Berkeley Graduates Create a Mobile App to Bridge Communication Gaps Recent engineering graduate students created the first real-time mobile app that allows deaf and hearing people to communicate. Read More
May 15, 2011 Einhorn, Geissler, and Puckett are officially Distinguished The Berkeley campus’s most prestigious award for teaching, the Distinguished Teaching Award is intended to encourage and recognize individual excellence in that endeavor. This year, the recipients were Robin Einhorn of professor of history, Phillip Geissler associate professor of chemistry (whose 2000 Ph.D. is from Berkeley), and Kent Puckett, associate professor of English.
April 27, 2011 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.
April 13, 2011 The Peace Corps is very Berkeley In the half century since the Corps was founded, UC Berkeley has supplied more volunteers than any other university in the U.S. — over 3,400 in more than 120 countries.
April 12, 2011 ‘Fall down seven times, stand up eight’ — a dispatch from Japan Remarkable narratives of survival, acceptance, and recovery are starting to emerge from witnesses to the March 11 disaster in Japan.
April 12, 2011 Grad-student archaeologist returns to coal country to aid a vibrant movement Brandon Nida wants to save a mountain — coal-rich Blair Mountain, in West Virginia, where thousands of coal miners battled a private army and federal troops in the largest labor insurrection in U.S. history
April 12, 2011 Earth-shaken ’89 cal grad student now leads the fix of the broken Bay Bridge Marwan Nader (M.S.’89, Ph.D.’92 CE) was walking outside Davis Hall when the earthquake struck. Twenty-two years later, he’s the lead design engineer of the new portion of the Bay Bridge.
April 12, 2011 What UC Berkeley is worth to California In the course of a March discussion in the State Capitol about the Berkeley Center for Green Chemistry, which is exploring the development and use of safe chemicals as well as ways to impact public policy, State Senator Joe Simitian had some specific things to say about UC Berkeley’s immense value to California’s economy.
March 17, 2011 Rankings: Berkeley’s not only super, it’s the greenest UC Berkeley is a member of a totally informal yet stratospherically exclusive club, an elite “supergroup” of six universities worldwide that are regarded head and shoulders above the rest of the throng. (The others are Harvard, MIT, Cambridge, Stanford, and Oxford.)
March 15, 2011 Most life on Earth to perish — again? Is Earth heading into a sixth mass extinction? A team of UC Berkeley professors and graduate students think it may well be. But it may be possible to stop short of the tipping point.
March 15, 2011 How’s your emotional intelligence? Can you tell, from what’s written on someone’s face, whether they’re showing anger or fear? If they’re sad or embarrassed? Happy? Lusty? Disdainful? It can be tricky, and misreads can cost you in real-world interactions with strangers, friends, coworkers, and lovers.
February 10, 2011 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.
February 10, 2011 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.
January 21, 2011 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.
January 21, 2011 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.
January 18, 2011 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.
December 17, 2010 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.
December 15, 2010 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.
December 15, 2010 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.
December 15, 2010 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.
November 12, 2010 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.