What makes the wheel go around 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.
Protecting a National Treasure G. Wayne Clough, Ph.D. ’69 UC Berkeley Civil Engineering Ph.D. recipient elected as the Smithsonian's 12th Secretary.
2008 Mentoring Awards Announcement 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.
Important Notice to Plaintiffs in the Kashmiri vs. The Regents Class Action Lawsuit Students who were identified as members of the plaintiff class in the Kashmiri vs. The Regents of the University of California class…
Whale of a story for a Berkeley grad student and colleagues 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.
Avoid the brat pack: Website makes raising joyous kids more practical 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.
John W. Gofman: a nuclear chemist who raised questions John Gofman in 1979. Photo: Egan O’Connor In mid-August, John Gofman died at the age of 88. He was widely known in…
‘Invisible economy’ scholar straddles the divide between barrio and Ph.D. seminar room A stint as a day laborer on the star-studded Malibu coast launched Alvaro Huerta’s career in academia.
David Wagner: debugging the vote 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.
Out of the lab to the top of the world; Berkeley biophysicist relishes first ascents 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.
Rich Newton engineered the future 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.
A brainy night in Berkeley: If it’s Thursday, this must be the corpus callosum. Has anyone seen my homunculus? 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.
Almost gone, but not forgotten 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.
Fossil rocks dinosaur tree. Herbivorous crocodile? Maybe. 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.
Pulling all-nighters, buying pizza, dressing up as Darwin… 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.
Being There: Three decades of Nemea through the eyes of its grad students 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.
Long Journey’s Sweet Ending 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.
Portraits & Observations: Emily Prince documents the cost of war 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.
Gritty Journey to Kashmir Leads to Sundance Honor When Shilpi Gupta didn’t receive an honorable mention at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival awards ceremony, she was disappointed.
Trading Spaces: land with a view 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.