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.
November 4, 2004
In her San Francisco studio, artist Emily Prince quietly continues a work-in-progress, her vast memorial to U.S. troops whose lives were lost in Operations Iraqi Freedom and Enduring Freedom. The artwork she’s created, completely by hand, consists of thousands of individual, wallet-size portraits, finely drawn in graphite, that, when arranged on a wall, create a very large map of America.
January 31, 2004
When Shilpi Gupta didn’t receive an honorable mention at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival awards ceremony, she was disappointed.
August 27, 2003
Wendy Cheng makes comparisons of urban space in Taipei, Tokyo. Levittown, San Diego, and the Carmel Valley, using her camera to document them, winning the Dorothea Lange Fellowship along the way.
August 27, 2003
When the Russians sent Sputnik I, the world’s first artificial satellite, into space on October 4, 1957, they unknowingly launched a women’s movement in America which would bring good fortune to higher education — Berkeley in particular — for years to come.
April 12, 2001
This article appeared in the print version of the The Graduate in the Spring of 2001. Editor’s Note: The first Black sorority at UC Berkeley was Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc., Kappa Chapter, founded by Vivian Osborne Marsh and chartered on February 21, 1921. Osborne Marsh was the first Black…