Student Profile: Rachel Preminger Rachel Preminger fell in love with classics during a required humanities course as a first-year student at Reed College. “The lessons you learn are so portable,” she says. “It’s not about memorizing facts but learning how to think.”
Student Profile: Dan Fahey An environmental and health crisis ravaging the Democratic Republic of the Congo has long been overlooked, says Dan Fahey. Despite years of bloody conflict, the region “wasn’t on the radar of the international community,” says Dan, a Ph.D. candidate in Berkeley’s Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management.
Student Profile: Amie Gordon What makes some romances sizzle and others go down in flames? That’s a question that fascinates Amie Gordon, a psychology doctoral student who specializes in the well-being of relationships. “If you want to understand what makes society work and brings fulfillment to lives, understanding romantic relationships is vital,” she says.
Student Profile: Cindy Huang Long after a visit to the Pakistan-China border in 1999, Cindy Huang yearned to know more about Central Asia and its extraordinary people. While a Berkeley doctoral candidate in anthropology, Cindy got that opportunity.
Alumni Profiles: Ken Lee always looks ahead and figures out the best way to get there Dr. Yong-Kyung Lee, better known in the western world as Ken Lee, is a person of many facets. One of Berkeley’s most illustrious alumni from Korea, he’s been a professor, a research scientist in the private sector in the U.S., CEO of a giant telecom corporation in Korea, and he’s now, as a member of South Korea’s National Assembly, a political leader.
Donor Profile: Eric Stern Eric Stern’s job takes him globetrotting. But when he isn’t away, the Cal alumnus has a standing dinner date. You’ll find him around the family table, savoring a meal and catching up with his wife, Rachel Kaganoff Stern, and their school-aged sons, Henri and Jonah.
Berkeley engineers invent a cell-phone microscope What the world needs now — besides love, of course — is a new technology for diagnosing infectious disease that’s inexpensive and portable yet highly effective. The World Health Organization estimates that there were about 247 million cases of malaria in 2006 and more than nine million new cases of tuberculosis in 2007, with African countries bearing most of the burden in both cases.
Berkeley Trio turns Algae into Fuel and Money At least once or twice a year, you can happen upon David Charron’s “Case Studies in Entrepreneurship” course in the Haas School of Business. In this class, students are confronted with a case study of the early days of a young start-up company called Aurora Biofuels, and asked to tackle a problem its founders, Matt Caspari, Bert Vick and Guido Radaelli, were confronted with from the outset.
A Greener Future: Bringing the U.S. & China Together China and the United States — the world’s top emitters of greenhouse gases — should be at the forefront of clean energy solutions for an ailing planet. That’s the bold vision of the U.S.-China Green Tech Summit, a gathering that drew more than 400 green technology executives, venture capitalists, academics and others to Beijing last fall.
Two scientists, both with Berkeley graduate degrees, are now “national icons” The microphones did not pick up Barack Obama’s private words to MIT biochemist JoAnne Stubbe just before he draped the ribbon with her National Medal of Science around her neck, but his public ones were of gratitude on behalf of the American people. Minutes before, he had expressed similar sentiments about retired physicist Berni Alder.
Graduate Work at Cal Pays Off with a Nobel Prize in Physiology/Medicine What she could not know for sure, back then as a 25-year-old grad student, was that this discovery would win her — and her mentor, Elizabeth Blackburn, now at UCSF — a Nobel Prize. ... When Greider was in the market for a graduate program, after earning her B.A. at UC Santa Barbara, Berkeley was in her final two choices, narrowed not for the usual reasons, but because those were the ones that would have her.
UNICEF’s Ann Veneman shares her perspective on health policy Among the many well-known figures, experts, and leaders who visit this campus in any given month, a significant proportion were here before, as students. One such, in March, was Ann Veneman, the executive director of UNICEF, who gave the Rhoda Goldman Distinguished Lecture in Health Policy.
The Importance of Mentoring Following the adoption of this 'best practices' document by the Academic Senate in 2006, Graduate Division sought external support to establish a mentoring award — and that effort has been successful!
We, Robot In recent years, Berkeley has become a hotbed of robotic activity, to the point where there’s a virtual subculture across many disciplines, involving faculty, alumni, grad students, undergrads, and postdocs in a broad variety of powerhouse labs and research groups and projects.
An evening MBA in the limelight On Wall Street, a national magazine for retail brokers and the financial services industry, has named Valerie Garcia Houts M.B.A. ’99 to its annual list of “Top 40 Advisors Under 40.”
Possible card-skimming scam inspires local caution A small wave of credit/debit card fraud has impacted UC students, among others in Berkeley, during the last few weeks, around the spring break interval.
Solving the Human Mystery The most famous fossil in modern history was given her nickname — "Lucy"— after the in-the-sky-with-diamonds Beatles song that played over and over on a tape recorder, during a drink-enhanced all-night celebration at a campsite in the barren wilds of Ethiopia. The year was 1974.
Engineering grad student wins $250,000 fellowship What would you do if you were handed a $250,000 award for graduate studies with no strings attached? Paul Tillberg, a Berkeley grad student in electrical engineering and materials science and engineering, is about to find out.
Catching up with Richard Blum San Francisco’s Richard Blum B.S. ’58, M.B.A. ‘59, widely known as a private equity financier and philanthropist, also gained considerable visibility as chairman of UC’s Board of Regents, in which role he publicly critiqued the ten-campus system and led an overhaul in the Office of the President.
Did you use a mouse to get here? Thank Doug Engelbart for that, and more Back in 1963, the year JFK was assassinated and the Beatles released “I Want To Hold Your Hand,” a Berkeley electrical engineering alumnus named Douglas Engelbart invented what would become the computer mouse.