September 23, 2008
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.
May 2, 2008
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.
April 30, 2008
Five faculty members, accompanied by colleagues and students who nominated them and friends and fans, were given special awards for mentoring grad students, an activity that historically has received little fanfare but is seen as vital by its recipients, often leading to key intellectual breakthroughs and providing the motivation to persevere despite daunting obstacles.
April 28, 2008
When I was a graduate student, I was a teaching assistant (more than once) for a very inspiring mentor, a man named Manos Vakalo. His teams of teaching assistants had remarkable autonomy. He never questioned a grade we gave, and he always treated us as respected equals. In retrospect, we could be dumb at times; I remember bringing beer to a critique for our undergraduates, and Manos simply raising an eyebrow in reprimand. That, however, was enough. He had remarkable expressions, every one of which I think I could still imitate perfectly today, nearly 20 years later.
April 13, 2008
UC Berkeley Civil Engineering Ph.D. recipient elected as the Smithsonian's 12th Secretary.
April 8, 2008
We are pleased to announce the 2008 recipients of the Sarlo Distinguished Graduate Student Mentoring Awards. These awards have been made possible by a grant from the Sarlo Foundation of the Jewish Community Endowment Fund. They are administered by the Graduate Division in collaboration with the Graduate Council of the Academic Senate.
April 4, 2008
Students who were identified as members of the plaintiff class in the Kashmiri vs. The Regents of the University of California class action lawsuit should have received a notice regarding the fee overcharge judgment. That notice, provided by the Office of Registrar, can be downloaded/viewed online (PDF).
December 11, 2007
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.
November 13, 2007
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.
October 9, 2007
John Gofman in 1979. Photo: Egan O’Connor 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.
October 5, 2007
A stint as a day laborer on the star-studded Malibu coast launched Alvaro Huerta’s career in academia.
August 14, 2007
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.
June 17, 2007
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.
April 20, 2007
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.
December 7, 2006
For the inexperienced traveler, Aubrey Gilbert’s “whirlwind tour of your nervous system” blows past the hippocampus and cortex of the frontal lobes like a five-day package excursion through the great cities of Europe. Looking back, there’s no doubt it's been a remarkable trip, but you’re unsure in which region of the brain you encountered Broca’s area, or the precise location of the olfactory bulb; your most vivid take-home memory is apt to be Gilbert's admonition never, ever to order brains for lunch.
September 6, 2006
Berkeley’s neighbor to the south, Oakland, has a Chinatown that’s well known to city residents and others who go there to shop, dine, and renew cultural ties. What most don’t know is that a previous Chinatown existed “uptown” in Oakland, farther north and west of the present site, until the 1870s, when most occupants were forced to vacate.
September 6, 2006
Whatever else it ate, it may have consumed a whole school of thought about where and how dinosaurs evolved, say Berkeley integrative biology Ph.D. student Randall Irmis and co-researchers of their find in Arizona’s Petrified Forest National Park.
December 8, 2005
As a GSI for Finance (BA 103) and Managerial Accounting (BA 102B), William "Willy" Wong, MBA '05, would offer "numerous review sessions and have 12-hour-long office-hour visits," wrote one of the 37 student who nominated him for heroic status. Another singled out the "large packets of material [he prepared] to help us learn the subject matter, which must have taken him many hours each time" — packets that "if compiled fully, will rival the class textbooks," said another admirer. When one student was having trouble obtaining internships, Wong gave him advice, then offered to look over his résumé, as he did for several others. And his 24/7 help was nondiscriminating: roughly half of the 37 survey respondents admitted that they were not even enrolled in one of his sections.
February 17, 2005
Jorge Bravo (at Nemea in 1997, 1998, 2000, 2001, 2002, and 2003) is a doctoral student whose dissertation is on the Hero Shrine of Opheltes.
December 17, 2004
Charles Man Fong Tung was nervous and tired last December when he walked into the Graduate Degrees Office on the third floor of Sproul Hall to – at long last – file his dissertation.
He had made the required two copies, printed in the required font size on the specified archival paper, but was it perfect? What if it wasn’t? Would his years of labor be frustrated?
His worries were not uncommon among degree candidates submitting the fruits of their intellectual labor. But, like most, he did it right (even a few days before the deadline), and he could relax.