scale of the problem globally until she began visiting hospitals in developing countries. She estimates that 300,000 health facilities do not have reliable electricity around the world. “There’s a 100-fold higher risk of dying in childbirth in developing countries than here,” she says.

Read the rest of Tracey Taylor’s story on Berkeleyside

First Place: Jeremy Chase Crawford

Chancellor’s Fellow in the Department of Integrative Biology and the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology. Berkeley Distinguished Graduate Fellowship recipient.

Second Place: Arturo Cortez

Doctoral student at the Graduate School of Education. Berkeley Distinguished Graduate Fellowship recipient.

Third Place: Kristina Kangas

Graduate student in the Department of Integrative Biology. Berkeley Distinguished Graduate Fellowship recipient.

• View all 2012 video contest submissions (YouTube)
• View 2011 video contest winners (YouTube)

A peaceful scene in early evening, but all was not well. Pelicans are rarely if ever seen on this campus, and its lack of activity signaled that this one was in distress. All the usual helpful agencies were closed for the day, but this bird was lucky: UCB Extension student Mara Guccione, a trained wildlife responder, happened by, and before long the feathered visitor was in rehab at a rescue clinic, medically assessed and eating heartily. (Campus photos: Dick Cortén. International Bird Rescue photo: Mara Guccione.)

Airport Berkeley

An unexpected visitor used the grass outside of Sproul Hall as a landing field one day in early April.  Safely on the ground, the flyer, a full-grown pelican of indeterminate age, ignored the humans streaming by, who were heading off to home and dinner. The main rush was over, and most didn’t notice the grey ball of feathers, hunkered down and unmoving, as they hurried along.

A few people did spot it, and kept watch. This was a sizable bird, and — despite the much larger statue of its ilk a mere hundred yards or so away, in front of Anthony Hall — a living, breathing pelican is virtually never seen on campus. (Seagulls commonly swoop around the Sproul Plaza when blustery weather tempts them inland to relatively calm oases with fresh garbage-snacks. Turkeys occasionally venture down from the oak and chaparral of the hills. But pelicans generally stay quite close to large bodies of water.)

This one moved rarely, except to steady itself against gusts of wind, and, once or twice, to stretch its wings. It seemed to be nodding off. So the watchers, who soon included a few campus police officers, began speculating about its health, and wondering what they might do to help. (One of the officers mumbled, “This was definitely not covered at the academy!”)

Smartphones and Google made the hunt for organizational alternatives somewhat easier, but it was after five, and most of those were closed, offered only polite recordings, or had no quick solution. The longer the bird stayed put, the more vulnerable it seemed and the bleaker its chances.

To the rescue!

Then good fortune arrived on foot in the person of a young woman named Mara Guccione — in transit to her evening UC Extension class in Barrows Hall when she saw the pelican and its befuddled human attendants. Guccione, it turns out,  is totally versed in What To Do in such situations. She’s a trained wildlife responder for International Bird Rescue — whose local center the police had just reached on the phone. Presto, their representative was already on the scene.

Guccione called her husband, Odin Zackman, who drove their truck through rush-hour traffic from their home in southwest Berkeley, bringing a dog crate and a patterned sheet.

Equipped, responder-Mara walked up behind the pelican, draped the cloth over it, and gathered it into her arms. The bird remained calm and did not protest, despite the compelling traditions of the local geography.

Minutes later, the pelican and its rescuers literally drove off into the sunset.

Wayfarers’ hotel

At some point, they made a turn to the northeast, conveying the bird 30-some miles away to an avian halfway house in Cordelia (not far from Fairfield, if you’re familiar with the road to UC Davis and Sacramento).

The International Bird Rescue clinic offers medical care and safety for as long as it takes for each bird to get well and  able to survive on his or her own. The pelican from Berkeley turns out to be a she (based in part on her size and bill length).

The experts have little more clue why she turned up on campus than the rest of us. Badly needed a rest stop, is the prevalent theory. One wag in UC’s Public Affairs office (where most are wags) suggested her GPS was on the fritz and couldn’t quite get her to her bronze likeness up the block.

For now, she’s in the best of hands. Her recovery pace will determine how long she stays at the clinic.  She arrived thin and weak, but with no other apparent medical problems. According to Guccione, she made a great start: “She gained 700 grams overnight, which is a great sign.” It should be; 700 grams is about a pound and a half, a sizable chunk for an animal whose normal fighting weight would normally at most be about the same as a small dog (a pug, say, or a Lhasa Apso).

As you might expect, International Bird Rescue is a nonprofit. It dates back about 40 years. Guiccione, who has a master’s in education from Harvard, has been volunteering with them since 2007, when the container ship Cosco Busan hit the Bay Bridge, releasing 54,ooo gallons of heavy fuel oil into the bay and coating thousands of aquatic birds and other creatures. Working with birds has changed Guccione’s life — she’s decided to become a veterinarian. “That’s precisely why I was on campus. I’m taking prerequisite classes four nights a week so I can I can apply for veterinary school this fall.”

Don’t try this at home

Guccione made the rescue look easy, but so, she says, did the bird. “She was so weak she didn’t put up much of a struggle. Pelicans can be quite feisty, so you need to know what you’re doing when capturing or handling them. That’s why a trained rescuer is really the only person who should ever do it.” That said, Guccione was also “really thrilled at how well the police and public reacted to a bird in need.”

After rehab will come release. With luck, she’ll do better than certain celebrities (Charlie S. and Lindsay L. come to mind.)

As a species, the brown pelican has bounced back from impending oblivion. First decimated so its feathers could decorate hats, it was nearly done in by the cumulative food-chain buildup of the insecticide DDT, which was banned in the United States in 1972. The brown pelican was listed as endangered in 1970, three years before Congress passed the Endangered Species Act.  Almost four decades later, in late 2009, after the DDT ban and vigorous conservation efforts and environmental protection, the species was officially delisted.  Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said at the time, “Today we can say the brown pelican is back,” with an estimated global population of about 650,000.

— Dick Cortén  

Update:  On Friday, April 20, International Bird Rescue held an event at the Brower Center in Berkeley,  to celebrate its four decades of emergency response work at over 299 oil spills worldwide and its year-round activity in California.  Mara Guccione, who rescued the pelican, attended that event after helping at the IBR clinic, where the bird was recuperating.  At that point, a little over two weeks after the bird touched down on campus, she was eating well, and from “too weak to resist” she had become feisty indeed.  One ankle was hurt, but getting better.  She had gained a kilo, which brought her up to around 4200 grams, or a much healthier nine pounds, four-plus ounces. — DC

India — March.  10 awards.  Application deadline: August 1, 2012.

Japan — June.  Up to 10 awards.  Application deadline: November 1, 2012.

Korea — June.  8 awards.  Application deadline: November 1, 2012.

France — October.  Up to 12 awards.  Application deadline: February 1, 2013.

Germany — October.  20 awards.  Application deadline: February 1, 2013.

Applications and more information

Application deadline: April 26, 2012.