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.
Cal’s night safety program gets an upgrade This spring, the campus has relaunched BearWALK, the night safety service, “reinvigorated with interactive and automated technology.” The enhancements are automated dispatch and a “live map” with shuttle tracking by GPS.
Empowering Women of Color for 26 years Clearly not a flash in the pan, the Empowering Women of Color Conference will hold its 26th iteration on Saturday, February 19, in the Martin Luther King Jr. Student Union. Keynote speakers are Angela Davis, Ericka Huggins, and Dylcia Pagán. Includes workshops, panels, plus vendors, food, performances, and music a-plenty. Admission: free to UC Berkeley students with IDs.
A new workshop series for international students All members of the Berkeley community are welcome to attend a new series of workshops presented by the Berkeley International Office this spring. It’s called The International Student Experience at Berkeley: Pathways to Personal and Academic Success. Workshop titles include "Popular Culture: Why is Everything Super-sized?", "History of Berkeley", "Do You Speak American?", and more.
A new summer institute on energy in Livermore Sandia’s Summer Institute: Technology and Policy Tools for Energy in an Uncertain World is a new cross-discipline week-long research program for top graduate students from the nation’s premier universities. Twenty select graduate students will collaborate in small teams, working side-by-side with leading scientists from Sandia. Participants will develop new career skills by solving challenging problems in a fast-paced, collegial work environment.
Reminder: to honor your mentors, nominate them now! Every year, the Graduate Division and the Graduate Assembly team up to call public attention to the exemplary and caring assistance individual…
Spring Lectures: Reich, Botstein, Witte, Jr., and Squyers Presenting this spring’s offerings from the Graduate Council Lectures and the Tanner Lectures on Human Values. These lectures (and the Tanner seminar) are free and open to the public.
Chemistry, 1980 or thereabouts The trip back to 1980 (or so) in this photo is fascinating enough. It takes us right into the clothing and hair styles of the era, and the equipment, and the scientists' oneness with with the apparatus. But a lot has happened since then.
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.
Berkeley graduate students have many outlets to showcase their work For the Berkeley Energy and Resources Collaborative (BERC), the word "collaborative" is key. The graduate-student-led organization brings together people across campus — in the sciences, business, law, and policy — to address pressing energy and natural resource issues. BERC also helps to link the Berkeley campus to other professionals working in these areas.
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 change, and his transformative leadership in energy research and policy.
National Science Foundation announces new rules for NSF Fellowships starting in 2011 The National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program (NSF GRFP) recently announced two policy changes regarding their fellowship: Starting in the academic…
A duo of recipients for Una’s Fellowship At the Faculty Club in November, two quiet ceremonies took place on different evenings, virtually out of the campus eye, but united by history and an unusual item of neckware. Each marked the presentation of the Una Fellowship, given to an outstanding woman graduate student in the field of history to “foster the spirit of inquiry and individuality” so characteristic of the woman for whom the fellowship is named, Una Smith Ross.
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.
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.
Inside the evolution of Jazzee A sea change will take place over the next year in the way the Berkeley campus deals with the thousands of graduate student applications it receives. The process of taking in the annual avalanche of "apps" and then reviewing and making decisions on them is complex, and has been that way for a long, long time.
Berkeley and Taiwan form an educational partnership The China Post, a major English-language daily newspaper published in Taiwan, led the news this way: "The No. 1 public research university in the United States recently sealed an unprecedented cooperative partnership with 15 academic institutions in Taiwan to increase the international experience and exposure of talented local humanities and social sciences scholars through government-sponsored graduate studies."
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.
Other rankings — To be (measured) is to be perceived (quantitatively, qualitatively, and through a variety of lenses) In an August 29 feature entitled "30 Ways to Rate a College" for the Chronicle of Higher Education, Alex Richards and Ron Coddington created a clear and revealing interactive map to the major rankings showing what measures are important to each rater — and how few they actually have in common.