News

ME alumna Tami Bond receives MacArthur ‘genius grant’

09/19/14 Daily Californian — Tami Bond (M.S.'95 ME), a civil and environmental engineering professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, was named a MacArthur Fellow on Wednesday for her research on the effects of black carbon emission and atmospheric pollution on global climate and human health.

Yashraj Khaitan, left, and Jacob Dickinson, co-founders of Gram Power, stand next to several solar panels in India

USAID is incubating start-ups to tackle poverty problems

09/17/14 Los Angeles Times — Seeking entrepreneurial solutions to poverty, the US Agency for International Development has bet a million dollars on Gram Power, the brainchild of two Berkeley Engineering grads who aim to bring electricity to rural India while slowing climate change at the same time.

EECS researcher creates controllable flying insects using TI technology

09/12/14 Texas Instruments — EECS associate professor Michel Maharbiz spends his days studying the "beautiful systems" of the insect world, and applying that knowledge to building the tiniest of flying objects.

William Tarpeh at the Berkeley Water Center

Defining development engineering

09/12/14 — Development engineers elude easy definition, but they are trained as multi-tooled tacticians creating holistic solutions to technical challenges that are interlaced with social and political complexities.

8 grad students named Siebel Scholars

09/11/14 Siebel Scholars Foundation — Eight Berkeley Engineering graduate students - five from bioengineering and three from EECS - have been selected as Siebel Scholars for 2015, joining a class of 83 of the most talented students from the world's leading graduate schools.

Bakar Fellow Michel Maharbiz of EECS explaining neural dust

Bakar research fellows make their case in Silicon Valley

09/09/14 — Sixteen Bakar Fellows, including several Berkeley Engineering faculty members, recently presented their research ideas to a a packed room of potential investors on Sand Hill Road.

UC helps build resources, revenue at private Armenian university

09/08/14 San Francisco Chronicle — American University of Armenia, an unusually open institution in a typically authoritarian region, gets lots of support from the University of California, including AUA's new president, Armen Der Kiureghian, a civil engineering professor on leave from UC Berkeley.

UC Berkeley and Tsinghua University launch research and graduate education partnership

09/06/14 — UC Berkeley and Tsinghua University have signed an agreement to establish a joint institute in the city of Shenzhen in South China to promote research collaboration and graduate student education. First areas of focus for the institute will be nanotechnology and nanomedicine, low-carbon and new energy technologies, and data science and next-generation Internet.

Berkeley students launch health tech incubator

09/05/14 Daily Californian — A group of UC Berkeley students, led by co-founders Taner Dagdelen and Zachary Zeleznick, both bioengineering juniors, have launched what they call the first-ever student-run health tech incubator.

Innovator aims to combat global warming from the rooftops down

09/04/14 California magazine — George Ban-Weiss (Ph.D. '08 ME) is all about being cool: Not only does coolness figuratively define his work as a professional jazz bassist, it almost literally defines his career as a scientist.

Welcome new students

09/03/14 — The excitement mixed with trepidation at the RSF gym and on Memorial Glade can mean only one thing: A new academic year is underway.

Students digitizing Hearst Museum artifacts

‘HackTheHearst’ to expand public discovery of ancient treasures

09/03/14 — The Hearst Museum of Anthropology is seeking participants for a hackathon this month that will create apps or web interfaces to enable easier, open-source exploration of the museum's digitized collections data and images.

Brainy, yes, but hardly handy

09/02/14 New York Times — Robots won't be able to take on many human roles until they acquire a delicate sense of touch, and that "takes time, and it's more complicated,” says Ken Goldberg, a roboticist and IEOR professor at Berkeley Engineering. “Humans are really good at this, and they have millions of years of evolution.”

Campus diversity resources

08/30/14 — The Division of Equity & Inclusion provides leadership, accountability & inspiration to the UC Berkeley campus in integrating equity, inclusion, and diversity into all aspects of university life.

Students outside Cesar Chavez Student Center

Disabled Students’ Program

08/30/14 — DSP promotes an inclusive environment for students with disabilities, equipping them with appropriate accommodations and services to achieve their individual academic goals.

Environmental faculty receive prestigious Obama-Singh Award

08/29/14 — Professors Kara Nelson, David Sedlak and Ashok Gadgil of civil and environmental engineering are among the Berkeley faculty selected for the prestigious Obama-Singh 21st Century Knowledge Initiative Award for 2014, which includes work on a sustainable water project in India.

ITS grad students receive Eisenhower fellowships

08/29/14 — Three Institute of Transportation Studies graduate students, Frank Proulx, Jesus Barajas and Lisa Rayle, have won coveted 2014 Dwight David Eisenhower Graduate Fellowships for their research in transportation planning.

Ramesh named associate director at Berkeley lab

08/29/14 Berkeley Lab — Ramamoorthy Ramesh, Purnendu Chatterjee Endowed Chair in Energy Technologies and professor of materials science and engineering and physics, has been named to the new position of associate laboratory director for energy technologies at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Last-minute mergers endanger drivers, worsen traffic jams

08/28/14 San Francisco Chronicle — The "jerk merge," where drivers cut into a traffic lane at the last possible moment, is "probably the most disruptive to traffic" and should be a target of police action, says Michael Cassidy, professor of civil and environmental engineering.

Wafer used to build "organoid chips"---chips that mimic the behavior of the human body.

New ‘biochips’ that mimic our bodies could speed development of drugs

08/27/14 Wired — Researchers in the labs of Berkeley bioengineers Kevin Healy and Luke Lee are collaborating on a project to recreate parts of the human body on chips. The research aims to find ways to get tissue to live and mimic how real organs function in order to eliminate years of animal and human testing of medical treatments.