Photo of Vasundhara Sirnate

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.

Robert Reich

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.

Peace Corps - Meera Chary

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.

Ken Thompson

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.

Photo of Ellie Schindelman

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.

Shenandoah

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.”

Dan Fahey

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.