Blog

algae in a metal turbine

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.
View of the Campanile from Morrisson Hall

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.
JoAnne Stubbe

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.
Carol Grieder at Nobel ceremony

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.
Ann Veneman

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

The Importance of Mentoring

Following the adoption of this 'best practices' document by the Academic Senate in 2006, Graduate Division sought external support to establish a mentoring award — and that effort has been successful!
We, Robot

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.
Valerie Garcia Houts M.B.A. ’99

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.”
The dig

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.
Paul Tilberg

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.
Richard Blum

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.
Arun Sarin

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

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.
Carol Greider

November 19, 2009

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 work in a couple of intervening decades, would bring them…