The head of UCSF, a Cal alum, is named in a fierce Top Ten list The chancellor of UC-San Francisco since mid-2009, Susan Desmond-Hellmann, a Berkeley alumna (M.P.H.’88) who already has a passel of distinctions, has been named by the daily industry newsletter Fierce Biotech as one of the Top Ten Women in Biotech.
Two more “geniuses” for Berkeley Thanks to two young faculty members — and, of course, the MacArthur Foundation — the already-sizeable total of active Berkeley campus MacArthur "genius" Fellows grew to 32 at the end of September.
Threesomes get noticed Two trios of grad students made the news recently, not for their trinity but for the interesting work they've been doing in very different fields.
Berkeley tops the list of new DOE Graduate Fellowships recipients With 19 out of 150 fellowships awarded — over an eighth of the total, more than any other university — UC Berkeley welcomes the lion's share of students in energy studies across its college and departments who will be studying here for up to three years, with support from the U.S. Department of Energy.
A “solar suitcase” brings light and communication to health workers in remote regions — and honors to a public health doctoral candidate Laura Stachel is a doctoral candidate in the School of Public Health. She's also an M.D. — an obstetrician who earned that degree at UCSF.
Energy-efficiency expert (and grad alum) Karl Brown is a champ An instrument box mounted in the depths of a campus classroom and office building is hardly a headline-grabbing weapon against climate change. But because buildings are estimated to be responsible for nearly half of all greenhouse-gas emissions, cutting-edge monitoring systems in fact are crucial tools for reducing global warming.
More than 270 GSIs are singled out for the quality of their teaching 276 GSIs from 61 graduate programs were granted this recognition, which is now just over a decade old. The award recognizes the excellence of their teaching. Selections are made according to detailed guidelines, following criteria which may include skills in presenting course materials, capacity to promote critical thinking, and skills in developing course materials that promote learning, as well as evidence such as evaluations by students, letters of nomination by faculty or students, and classroom observation by faculty.
Creative—and effective—solutions win honors for 11 GSIs The Graduate Division’s Teaching Effectiveness Awards were presented May 13 in the Women’s Faculty Club. The winners identified a teaching/learning problem in their own classes, laboratories, and sections, then came up with a method, strategy, or idea to address the problem, implemented it, measured its effectiveness, and described the process in an essay. Their essays become part of a permanent archive.
Grad Division and Graduate Assembly team up to honor mentors In the 1970s, the Berkeley campus was, a veteran faculty member told a concerned new assistant professor, “not a loving institution.”
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.
Journalism student Steve Saldivar wins the Dorothea Lange Fellowship Steve Saldivar is this year's winner of the Dorothea Lange Fellowship, which annually funds an academic project using color or black-and-white photography by a graduate student or faculty member from any discipline.
A Berkeley prof will use the sun to power student housing in Buffalo, N.Y. Walter Hood recently won a public art competition to design a planned solar energy array at the North Campus of the University of Buffalo in New York. Hood, a 20-year member of Berkeley's landscape architecture faculty, earned two graduate degrees here (M.L.A. '89, and M. Arch. '89).
Three faculty who’ve been very, very good mentors are “ambushed” with honors Environmental Science, Policy and Management professor Gary Sposito is not fond of having his picture taken. When a friendly deputation 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.
Two Superb Mentors Get Their Due at Berkeley For the last three years, there’s been a new way to honor faculty mentors at Berkeley. Called the Sarlo Distinguished Graduate Student Mentoring Award, it honors faculty for all the ways they help graduate students — not only in research, not only in teaching, but across the board.
Berkeley Trio turns Algae into Fuel and Money At least once or twice a year, you can happen upon David Charron’s “Case Studies in Entrepreneurship” course in the Haas School of Business. In this class, students are confronted with a case study of the early days of a young start-up company called Aurora Biofuels, and asked to tackle a problem its founders, Matt Caspari, Bert Vick and Guido Radaelli, were confronted with from the outset.
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.
Graduate Work at Cal Pays Off with a Nobel Prize in Physiology/Medicine What she could not know for sure, back then as a 25-year-old grad student, was that this discovery would win her — and her mentor, Elizabeth Blackburn, now at UCSF — a Nobel Prize. ... When Greider was in the market for a graduate program, after earning her B.A. at UC Santa Barbara, Berkeley was in her final two choices, narrowed not for the usual reasons, but because those were the ones that would have her.
An evening MBA in the limelight On Wall Street, a national magazine for retail brokers and the financial services industry, has named Valerie Garcia Houts M.B.A. ’99 to its annual list of “Top 40 Advisors Under 40.”
Engineering grad student wins $250,000 fellowship What would you do if you were handed a $250,000 award for graduate studies with no strings attached? Paul Tillberg, a Berkeley grad student in electrical engineering and materials science and engineering, is about to find out.
A knighthood for Berkeley alumnus Arun Sarin When the British Foreign Office announced spring honors for 2010 it listed all the specific awards the Queen “was graciously pleased to approve.” They included, in “The Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (Civil Division),” the name Arun Sarin, “for services to the communication industry.” Born in central India, Sarin has two 1978 master’s degrees from Berkeley, one an M.B.A. and the other in material sciences and engineering.