August 11, 2010
If you are a student who is new to campus — welcome! If you are filing a thesis or dissertation this month — congratulations!
August 11, 2010
(Photo: Dick Cortén) On its journey to a new building, the School of Public Health has vacated its ancestral headquarters (Warren Hall) and watched (from temporary space in University Hall and elsewhere on campus) as that timeworn structure was obliterated (in 2007) and its substitute, the Li Ka Shing…
August 11, 2010
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
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
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
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 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
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
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
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.
July 19, 2010
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.
July 15, 2010
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
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
In the 1970s, the Berkeley campus was, a veteran faculty member told a concerned new assistant professor, “not a loving institution.”
July 13, 2010
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, 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
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
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
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
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.