Blog - Page 109 of 114 - Berkeley Graduate Division

August 11, 2010

Energy Secretary advances nano science in spare time

Apparently the most-Berkeley person in the Obama cabinet, Secretary of Energy Steven Chu (former director of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley Ph.D. '76), makes scientific contributions, and news, even while he takes it easy. "In his down time, often while flying somewhere," reported AP science writer Seth Borenstein, Chu "relaxes by tackling a scientific conundrum and stretching the limits of technology."

August 11, 2010

Energy-efficiency expert (and grad alum) Karl Brown is a champ

An instrument box mounted in the depths of a campus classroom and office building is hardly a headline-grabbing weapon against climate change. But because buildings are estimated to be responsible for nearly half of all greenhouse-gas emissions, cutting-edge monitoring systems in fact are crucial tools for reducing global warming.

August 11, 2010

Joining a global campus network, Berkeley launches a new master’s degree program in sustainability

Recognizing the proven leadership of campus faculty and students in addressing climate change, poverty and public health, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation in May selected the University of California, Berkeley, as one of 10 universities worldwide to launch a new master’s degree program in development practice.

August 11, 2010

Graduate students drive UC research and help keep top faculty

Julie Kang, a psychology graduate student at UC Riverside, stated the case more baldly than most: "Without graduate students, (the university) quite honestly would come to a screeching halt."

July 19, 2010

The Berkeley underpinnings of Google’s July 4th salute

The world’s best-known search engine varies its logo playfully on its homepage on holidays and whenever it feels like it. This Fourth of July, it featured the basic DNA of a Rube Goldberg device. One of the country's most popular cartoonists, Goldberg started here, in the first issues of Cal’s best-known and longest-lasting humor magazine, the California Pelican, which was founded in 1903 and survived, amusing and outraging people for eight decades, give or take.

July 19, 2010

Just released: Mark Twain’s posthumous poke at interviewers

The Rundown, the blog of The News Hour on PBS, has just published an exclusive: for “the first known time in print,” an essay by Mark Twain on the journalistic interview. In the course of Twain’s career, he was frequently interviewed by reporters, not often to his satisfaction.

July 19, 2010

I School Ph.D. students enlist in an all-volunteer boot camp — no push-ups, no marching, just lots and lots of writing

For two weeks in May, the lone “bong” of the Campanile chiming one p.m. signaled the end of a long morning of labor for a determined group of Information School doctoral students, plus one from the Haas School of Business.

July 19, 2010

The new Dissertation Writer’s Room opens its door to all doctoral candidates

Graduate Division Dean Andrew Szeri and Doe Library's Graduate Services staff have teamed up to offer a new space dedicated to doctoral students advanced to candidacy: the Dissertation Writer's Room, which opened June 21 in Room 215 of the Doe Library.

Graduate Student Instructors in a large room

July 19, 2010

More than 270 GSIs are singled out for the quality of their teaching

276 GSIs from 61 graduate programs were granted this recognition, which is now just over a decade old. The award recognizes the excellence of their teaching. Selections are made according to detailed guidelines, following criteria which may include skills in presenting course materials, capacity to promote critical thinking, and skills in developing course materials that promote learning, as well as evidence such as evaluations by students, letters of nomination by faculty or students, and classroom observation by faculty.

10 winners of the Teaching Effectiveness Award pose together

July 15, 2010

Creative—and effective—solutions win honors for 11 GSIs

The Graduate Division’s Teaching Effectiveness Awards were presented May 13 in the Women’s Faculty Club. The winners identified a teaching/learning problem in their own classes, laboratories, and sections, then came up with a method, strategy, or idea to address the problem, implemented it, measured its effectiveness, and described the process in an essay. Their essays become part of a permanent archive.

July 15, 2010

Love among the technically-inclined

Juliet Holwill had clearly come to trust her fellow UC Berkeley engineering grad student and fellow Aussie Ben Rubinstein, because one sunny September day in 2006 she let him pick her up in a car, blindfold her, and drive her off to an unknown destination.

July 15, 2010

Grad Division and Graduate Assembly team up to honor mentors

In the 1970s, the Berkeley campus was, a veteran faculty member told a concerned new assistant professor, “not a loving institution.”

July 13, 2010

New Dissertation Writing Resources Open to Students

Photo: Peg Skorpinski Tom Leonard and I have both been where you are: in graduate school. Mine was Cornell (Ph.D., 1988), while Tom’s was right here at Cal (Ph.D., 1973). We both know how difficult it can be to find the right time and place to do some serious…

June 19, 2010

Graduation season — A cause for celebration

Graduation season, like a compass, is marked with a series of degrees. But the word “graduation” seems too, well, gradual for what actually happens when the campus blossoms with academic regalia, floral (and currency!) leis, and smiling relatives from all over the planet.

June 2, 2010

Top quality graduate students flock to UC Berkeley despite budget woes

Despite a budget shortfall, hiring freeze and higher fees, the University of California, Berkeley, continues to attract more and higher quality graduate students, according to new data from the campus's Graduate Division.

May 24, 2010

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.

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.