Historic Julia Morgan Hall Replanted in UC Botanical Garden, Now Open to Public The century-old edifice was initially built to give female students — who weren’t allowed in Senior Hall — a place to congregate for social activities. Read More
May 21, 2010 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.
May 21, 2010 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.
May 21, 2010 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).
May 21, 2010 Three of the world’s most popular online course lectures are by UC Berkeley professors Three of the world’s most popular online course lectures — as measured by view-counts of the videos thereof, posted on the video giant YouTube on April 1 of this year — are by UC Berkeley professors, and all three of those have Berkeley degrees. In fact, they have seven Berkeley degrees among the trio, five at the graduate level.
May 5, 2010 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.
April 25, 2010 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.
April 8, 2010 Berkeley engineers invent a cell-phone microscope What the world needs now — besides love, of course — is a new technology for diagnosing infectious disease that’s inexpensive and portable yet highly effective. The World Health Organization estimates that there were about 247 million cases of malaria in 2006 and more than nine million new cases of tuberculosis in 2007, with African countries bearing most of the burden in both cases.
April 8, 2010 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.
April 7, 2010 A Greener Future: Bringing the U.S. & China Together China and the United States — the world’s top emitters of greenhouse gases — should be at the forefront of clean energy solutions for an ailing planet. That’s the bold vision of the U.S.-China Green Tech Summit, a gathering that drew more than 400 green technology executives, venture capitalists, academics and others to Beijing last fall.
April 7, 2010 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.
April 7, 2010 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.
April 7, 2010 UNICEF’s Ann Veneman shares her perspective on health policy Among the many well-known figures, experts, and leaders who visit this campus in any given month, a significant proportion were here before, as students. One such, in March, was Ann Veneman, the executive director of UNICEF, who gave the Rhoda Goldman Distinguished Lecture in Health Policy.
April 6, 2010 We, Robot In recent years, Berkeley has become a hotbed of robotic activity, to the point where there’s a virtual subculture across many disciplines, involving faculty, alumni, grad students, undergrads, and postdocs in a broad variety of powerhouse labs and research groups and projects.
April 6, 2010 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.”
April 2, 2010 Solving the Human Mystery The most famous fossil in modern history was given her nickname — “Lucy”— after the in-the-sky-with-diamonds Beatles song that played over and over on a tape recorder, during a drink-enhanced all-night celebration at a campsite in the barren wilds of Ethiopia. The year was 1974.
March 30, 2010 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.
March 3, 2010 Catching up with Richard Blum San Francisco’s Richard Blum B.S. ’58, M.B.A. ‘59, widely known as a private equity financier and philanthropist, also gained considerable visibility as chairman of UC’s Board of Regents, in which role he publicly critiqued the ten-campus system and led an overhaul in the Office of the President.
March 3, 2010 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.
February 17, 2010 Notable alumni with graduate degrees, all honored by the California Alumni Association In the Fall 2005 issue (pp. 22-23), we presented a group of Berkeley alumni who shared at least two characteristics: 1) they had earned one or more graduate degrees at this campus, and 2) they each had won a Nobel Prize.
November 24, 2009 UC Berkeley is at or near the top in recent rankings of universities in the U.S. and the world The academic reputation of this campus continues to gleam among its counterparts in this country and around the globe, according to recent independent assessments.