The Ausfahl Family Gives Back
Bill Ausfahl established the Ausfahl Chair in Philosophy, which provides a stable, predictable source of funding for a professor to apply to research and to supporting top graduate students.
Student & Alumni Profiles
Meet Tesla Monson, Host of KALX’s “The Graduates”
Tesla Monson, a fourth year Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Integrative Biology, is the host and producer of “The Graduates,” a science radio talk show that airs on KALX 90.7.
Spotlight on Fulbright Scholars: Cristobal Madero
Cristobal Madero is a doctoral student in the area of Education Policy and a Fulbright scholar. After 10 years of teaching in Chile, he came to Berkeley to research how schools might help teachers develop a passion for their profession.
Fellowship Matters: Remarkable Scholars and Their Supporters
Katya Cherukumilli teamed up with four other graduate students to develop a bauxite-based defluoridation technique for water sources that contain dangerously high levels of fluoride.
Meet Ben Gould: Berkeley Mayoral Candidate
Ben Gould, a 2nd year dual-degree student pursuing Master’s degrees in Environmental Engineering and in Public Policy, announced his intention to run for mayor of Berkeley.
Fellowship Matters: Remarkable Scholars and Their Supporters
First-year doctoral student in Chemistry, Laura Sofen is the recipient of the 2015 Joe Lurie Returning Peace Corps Volunteer Gateway Fellowship, which provides room and board at International House.
Yu-Hui Lin is Celebrated as this Year’s Una Fellow
Yu-Hui (Amy) Lin, a Ph.D. candidate in Ethnic Studies was awarded this year’s Una Fellowship. The Una fellowship is awarded each year to an outstanding woman graduate student studying history at Berkeley.
Fellowship Matters: Remarkable Scholars and Their Supporters
With generous support from the Alan Dundes Graduate Fellowship, Luke Patterson has been able to make an unimaginable intellectual journey halfway around the world.
U.S. Department of Energy Awards Student for Wind Energy Outreach
ERG student, Joe Rand, recently received national recognition for his contribution to wind energy deployment.
The ‘Woz’ Steve Wozniak Awarded Alumnus of the Year
Apple co-founder and alumnus Steve Wozniak has been a big supporter of Cal for nearly three decades.
ERG Students Achieve National Recognition for Groundbreaking Studies
In honor of the upcoming Earth Week, we’re featuring two Energy and Resources Group students whose research has earned national press coverage.
First-Year Graduate Student Takes on the Biggest Story of Her Life
When journalism student Harriet Rowan began researching campaign reports at UC Berkeley, she didn’t realize it would land her in the media spotlight.
Jessica Reilly Sails Around Latin America with International Fellowship
Energy and Resources Group Ph.D. student studies the impact of rising sea levels on coastal life.
Fellowship Matters: Remarkable Scholars and Their Supporters
Selina Shieunda Makana is a PhD student in African American Diaspora Studies (AADS) from Kenya, and benefits from fellowship support made possible by Berkeley-based art dealers of African and Asian imports, Beany and Dick Wezelman. The personal bond they have … Continued
School of Public Health Alumna Examines Decentralized California Health Care in Dissertation
Alumna Megan Vanneman ’13 was in her third year at the School of Public Health when she became interested in examining the effects of the decentralized public mental health care system in California. Last month Vanneman’s dissertation was published…
Meet the Winners of the 2014 Distinguished Fellows Video Contest
Earlier this year, we asked winners of the Berkeley, Chancellor’s and a few other fellowship programs to submit short videos about why they chose Berkeley for graduate study. See what they had to say.
Graduate Student Mimics Flight of Birds with Robots
Cameron Rose loves anything that flies. So much, in fact, that he has devoted his life to building robotic drones that fly like birds.
Meet Graduate Student Paige Johnson
A graduate student at the Department of Theater, Dance and Performance Studies, Paige came to UC Berkeley following a year in Indonesia on a Fulbright grant.
Student in School of Social Welfare Studies Sex Trafficking
Lynsey Clark, a master’s degree student at UC Berkeley’s School of Social Welfare, recently published an article in the San Francisco Chronicle, focusing on the child sex trafficking epidemic in her local community.
Meet David Spiciarich, UC Berkeley Chemistry Student and Lindau Fellow
Spiciarich was nominated in 2012 to represent the US at the annual meeting of Nobel Laureates in Lindau, Germany, along with a selected group of graduate students.
Hooked on Sailing through Cal Adventures
Public Health graduate student Rachel Weintrab is hooked on sailing through Cal Adventures
Landing Your First Job After Graduation
Check out a guide we prepared for you and get advice from a graduate student who landed a great first position with IBM Africa.
Life after dissertation: What’s next for degree recipients?
Anna Spurlock, a graduate student in Agricultural and Resource Economics, completed her dissertation this spring. Now she plans to spend her time at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory researching energy efficiency related topics.
Minh Dang, MSW ’13, named by White House as a Champion for Change
Recognized by the White House as a Champion of Change, Dang has become nationally known for fighting the commercial sexual exploitation of children — helping many heal the pain and shame associated with it.
Life after dissertation: What’s next for degree candidates?
Political Science doctoral student Jason W. Blakely reflects on his intellectual growth at Berkeley, dissertation writing, and gratitude.
Asian Sorority Creates New Graduate Fellowship
The Sigma Omicron Pi Sorority, Inc., Fund for Graduate Fellowships will be used to support high-achieving female graduate students.
Meet the Winners of the 2013 Distinguished Fellows Video Contest
Earlier this year, we asked winners of the Berkeley, Chancellor’s and a few other fellowship programs to submit short videos about why they chose Berkeley for graduate study. See what they had to say.
Berkeley Alumna Frances Arnold Wins National Medal of Technology and Innovation
With a 1985 Berkeley chemical engineering Ph.D., Frances Arnold is now a professor at Caltech and finding ways to produce fuels that can help lower carbon dioxide emissions. Her work brought her a medal from President Barack Obama in February.
Berkeley leads the way in NSF fellowships
The National Science Foundation fellowship is a crown jewel of graduate student awards. And Berkeley students lead the nation in capturing these prestigious and highly competitive grants. Here are 6 of this year’s recipients.
Inspired by the Intersection Between Science and Humanities
Jessica Ling, Ph.D. candidate in English, was awarded the Yoshiko Uchida Endowed Scholarship, which assists Asian graduate students who want to become writers. With the help of her fellowship, Jessica is pursuing research on the nineteenth-century novel.
The assignment of a lifetime
Peter Soler, a chemical engineering grad student, with the help of an NSF research fellowship, is helping build an artificial kidney that may be a game-changer for two million patients.
M.F.A. Graduate Bridges Place and Art
The new Bay Bridge is still more than a year away from opening, but it’s already inspiring the art of Amanda Hughen, M.F.A. ’03. Hughen and her frequent collaborator, Jennifer Starkweather, created a series of abstract prints, paintings, and drawings … Continued
Meet the Winners of the 2012 Distinguished Fellows Video Contest
Meet the winners of the 2012 Distinguished Fellows Video Contest: First Place: Jeremy Chase Crawford. Second Place: Arturo Cortez. Third Place: Kristina Kangas. Winners received conference travel awards in the amounts of $1,000, $500, and $250, respectively.
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. There is, for the record, no final exam. Even in R1A, a required class for every … Continued
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.
Fellowships: do people here get them? People do.
Many apply, but few are chosen. Are any of those few from Berkeley? It’s unpredictable, but yes, it definitely happens. Here are some recent cases in point.
‘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.
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.
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.
Decoding Physical Differences, With Help from a Vital Fellowship
At UC Berkeley, Lori Glenwinkle examines how animal genomes evolve in response to environmental changes. An essential fellowships gives her the intellectual freedom to explore these new paths.
Thinking beyond the score: music Ph.D. student is here thanks to the Ausfahl Family Fellowship
Jamie Apgar says he owes his “whole presence at Berkeley” to the Ausfahl Family Fellowship Fund. It enabled the Baltimore native to return to his studies, after performing professionally following his 2009 graduation from Yale.
Saul Perlmutter Ph.D. ‘89 wins the Nobel Prize in Physics
Talking about the discovery that led to the prize, Perlmutter said in a press conference that it was “the slowest aha moment you’ve ever heard”
Berkeley students win a sizable share of environmental fellowships
In August, the Robert and Patricia Switzer Foundation announced the winners of its half-million dollars worth of environmental fellowships and grants for 2011. There were 20 of them around the United States, master’s and Ph.D. students. Four — a fifth of the total — are pursuing studies at Berkeley.
Celebrating Joe Duggan’s epic career as teacher, scholar, and dean
On June 30, Duggan handed over the reins of his associate deanship, having previously retired in 2005 from his formal teaching duties in two departments. Read a tribute to his long and distinguished career, view a slideshow of the decades, see messages from his colleagues and former students — and add your own message, if you like!
Steps to success, or how the fellowship was won
Sending in all those applications can pay off, and sometimes we hear about it. Case in point: Ph.D. student Vasundhara Sirnate was selected for a $30,000 award. She tells us how that happened.
Big Man On Campus: Robert Reich at Berkeley
Physically one of the smallest people on campus, Robert Reich has a vast list of accomplishments, a huge national reputation, and an ego to which none of that particularly matters.
Charlie Yeh
Bringing an engineer’s expertise to the diagnosis and cure of health problems, the Taiwanese Ph.D. student chose UC Berkeley, which has a joint program in bioengineering with UCSF Medical School, to launch a career that will seamlessly combine his interests in biology and engineering.
ARCS Scholar Doubles His Impact
An ARCS Foundation Scholar, Brian is combining his Ph.D. studies in engineering with a master’s program through the Goldman School of Public Policy.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Michael P. Wilson, (M.P.H. ’98, Ph.D. ’03) Wins Coveted Switzer Prize
Michael P. Wilson has been a member of the Switzer Network since receiving a Switzer Foundation fellowship in 2002. He is on the cutting edge of the emerging field of green chemistry. A product of the environmental health sciences program at the School of Public Health (M.P.H. ’98, Ph.D. ’03), he has been a research scientist at the school’s Center for Occupational and Environmental Health since receiving his doctorate.
Ellie Schindelman
Earlier, the “prize patrol” had (also with GSI connivance) snuck into a computer-lab setting on the third floor of Haviland Hall, where public health lecturer Ellie Schindelman was team-teaching a class on using video for public health leadership and advocacy.
Gary Sposito “ambushed” with honors
Environmental Science, Policy and Management professor Gary Sposito is not fond of having his picture taken. When a friendly deputation (including his GSIs and departmental chair, colleagues, and staff and, oh, God, a photographer) 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.
From the Berkeley school to the New York school
New York painter Norman Kanter B. A. ‘54, M. A. ’55 has been enjoying his views of lower Manhattan since renovations took place on his loft in Tribeca, where he’s lived and worked for more than 40 years. The project, says Kanter, led to some surprising revelations.
Student Profile: Rachel Preminger
Rachel Preminger fell in love with classics during a required humanities course as a first-year student at Reed College. “The lessons you learn are so portable,” she says. “It’s not about memorizing facts but learning how to think.”
Student Profile: Dan Fahey
An environmental and health crisis ravaging the Democratic Republic of the Congo has long been overlooked, says Dan Fahey. Despite years of bloody conflict, the region “wasn’t on the radar of the international community,” says Dan, a Ph.D. candidate in Berkeley’s Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management.
Student Profile: Amie Gordon
What makes some romances sizzle and others go down in flames? That’s a question that fascinates Amie Gordon, a psychology doctoral student who specializes in the well-being of relationships. “If you want to understand what makes society work and brings fulfillment to lives, understanding romantic relationships is vital,” she says.
Student Profile: Cindy Huang
Long after a visit to the Pakistan-China border in 1999, Cindy Huang yearned to know more about Central Asia and its extraordinary people. While a Berkeley doctoral candidate in anthropology, Cindy got that opportunity.
Alumni Profiles: Ken Lee always looks ahead and figures out the best way to get there
Dr. Yong-Kyung Lee, better known in the western world as Ken Lee, is a person of many facets. One of Berkeley’s most illustrious alumni from Korea, he’s been a professor, a research scientist in the private sector in the U.S., CEO of a giant telecom corporation in Korea, and he’s now, as a member of South Korea’s National Assembly, a political leader.
Donor Profile: Eric Stern
Eric Stern’s job takes him globetrotting. But when he isn’t away, the Cal alumnus has a standing dinner date. You’ll find him around the family table, savoring a meal and catching up with his wife, Rachel Kaganoff Stern, and their school-aged sons, Henri and Jonah.
Did you use a mouse to get here? Thank Doug Engelbart for that, and more
Back in 1963, the year JFK was assassinated and the Beatles released “I Want To Hold Your Hand,” a Berkeley electrical engineering alumnus named Douglas Engelbart invented what would become the computer mouse.
They Come in Peace
Sergio Rapu can trace the history of his people, the Rapanui of Easter Island, to around 400 A.D., when Polynesian explorers arrived, stayed, and eventually built the mysterious giant stone heads (moai) that captured the world’s imagination.
A former Cal student and her grad advisor share a Nobel
Elizabeth Blackburn, then a Berkeley professor, challenged her Ph.D. student Carol Greider in the 1980s with some research that clearly wasn’t easy. It turned out to be breakthrough stuff in molecular biology, but neither suspected at the time that it, with … Continued
A portable tribute to Earl Warren
The name of one of Berkeley’s most distinguished alumni, Earl Warren (undergraduate class of 1912, law school class of 1914), three-term governor of California and history-making chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, graced a large building along Oxford Street for over half a century — until the structure was torn down in 2008 to make way for the badly-needed Li Ka Shing Center for Biomedical and Health Sciences, named for its lead donor.
The Tech World’s Big Boost from Berkeley
This is not a Cold War stereotype with impossible claims to breakthrough inventions. UC Berkeley has not felt the need, for institutional pride, to assert pioneering involvement in, say, the steam engine, the electric light, or the airplane.
London Calling
Claire Weldin took her master’s degree in architecture to London a decade ago, “fascinated by the complex structure of cities: the multiplicity of urban experience and, underlying it, the presence of the past.” Today, as an Associate with Allies and Morrison Architects, she is leading the £370 million phase 2 King’s Cross Underground Station redevelopment.
Above the Napa Valley: George Rubissow Pairs Science with Wine
While the spanakopita rests on the counter to cool, George Rubissow suggests a walk through the vineyards. He leads us to the picturesque front porch of his yellow farmhouse, its blue chairs surrounded by spring flowers that tumble downhill toward a breathtaking view of the Napa Valley. We follow him uphill past a small redwood grove to the sustainable vineyards, environmentally-friendly and planted to follow the contours of the property. This is Mount Veeder, an appellation famous for Cabernet Sauvignon, where for nearly a quarter of a century Rubissow and his partner-in-wine Tony Sargent have produced award-winning wines.
Shaping sounds — and, soon, the instruments that make them
Computer science graduate student Cynthia Bruyns immersed herself in the complex world of machine-generated music and, from the user’s perspective, simplified it.
Two grad students are honored by the Chancellor for civic engagement
At the annual Chancellor’s Awards for Public Service ceremony, which took place April 24, two Ph.D. candidates were singled out for their extensive community work. Paula Agentieri of the School of Education’s social and cultural studies program was honored for her 14 semester of serving as the lead GSI and co-cordinator for Education 190, the core class for education minors, during which she has taught more than 1,000 students and has trained more than 70 undergraduate teaching assistants to teach and facilitate a class democratically and to serve the local community.
Adventure Man
In a field where the progress of research and career are usually sequential, orderly, and predictable, Rich Muller is a wild card, rocketing wherever the first tantalizing inkling of a puzzle takes him until he has the explanation pinned down satisfactorily. Then he abruptly goes elsewhere, as if cued by the Monty Python catchphrase (first used to introduce a sketch about a man with three buttocks) — “And now for something completely different.”
Learning to teach, with a little help
The GSI Center: from baby steps to national example BEING A GRADUATE STUDENT INSTRUCTOR is not only a good way to offset the expenses of your graduate education, it’s a heck of a good way to develop your skills and … Continued
A winning woman is back on ‘Jeopardy’ — Cal’s Larissa Kelly hopes to top 14 other champs
Larissa Kelly, the diminutive UC Berkeley graduate student in history who swept to game show triumph last spring, has returned to compete again.
J-student Rhyen Coombs’ photos of a foreclosed home win her the Lange Fellowship
From 2001 on, all but one of the Lange Fellowship winners have been graduate students, and the last five have all been seeking journalism degrees. Coombs’ emphasis in the J-school is new media.
A grad-student artist documents the ageless and preserves the temporary
Art Practice M.F.A. candidate Miguel Arzabe is a West Oakland urbanite who loves the outdoors. He documents his wilderness hikes on video and in abstract paintings, and has also brought the experience back through a medium many of us have … Continued
Fire in Space: A Berkeley Lab Group is Focused on How to Prevent Disasters
Reno native and triathlete Sara McAllister has a lot going for her these days. The newly minted Berkeley mechanical engineering Ph.D. and current post-doc not only successfully participated in some 16 triathlons–including a grueling half-Iron Man Aquabike race, she also recently appeared on the History Channel series “The Universe,” …
Between Africa, Asia and the European Union: My work in International Public Health
It’s very hot outside, the sun is burning, and the light is violent at noon. I walk alongside my sister on an earthy red path through sugar cane fields, on our way home from school. We are thirsty; the sugar cane is refreshing and delicious. This is Africa. This is Bouaké in the early 1960s when it still is in the middle of nowhere, a big village in the bush.
What brought Mimi Silbert (M.A. ’65, Ph.D. ’68) back to Berkeley in 2008
Berkeley’s fall (and summer) 2008 graduates had a two-degree Cal alumna as the principal speaker at their commencement in December, Mimi Silbert by name.
In his own words: Edouard Servan-Schreiber, Ph.D., Computer Science
“After graduating from Carnegie Mellon with my B.S. in mathematics and computer science, I worked in consulting, traveled in Asia, did my military service in France, before wishing to return to academic endeavors. After considering carefully my options, Berkeley stood out for its exceptional “value proposition,” as the business world likes to say — stunning academics and fabulous quality of life.
Grad alum at University of Washington gains $10,000 for promoting accessibility
Richard Ladner, another winner of the 2008 Purpose Prize, not only has a Ph.D. from Berkeley, by one of those curious coincidences he received it in 1971, the same year as Arlene Blum (see above). While hers was in biophysical … Continued
Profile: Eve Ekman
A family group closely associated with the Graduate Division is well-represented in the trust-themed Fall ’08 issue of Greater Good, in a feature called “Can I Trust You?”.
In his own words: Richard Halkett, MPP ’05, Goldman School of Public Policy
Throughout his career, Richard Halkett has focused on technology, innovation, and education, in relation to foreign policy. He currently serves as the Director of Strategy & Research for Cisco Global Education. From 2006 to 2008, he was the Executive Director of Policy & Research at the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (NESTA) in London, where he developed programs to enrich and strengthen innovation policy in the U.K. Before NESTA, he worked at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a large foreign policy think tank in Washington D.C.
Halkett graduated from Oxford University with a double first and a university prize from Merton College. After Oxford, he co-founded Boxmind, an Oxford—based technology company, which he ran from 2000 to 2003. He came to Berkeley in 2003 as a U.K.-U.S. Fulbright Scholar in the Goldman School of Public Policy. Not long after he arrived, he and a classmate founded PolicyMatters, the journal of the Goldman School.
A nod from the Big Apple for a grad student composer
Toward the end of September 2008, the New York Times reviewed a concert by the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra and mentioned, in the same breath, music by Rachmaninoff, Respighi, and a new work, “Fiesta!” “by a young Peruvian composer, Jimmy … Continued
A Cal grad alum at UW snags a MacArthur — just in time
The Seattle Post-Intelligencer told its readers on September 22, 2008, that University of Washington professor David Montgomery was one day into his sabbatical, wondering how to cut expenses while writing a book, when he was contacted by the MacArthur Foundation. … Continued
Public Health Hero is a Champion of Teens
A summer job during high school proved to be life-changing for Barbara Staggers. The high achieving teen who aspired to be a ballerina or maybe a veterinarian was working for a recreation program for inner-city kids. “My job was to teach swimming and gymnastics so at the end of the day they’d be too tired to get into trouble,” she recalls. Among her youngsters was a quiet, beautiful 14-year old girl — until a man came to take her away. “He looked like the classic pimp from the movies and said he needed her to work,” recounts Staggers, who went to her supervisor. But when they phoned the girl’s mother, she said, “Let her go. We need the money.”
How to Save a Life
In 2004, the United States Agency for International Development contacted Ashok Gadgil, of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, for help. Gadgil’s idea: design a fuel-efficient, portable stove for Darfur.
In his own words: Wilson Shearin, Classics Ph.D., 2007
Few disciplines are as traditional, in every possible sense of the term, as the field of Classics. Indeed, it could be said that Classics – the intensive study of Greek and Roman literature, language, and culture – is an originary site for the notion and study of tradition. traditio (a noun: “handing over, delivery; the handing down of knowledge”) and its cognate tradere (a verb: “to hand over; to hand down”) are both Latin words. These two terms encode a double sense: first, the notion of making a present-time gift and second, the notion of wisdom handed down through time. One powerful example of this duality is the Homeric rhapsode, a bard who professes in each performed song to enact “Homer” – the ever-same, traditional poems by the ever-same poet. Yet each performance is a different event. Ancient evidence suggests that different performances produced drastically different, if structurally similar, poems. Each performance thus relies upon tradition (traditio), even while it delivers (tradit) the present-time gift of a new poem.
In her own words: Julia Menard-Warwick, Education Ph.D., 2004
In February 1999 when I learned that I was being offered a Berkeley Graduate Fellowship, I had been a part-time English as a Second Language (ESL) instructor at a small community college in Washington state for 10 years. In 1997 I had been awarded a Part-time Faculty Award of Excellence at my college, based on both my teaching and program development work, and then in 1998, I was turned down for a full-time position. I was ready for something new, and excited about the idea of doing research on the social contexts of second language learning in immigrant communities. I also had a house, a husband, two children, and a large extended family in my town in Washington, and it was difficult to consider uprooting. Berkeley’s offer of a prestigious fellowship helped to reassure me that I wasn’t completely out of my mind.
Civil Rights Pioneer, Federal Judge, Biopic Subject, and Alumnus of the Year
Now an esteemed and controversial federal judge, Thelton Henderson came to Cal from Los Angeles on a football scholarship. The law was not on his mind.
Enriching the culture, educating the next generation
Andrew Szeri savors his walk to work each day, winding through the scenic neighborhoods of Berkeley. He says the journey to Sproul Hall is peaceful and provides time to think before he dives into the emails and voicemails that await him.
Protecting a National Treasure G. Wayne Clough, Ph.D. ’69
UC Berkeley Civil Engineering Ph.D. recipient elected as the Smithsonian’s 12th Secretary.
Whale of a story for a Berkeley grad student and colleagues
Big gulp: to drink in a good portion of tiny krill, a Fin Whale somehow more than doubles its size for a few seconds. Nicholas Pyenson studied how and why.
Avoid the brat pack: Website makes raising joyous kids more practical
Reams of academic research abound across the country on how to raise happy children, but who has the time to read this myriad of findings, boil down the facts, and then turn them into practical parenting advice? The University of California, Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center is taking on the job with its new website on how to foster joy and avoid brattish behavior in children.
John W. Gofman: a nuclear chemist who raised questions
In mid-August, John Gofman died at the age of 88. He was widely known in a variety of roles: physician, cardiac researcher, radiation scientist, and nuclear safety advocate. While working for his Ph.D. here in the 1940s under Glenn T. … Continued
‘Invisible economy’ scholar straddles the divide between barrio and Ph.D. seminar room
A stint as a day laborer on the star-studded Malibu coast launched Alvaro Huerta’s career in academia.
David Wagner: debugging the vote
The State of California had a Swiss-cheese factor in all three of the electronic voting systems used in its elections, a team of UC Davis and UC Berkeley researchers found.
Out of the lab to the top of the world; Berkeley biophysicist relishes first ascents
One September evening in 1970, working alone in my chemistry lab in Latimer Hall, I was preparing nucleic acid for my final experiments for my Ph.D. in biophysical chemistry. The lab was quiet except for the repetitive tick of the spinning centrifuge. After finishing the purification, to my horror, I knocked the vial onto the floor, where it shattered, the precious liquid lost.
Rich Newton engineered the future
Few on campus even knew Richard Newton was sick. Then, suddenly, he was gone. On the second day of 2007, only six weeks after he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, he died at UC San Francisco Medical Center.