Alumni

One of BART’s Biggest Fans

09/04/09 — Barney Smits (B.S.'92 ME) rides Bay Area Rapid Transit every weekday from his Oakland home to his office, two blocks from Oakland's 19th St. station. "I take it just about everywhere I can," he says. "To the opera in the city, to the airport when I'm traveling. Once you're used to it, it's the absolute best, easiest way of getting around." But then he might be biased. Smits, 53, is the transit system's principal mechanical engineer, a job he's held for several years. He's one of the guys who makes sure that the 20 miles of tunnel and 208 miles of track and all the stations and system facilities are safe for riders like him, and you.

What’s Ahead for Our Graduates?

06/04/09 — “If you haven't gotten the ideal job yet, don't take any job! Be bold and creative: take a year off. Look for great leadership development opportunities. Become a volunteer math or science teacher in underserved communities in America or in poor villages in Africa, South America or Asia.”

A Recipe for Success

02/02/09 — Baking a French-inspired strawberry tart and running engineering calculations for a building project make a perfect pairing for Anita Chu (B.S.'98, M.S.'99 CEE). The San Francisco engineer is a pastry chef, an award-winning dessert blogger and photographer, and recently published her first cookbook. "I think there are a lot of similarities between engineering and pastry," Chu says. "Pastry is all about very precise measurement and technique, and that applies to engineering, too."

Schooling Girls on Real-Life Engineering

01/01/09 — Wielding screwdrivers and shears, a crew of Oakland middle-school girls was doing some serious damage to a pair of hapless computers. The girls pried open a PC tower and a laptop and eagerly began extracting such components as the memory, hard drive and power supply. "This is awesome," said Jessica Nguyen, a sixth grader at Montera Middle School. "It's so much fun to take things apart!" Berkeley Engineering alumnae are volunteering as mentors for Techbridge, an Oakland-based program that introduces girls in grades 5 through 12 to technology, science and engineering with a variety of after-school and summer activities.

Mobile Phone Metamorphosis

11/02/08 — Paul Jacobs (B.S. '84, M.S. '86, Ph.D. '89 EECS) sees no limits to what next-generation cell phones will do. As a development engineer, an executive and now CEO of Qualcomm, the San Diego-based wireless technology company, Jacobs has played a major role in the transformation of the mobile phone. Along with their original function in voice communications, the devices have evolved into wireless computers, music players, digital cameras, navigational tools, and medical diagnostic and monitoring equipment. And, says Jacobs, still more advances are on the way. "Innovation comes from being open to diverse ideas," says Jacobs, who holds more than 35 patents for his inventions. "The world changes and you change."

A sky-high career

09/02/08 — Rex Walheim (B.S'84 ME) has a view that's literally out of this world. He's gazed at Earth from 220 miles in space. A NASA astronaut who grew up in San Carlos, California, the 45-year-old Walheim is a veteran of two shuttle missions to the International Space Station and five spacewalks. His most recent voyage, aboard the shuttle Atlantis, carried him to the space station for 12 days in February. The mission's lead space walker, Walheim helped deliver and install a $2 billion European science laboratory known as Columbus.

King of Cool

08/02/08 — As a student, Chandrakant Patel (B.S.'83 ME) rode the bus every day from the low-income Graystone Hotel in San Francisco's Tenderloin, where he lived, to the verdant UC Berkeley campus, where he studied. Today, a lot has changed for Patel, now a fellow at HP Laboratories in Palo Alto, leading the charge to develop a new generation of energy-efficient data centers.

Wired for Success

05/02/08 — For Berkeley-trained Sung-Mo "Steve" Kang, the work of a university chancellor is a lot like engineering. "Think of integrated circuits," says Kang (Ph.D. '75 EECS), who in March began his second year at the helm of UC Merced. Just as a chip relies on a network of connections to operate smoothly, so does a college campus. With that in mind, Kang is taking a collaborative approach to building his young institution into a world-class research university.

A search giant

04/02/08 — It's no surprise that a Google search for Peter Norvig turns up tens of thousands of hits. Norvig (Ph.D. '86 EECS) literally wrote the book on artificial intelligence, coauthoring a bestselling textbook on the subject with Professor Stuart Russell in 1995. As the senior computer scientist at NASA Ames Research Center, he led the team that developed the remote artificial intelligence software that flew aboard the Deep Space 1 spacecraft in 1999. And today, as Google's director of research, Norvig is transforming the way information is organized and accessed on the Web.

Rethinking Risks

03/02/08 — Early in his career, Network Appliance cofounder James Lau ventured out in hopes of developing one of the first hand-held personal computers. His PDA would have used a stylus to enter notes, appointments and other data, but after six months of work in 1991, he scrapped the project. But Lau never regretted his unsuccessful quest. When it comes to innovation, “there's no guarantee,” he says. “That's part of the exploration. You just need to move on.” Move on, he did. Today, Network Appliance has Fortune 1000 status, and last month James Lau received the 2007 Berkeley Engineering Innovation Award for lifetime achievement.

Steve Beck (B.S. ’71 EECS): Giving Back and Getting a Lot in Return

12/02/07 — Steve Beck, 57, has harnessed his passion for video with a vengeance. A noted artist specializing in the use of electronic video, Beck is also the developer of more than 500 commercial electronic products ranging from an energy management system to electronic toys and video games. Beck, whose electronic art is in the collections of such prominent institutions as The Museum of Modern Art, New York, was named EECS Alumnus of the Year in 2003.