Blog

student waving Cal flag

April 30, 2008

Rewarding mentors, the academy’s unsung secret weapon

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.
Four mentoring award winners pose with plaque

April 28, 2008

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.

April 8, 2008

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.
Executive Director of the Greater Good Science Center Christine Carter

November 13, 2007

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.

October 9, 2007

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 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.
David Wagner, right, and then-grad student, now alumnus Naveen K. Sastry (Ph.D. '07) Photo: Peg Skorpinski

August 14, 2007

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.
person hiking snowy mountain

June 17, 2007

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.

April 20, 2007

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.

December 7, 2006

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.

September 6, 2006

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.

September 6, 2006

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.

December 8, 2005

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.
Charles Man Fong Tung awarded a lollipop.

December 17, 2004

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.
American Servicemen and Women Who Have Died in Iraq and Afghanistan (but Not including the Wounded, nor the Iraqis, nor the Afghanis): “The numbers kept coming up in the daily reports. Five here, fourteen there, one day after another. And then the growing figure mounting over a thousand. Peripherally it was ever-present, but still only an abstraction... I needed to see pictures of them, to familiarize myself just a tiny bit more with what was happening far from my warm home,” writes Emily Prince in an introduction to her project. Shown above at the 52nd Venice Biennale, the artwork has been seen by thousands of people from around the world. (Courtesy of designboom.com)

November 4, 2004

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.