Call for nominations for alumni of the year!
The Cal Alumni Association annually recognizes distinguished alumni whose achievements exemplify the excellence of UC Berkeley. You can help the University identify distinguished alumni by submitting a nomination for one or more of the 2014 alumni awards.
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.
Philip Brett LGBT Studies Fellowship – 3/15/2013
The Philip Brett LGBT Studies Fellowship will provide an award in spring 2013 to a UC Berkeley graduate student conducting research related to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and/or queer studies in any field or discipline. The competition for this fellowship is open to all UC Berkeley graduate students, regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity.
AmphibiaWeb tracks newly discovered species — and those in a mass die-off
Berkeley people — including grad alumni — are at the heart of a vital resource where you can find out, online, how all of earth’s known frogs, toads, and salamanders are doing.
Tips from Berkeley-trained CEOs
Two alumni who happen to be star-quality technology executives came back to Berkeley in May to give graduation speeches. Expect change and profit from it Shantanu Narayen, the CEO of Adobe Systems returned on Saturday, May 19, to address the Haas School’s Class of 2012. In congratulating the new grads, he recalled earning his (’93) [...]
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.”
Already a busy semester for the Graduate Division, here and abroad
Dear Graduate Students, Your future selves are out there — graduate alumni of Berkeley. Some of them are very far from campus, oceans away, but they remain surprisingly close. I spent a week recently visiting alumni at events in Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Seoul. These events are always really interesting to me, because I learn [...]
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.
Top Dog with Top Dogs: a meet-and-eat event
An afternoon of social networking and hot dogs at Alumni House. Admission comes with unlimited food and drink, and costs $3 per student. Register by February 22nd.
Steve Chu and six other grad alumni receive top Cal Alumni Association honors at Charter Gala
The Cal Alumni Association had a big party — its annual Charter Gala — April 9 at San Francisco’s City Hall to celebrate the university’s birthday and to physically present the association’s 2011 alumni awards (publicly announced back in December 2010).
Why Graduate Education at Berkeley Matters
Graduate Dean Andrew Szeri discusses why and how our academic enterprise matters to the state of California, the U.S., everywhere.
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.
Energy Secretary Steven Chu is named Cal’s Alumnus of the Year
STEVEN CHU, who received his physics Ph.D. from UC Berkeley in 1976, has been selected as the 2011 Alumnus of the Year by the Cal Alumni Association. The U.S. Secretary of Energy and Nobel Laureate is being recognized for his groundbreaking contributions to the fields of biophysics and atomic physics, his commitment to addressing climate [...]
Neuroanatomist Marian Diamond, still teaching and gaining students at 84, going on 1.5 million
It’s not news that Marian Diamond — who at 84 may be Berkeley’s oldest actively teaching professor — carries a brain around in a hatbox.
Engaging Graduate Alumni
Graduate alumni are pursuing the most astonishing array of careers, and it’s a pleasure for Dean of the Graduate Division Andrew Szeri to interact with them, especially given their warm feelings for their alma mater—UC Berkeley.
The Berkeley underpinnings of Google’s July 4th salute
The world’s best-known search engine varies its logo playfully on its homepage on holidays and whenever it feels like it. This Fourth of July, it featured the basic DNA of a Rube Goldberg device. One of the country’s most popular cartoonists, Goldberg started here, in the first issues of Cal’s best-known and longest-lasting humor magazine, the California Pelican, which was founded in 1903 and survived, amusing and outraging people for eight decades, give or take.
Three grad alumni are among 2010′s Cal Alumni Association honorees
Each spring the Cal Alumni Association celebrates the University of California birthday — the anniversary of its founding — with a traditional banquet known as the Charter Gala. This year’s event took place April 24 in San Francisco’s historic Ferry Building. The 2010 award recipients include three alumni with Cal graduate degrees.
Alumni Profiles: Ken Lee always looks ahead and figures out the best way to get there
Dr. Yong-Kyung Lee, better known in the western world as Ken Lee, is a person of many facets. One of Berkeley’s most illustrious alumni from Korea, he’s been a professor, a research scientist in the private sector in the U.S., CEO of a giant telecom corporation in Korea, and he’s now, as a member of South Korea’s National Assembly, a political leader.
Donor Profile: Eric Stern
Eric Stern’s job takes him globetrotting. But when he isn’t away, the Cal alumnus has a standing dinner date. You’ll find him around the family table, savoring a meal and catching up with his wife, Rachel Kaganoff Stern, and their school-aged sons, Henri and Jonah.
Two scientists, both with Berkeley graduate degrees, are now “national icons”
The microphones did not pick up Barack Obama’s private words to MIT biochemist JoAnne Stubbe just before he draped the ribbon with her National Medal of Science around her neck, but his public ones were of gratitude on behalf of the American people. Minutes before, he had expressed similar sentiments about retired physicist Berni Alder. [...]
We, Robot
In recent years, Berkeley has become a hotbed of robotic activity, to the point where there’s a virtual subculture across many disciplines, involving faculty, alumni, grad students, undergrads, and postdocs in a broad variety of powerhouse labs and research groups and projects.
Solving the Human Mystery
Nobody knows for sure where we came from, but folks at Berkeley have more clues than most The most famous fossil in modern history was given her nickname — “Lucy”— after the in-the-sky-with-diamonds Beatles song that played over and over on a tape recorder, during a drink-enhanced all-night celebration at a campsite in the barren [...]
They Come in Peace
Sergio Rapu can trace the history of his people, the Rapanui of Easter Island, to around 400 A.D., when Polynesian explorers arrived, stayed, and eventually built the mysterious giant stone heads (moai) that captured the world’s imagination.
