Rachel Sklar Helps Turn Human Waste into Renewable Fuel A Public Health student traveled to Mombasa, Kenya to help a community change their waste management practices. Read More
November 12, 2010 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.”
November 12, 2010 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.
October 29, 2010 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.
October 19, 2010 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.
October 7, 2010 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.
September 3, 2010 The Distinguished Teaching Award, 2010: a new crop of four and a brief reunion Four professors who individually teach in the fields of computer science, linguistics, engineering, and business are now part of a rare and highly valued subtribe on campus, the recipients of the Distinguished Teaching Award, which is bestowed annually by the Academic Senate’s Committee on Teaching.
September 3, 2010 The GSAOs in your programs: they’re there for you Each semester the Graduate Student Affairs Officers get together to stay up to date on the latest opportunities for, and policy changes affecting, the students in their programs.
August 11, 2010 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.
August 11, 2010 Energy Secretary advances nano science in spare time Apparently the most-Berkeley person in the Obama cabinet, Secretary of Energy Steven Chu (former director of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley Ph.D. ’76), makes scientific contributions, and news, even while he takes it easy. “In his down time, often while flying somewhere,” reported AP science writer Seth Borenstein, Chu “relaxes by tackling a scientific conundrum and stretching the limits of technology.”
August 11, 2010 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.
August 11, 2010 Joining a global campus network, Berkeley launches a new master’s degree program in sustainability Recognizing the proven leadership of campus faculty and students in addressing climate change, poverty and public health, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation in May selected the University of California, Berkeley, as one of 10 universities worldwide to launch a new master’s degree program in development practice.
August 11, 2010 Graduate students drive UC research and help keep top faculty Julie Kang, a psychology graduate student at UC Riverside, stated the case more baldly than most: “Without graduate students, (the university) quite honestly would come to a screeching halt.”
July 19, 2010 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.
July 19, 2010 Just released: Mark Twain’s posthumous poke at interviewers The Rundown, the blog of The News Hour on PBS, has just published an exclusive: for “the first known time in print,” an essay by Mark Twain on the journalistic interview. In the course of Twain’s career, he was frequently interviewed by reporters, not often to his satisfaction.
July 19, 2010 I School Ph.D. students enlist in an all-volunteer boot camp — no push-ups, no marching, just lots and lots of writing For two weeks in May, the lone “bong” of the Campanile chiming one p.m. signaled the end of a long morning of labor for a determined group of Information School doctoral students, plus one from the Haas School of Business.
July 19, 2010 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.
July 15, 2010 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.
July 15, 2010 Love among the technically-inclined Juliet Holwill had clearly come to trust her fellow UC Berkeley engineering grad student and fellow Aussie Ben Rubinstein, because one sunny September day in 2006 she let him pick her up in a car, blindfold her, and drive her off to an unknown destination.
July 15, 2010 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.”
June 2, 2010 Top quality graduate students flock to UC Berkeley despite budget woes Despite a budget shortfall, hiring freeze and higher fees, the University of California, Berkeley, continues to attract more and higher quality graduate students, according to new data from the campus’s Graduate Division.