March 18, 2009
Larissa Kelly, the diminutive UC Berkeley graduate student in history who swept to game show triumph last spring, has returned to compete again.
March 18, 2009
The drama that actually took place in a much more compressed interval back in February of this year played out over seven separate days in the latter part of May.
That its star, Larissa Kelly, was no longer in California, or even the United States, didn’t matter. It was literally academic. (Kelly was, like the serious Ph.D. candidate she is, pursuing her dissertation research, which took her to Mexico.)
March 13, 2009
Larissa Kelly, the diminutive UC Berkeley graduate student in history who swept to game show triumph last spring, has returned to compete again.
March 12, 2009
MCB professor Ellen Robey (Berkeley Ph.D. '86), two of her postdocs, and a grad student are in Nature's coverage of their lab as the post-stem-cell ban era begins.
March 11, 2009
From 2001 on, all but one of the Lange Fellowship winners have been graduate students, and the last five have all been seeking journalism degrees. Coombs’ emphasis in the J-school is new media.
March 11, 2009
Miguel Arzabe Art Practice M.F.A. candidate Miguel Arzabe is a West Oakland urbanite who loves the outdoors. He documents his wilderness hikes on video and in abstract paintings, and has also brought the experience back through a medium many of us have tried and, over the years,…
February 10, 2009
Reno native and triathlete Sara McAllister has a lot going for her these days. The newly minted Berkeley mechanical engineering Ph.D. and current post-doc not only successfully participated in some 16 triathlons--including a grueling half-Iron Man Aquabike race, she also recently appeared on the History Channel series “The Universe,” ...
February 10, 2009
It’s very hot outside, the sun is burning, and the light is violent at noon. I walk alongside my sister on an earthy red path through sugar cane fields, on our way home from school. We are thirsty; the sugar cane is refreshing and delicious. This is Africa. This is Bouaké in the early 1960s when it still is in the middle of nowhere, a big village in the bush.
February 5, 2009
His full name is Steven Chu. That he’s not a very formal guy is clear from the headline from the news released by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, which he currently heads — “Obama Picks Berkeley Lab Director Steve Chu for Energy Secretary.”
January 18, 2009
Berkeley’s fall (and summer) 2008 graduates had a two-degree Cal alumna as the principal speaker at their commencement in December, Mimi Silbert by name.
January 8, 2009
“After graduating from Carnegie Mellon with my B.S. in mathematics and computer science, I worked in consulting, traveled in Asia, did my military service in France, before wishing to return to academic endeavors. After considering carefully my options, Berkeley stood out for its exceptional "value proposition," as the business world likes to say — stunning academics and fabulous quality of life.
December 11, 2008
Richard Ladner, another winner of the 2008 Purpose Prize, not only has a Ph.D. from Berkeley, by one of those curious coincidences he received it in 1971, the same year as Arlene Blum (see above). While hers was in biophysical chemistry, his was in mathematics. Lardner is now a professor…
December 11, 2008
A family group closely associated with the Graduate Division is well-represented in the trust-themed Fall '08 issue of Greater Good, in a feature called "Can I Trust You?".
November 19, 2008
Throughout his career, Richard Halkett has focused on technology, innovation, and education, in relation to foreign policy. He currently serves as the Director of Strategy & Research for Cisco Global Education. From 2006 to 2008, he was the Executive Director of Policy & Research at the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (NESTA) in London, where he developed programs to enrich and strengthen innovation policy in the U.K. Before NESTA, he worked at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a large foreign policy think tank in Washington D.C.
Halkett graduated from Oxford University with a double first and a university prize from Merton College. After Oxford, he co-founded Boxmind, an Oxford—based technology company, which he ran from 2000 to 2003. He came to Berkeley in 2003 as a U.K.-U.S. Fulbright Scholar in the Goldman School of Public Policy. Not long after he arrived, he and a classmate founded PolicyMatters, the journal of the Goldman School.
October 21, 2008
Jimmy Lopez Toward the end of September 2008, the New York Times reviewed a concert by the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra and mentioned, in the same breath, music by Rachmaninoff, Respighi, and a new work, “Fiesta!” “by a young Peruvian composer, Jimmy López.” Mr. López, 29, noted…
October 21, 2008
The Seattle Post-Intelligencer told its readers on September 22, 2008, that University of Washington professor David Montgomery was one day into his sabbatical, wondering how to cut expenses while writing a book, when he was contacted by the MacArthur Foundation. “Montgomery, 47,” the paper said, “is one of 25 people…
September 24, 2008
A summer job during high school proved to be life-changing for Barbara Staggers. The high achieving teen who aspired to be a ballerina or maybe a veterinarian was working for a recreation program for inner-city kids. “My job was to teach swimming and gymnastics so at the end of the day they’d be too tired to get into trouble,” she recalls. Among her youngsters was a quiet, beautiful 14-year old girl — until a man came to take her away. “He looked like the classic pimp from the movies and said he needed her to work,” recounts Staggers, who went to her supervisor. But when they phoned the girl’s mother, she said, “Let her go. We need the money.”
September 24, 2008
In 2004, the United States Agency for International Development contacted Ashok Gadgil, of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, for help. Gadgil’s idea: design a fuel-efficient, portable stove for Darfur.
September 23, 2008
Few disciplines are as traditional, in every possible sense of the term, as the field of Classics. Indeed, it could be said that Classics – the intensive study of Greek and Roman literature, language, and culture – is an originary site for the notion and study of tradition. traditio (a noun: “handing over, delivery; the handing down of knowledge”) and its cognate tradere (a verb: “to hand over; to hand down”) are both Latin words. These two terms encode a double sense: first, the notion of making a present-time gift and second, the notion of wisdom handed down through time. One powerful example of this duality is the Homeric rhapsode, a bard who professes in each performed song to enact “Homer” – the ever-same, traditional poems by the ever-same poet. Yet each performance is a different event. Ancient evidence suggests that different performances produced drastically different, if structurally similar, poems. Each performance thus relies upon tradition (traditio), even while it delivers (tradit) the present-time gift of a new poem.
September 23, 2008
In February 1999 when I learned that I was being offered a Berkeley Graduate Fellowship, I had been a part-time English as a Second Language (ESL) instructor at a small community college in Washington state for 10 years. In 1997 I had been awarded a Part-time Faculty Award of Excellence at my college, based on both my teaching and program development work, and then in 1998, I was turned down for a full-time position. I was ready for something new, and excited about the idea of doing research on the social contexts of second language learning in immigrant communities. I also had a house, a husband, two children, and a large extended family in my town in Washington, and it was difficult to consider uprooting. Berkeley’s offer of a prestigious fellowship helped to reassure me that I wasn’t completely out of my mind.