UC Berkeley Faculty Recognized by Mentorship Awards This year, five exceptional professors were honored as some of the top mentors on campus. Read More
August 20, 2012 Tackling a global health crisis, one toothbrush at a time A Public Health alumna (and professor), Karen Sokal-Gutierrez, shocked by what junk food had done to young teeth in parts of the world where decay had been nearly unknown, founded a volunteer project that’s now saving smiles in five countries around the world.
August 7, 2012 Berkeley Optometry’s 20-20 Vision for Doing Good This marks the 13th consecutive year that Berkeley Optometry students have joined Volunteer Optometric Services to Humanity (VOSH) in providing eye care to the under-served community. For Cal’s doctors-in-training, the four-day service trip is a true eye-opener.
July 11, 2012 Berkeley Academic Senate’s 2012 top honor goes to former chancellor Robert Berdahl and professor-alumna Marian Diamond At a dinner in May, the UC Berkeley Division of the Academic Senate gave its highest honor, the Clark Kerr Award, to two people with high-profile connections to the Berkeley campus, Robert M. Berdahl, who was Berkeley’s eighth chancellor, and Marian C. Diamond, professor emeritus of integrative biology and a world-renowned brain researcher.
July 11, 2012 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.
June 1, 2012 The key to totally surprising a mentor: no leaks So far, nobody’s let the cat out of the bag, so the surprise has been total in every case. Despite Berkeley’s long tradition of protest and California’s reputation for spontaneity, faculty members here simply don’t expect to be interrupted by outsiders while they’re teaching a class. When it dawns on them that the invasion brings unexpected but happy news for them personally, decorum goes out the window.
April 24, 2012 Grad-student-led project gets a first prize in the Big Ideas @ Berkeley contest 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.
April 24, 2012 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.”
April 24, 2012 From the Berkeley garage of Laura Stachel and Hal Aronson, a solar initiative that saves lives 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.
April 13, 2012 There’s a WHAT on the lawn? 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.
March 21, 2012 Students take their research to the Capitol A delegation of 20 graduate students and deans traveled to Sacramento to give lawmakers their perspective: that graduate student research is central not only to the future of the University of California, but to that of the state and the nation as well.
March 21, 2012 2012 Fellows Reception: a pleasant gathering on a day that only occasionally exists It was not hard for a good time to be had by all. The atmosphere was convivial, the mood was celebratory, there were plenty of people to talk to, and — always a priority for grad students — there was food. And not only that, the food was good.
March 21, 2012 The Symantec/UC Berkeley Symposium — a confluence of minds on computer security and more On February 15, two normally quite separate entities got together — to exchange ideas and information, and to simply get to know each other better. That was the plan, and it clearly worked.
March 20, 2012 Call for Programs: Stay Day 2012 – Students in Action Stay Day is a one-day event, sponsored by the Division of Student Affairs, that provides participants with the opportunity to engage in a collective conversation about the evolving needs of our students through a series of interactive sessions.
February 17, 2012 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.
February 17, 2012 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.
January 18, 2012 Grad Division goes social As Dean Szeri mentioned in his message this month, the Graduate Division has expanded its online connections to include Facebook and Twitter.
January 18, 2012 ‘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.
January 18, 2012 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.
January 18, 2012 Top honors will be given to grad alumni by the Cal Alumni Association Three alumni with Berkeley graduate degrees will be honored March 24 at the Cal Alumni Association’s traditional Charter Gala, being held this year at San Francisco’s Palace Hotel.
January 18, 2012 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.