Camp gives middle school girls hands-on experience in engineering
07/16/15 — At UC Berkeley's Girls in Engineering summer camps, middle schoolers go from robots to cow legs to edible juice caviar, all in one whirlwind week.
News
Center for Technology, Society and Policy promotes graduate student and postdoc involvement
07/16/15 — The UC Berkeley School of Information is launching the Center for Technology, Society and Policy, established with seed funding from Google, to focus on engineering ethics, technology and well-being, standards and governance, and digital citizenship.
Alice Agogino: ME trailblazer
07/15/15 Blum Center — When historians get around to investigating the trials and triumphs of women scientists in the late 20th century, they would do well to spend some time looking at the career of Alice Merner Agogino, a pioneer in mechanical engineering, development engineering and STEM gender equity.
Researchers create model of early human heart development from stem cells
07/14/15 — Berkeley bioengineers, in collaboration with scientists at the Gladstone Institutes, have developed a template for growing beating cardiac tissue from stem cells, creating a system that could serve as a model for early heart development and a drug-screening tool to make pregnancies safer.
Rock on: Student-designed chair generates energy to charge phone
07/13/15 California magazine — The Volta, a chair that harnesses the rocking motion of the sitter to generate energy, has won a National Maker Faire award for its inventors - four Berkeley undergrads taking part in the interdisciplinary Interactive Seating Design Competition sponsored by the Jacobs Institute for Design Innovation.
Ernest S. Kuh, Berkeley Engineering professor and dean emeritus, 1928–2015
07/08/15 — Ernest S. Kuh, dean and professor emeritus at the College of Engineering and an internationally renowned expert in electronic circuit theory, died on June 27. He was 86. A campus memorial will be held this September.
Radiation safety for sunken-ship archaeology
07/08/15 Berkeley Lab — Kai Vetter, professor of nuclear engineering and Berkeley Lab scientist, is helping researchers determine the radiation risk of exploring an underwater aircraft carrier scuttled off the Farallon Islands after World War II.
VC firm to invest $250,000 in winner of campus startup contest
07/07/15 — Pejman Mar Ventures, known for investing in Stanford University startups, is on the hunt for UC Berkeley entrepreneurs, and has created a new $250,000 competition to find one.
Project Jupyter gets $6M to expand collaborative data science software
07/07/15 — A powerful, interactive platform popular among academics and scientists who wrestle with large datasets in multiple formats is getting a big infusion of support to broaden its capabilities for collaborative data science and to reach ever wider audiences.
How to grow back the back
07/06/15 Berkeley Research — Grace O'Connell, assistant professor of mechanical engineering, is exploring ways to grow human disc tissue – the spongy, protective material between vertebrae – in order to repair or replace damaged cartilage.
UC Berkeley holds NSA-sponsored hacking summer camp for teens
07/06/15 KGO-TV — It is summer camp season and at UC Berkeley it is the government's cyberspies - the National Security Agency - who are sponsoring the summer fun. Instead of cloak and dagger, it's all about codes and hackers.
Multicampus ‘People and Robots Initiative’ targets advances, challenges
07/01/15 CITRIS — Cloud Robotics, Deep Learning, Human-Centric Automation, and Bio-Inspired Robotics are among the primary research themes of the new CITRIS initiative that focuses on innovative theory, benchmarks, software, and approaches to address challenges in the interest of society.
Institute of Physics awards Newton Medal to Eli Yablonovitch
07/01/15 — The United Kingdom's Institute of Physics has awarded its prestigious Isaac Newton Medal to EECS professor Eli Yablonovitch, a pioneer in the field of optoelectronics and nanophotonics.
Ride-sharing forces automakers to rethink how they sell cars
06/30/15 Los Angeles Times — Every vehicle that goes into a full-time car-sharing service, such as short-time rental company Zipcar, supplants four to six new car sales and postpones the purchase of up to seven more, says Susan Shaheen, a transportation sustainability researcher and adjunct professor of civil and environmental engineering.
Ernest Kuh, professor and dean emeritus, 1928-2015
06/30/15 — Ernest S. Kuh, who greatly expanded the College of Engineering's partnerships with its alumni and industry networks while serving as dean in the 1970s, died June 27 at age 86. A complete obituary will be published shortly.
Steve Wozniak receives top alumni honor
06/29/15 Cal Alumni Association — The Cal Alumni Association presented Steve Wozniak ('86 EECS) with its most esteemed honor, the 2015 Alumnus of the Year award, at a gala event at Memorial Stadium's University Club.
Environment takes big hit from water-intensive marijuana cultivation
06/24/15 — A new study from the Nature Conservancy, co-authored by environmental engineers and other researchers from UC Berkeley, highlights the toll that the illegal cultivation of thirsty marijuana is taking on the environment, particularly on fragile watersheds.
New Sandia director will be first woman to lead national security lab
06/23/15 Sandia National Lab — Jill M. Hruby (M.S.'82 ME) has been named the next president and director of Sandia National Laboratories, the country's largest national lab. She will be the first woman to lead a national security laboratory when she steps into her new role July 17.
To teach the world robotics
06/17/15 — An electrical engineering professor and a graduate researcher designed a massively open online course to teach an intro to hacking electronics course.
Why do buses always come in bunches?
06/17/15 CityMetric — Lewis Lehe, a transport engineering Ph.D. candidate, has built a game of sorts to demonstrate the math behind the unfortunate truth that city buses serving the same route tend to arrive in clumps, one right behind the other.