Blog

November 9, 2010

Engaging Graduate Alumni

Graduate alumni are pursuing the most astonishing array of careers, and it's a pleasure for Dean of the Graduate Division Andrew Szeri to interact with them, especially given their warm feelings for their alma mater—UC Berkeley.
E-Skin

October 29, 2010

Threesomes get noticed

Two trios of grad students made the news recently, not for their trinity but for the interesting work they've been doing in very different fields.

October 20, 2010

UC Berkeley among top of recently released NRC rankings

The National Research Council's Data Based Assessment of Research Doctorate Programs has been released. Berkeley did very well in the assessment, with illustrative rankings that put many of our programs at or near the top.
Steven Chu

October 7, 2010

Berkeley tops the list of new DOE Graduate Fellowships recipients

With 19 out of 150 fellowships awarded — over an eighth of the total, more than any other university — UC Berkeley welcomes the lion's share of students in energy studies across its college and departments who will be studying here for up to three years, with support from the U.S. Department of Energy.

August 11, 2010

Progress report: two down, one nearly up, and one to go

(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…
Steven Chu

August 11, 2010

Energy Secretary advances nano science in spare time

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."
Karl Brown

August 11, 2010

Energy-efficiency expert (and grad alum) Karl Brown is a champ

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.
Rube Goldberg Machine

July 19, 2010

The Berkeley underpinnings of Google’s July 4th salute

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.
Mark Twain Text

July 19, 2010

Just released: Mark Twain’s posthumous poke at interviewers

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.
Graduate Student Instructors in a large room

July 19, 2010

More than 270 GSIs are singled out for the quality of their teaching

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.