Making waves: Turning ocean power into electricity
03/15/16 — Ocean waves constantly generate energy. Berkeley engineers are trying to build a device to harness that power and convert it to electricity.
Civil engineering
How deep learning gives us a precise picture of all the water on earth
02/26/16 MIT Technology Review — Scientists are using artificial intelligence to help them achieve precise, dynamic measurements of water levels around the world. CEE professor Steven Glaser says most current water models are based on readings from the last 50 years.
CEE’s William Tarpeh honored as a young innovator
02/19/16 NBC — Environmental engineering Ph.D. student William Tarpeh, whose work promotes sustainable sanitation in developing countries, was selected by NBC News as one of the NBCBLK28 - innovators and game changers who are "young, gifted, and unapologetically Black."
New members elected to the National Academy of Engineering
02/08/16 — The National Academy of Engineering elected five Berkeley engineers, including three current faculty, in this year's class of new members.
White House renews commitment to earthquake early warning system
02/03/16 — Buoyed by recent advances in technology, the federal government announced Tuesday that it is expanding its commitment to earthquake warning systems because they will save lives.
Filtering water with graphene
01/15/16 — CEE professor Baoxia Mi is developing a more efficient water filtration membrane constructed from graphene oxide, a carbon-based material that's made from naturally-occurring graphite, the same material found in pencils.
Building an organ in the marsh
12/16/15 — A Louisiana native and environmental engineering Ph.D. student, Madeline Foster-Martinez is studying the fluid dynamics of a local marsh to better understand tidal wetland restoration.
Of war, water and working to fix South Sudan
11/18/15 — Civil engineering undergrad Akol Kuan brought tales of his native South Sudan to Oakland's Beacon Day School, where sixth graders had just finished reading A Long Walk to Water, a novel that follows the hardships and heartbreaks of two Sudanese 11-year-olds.
Celebrating World Toilet Day, reinventing sanitation
11/17/15 — United Nations World Toilet Day on Nov. 19 is environmental engineering doctoral student William Tarpeh's main chance - a time to proselytize about all things sanitation. For mechanical engineering grad student Emily Woods, it's a boost for Sanivation, the company she co-founded to convert human feces into charcoal for a poor community in Kenya.
blueEnergy’s water and sanitation technology for Nicaragua
11/06/15 Blum Center — NGOs like blueEnergy, founded by Berkeley graduate Mathias Craig (B.S'01 CEE), are helping to provide residents of resource-rich but infrastructure-poor Nicaragua with access to clean water and improved sanitation.
Heavy lifting
11/01/15 — With an eclectic array of equipment, the Glaser Lab is home to research projects ranging from seismic safety and geothermal energy monitoring to sensor grids to measure Sierra snowpack.
Still shakin’ it
11/01/15 — The venerable Shake Table of the Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research Center (PEER), the largest six-degrees-of-freedom table in the country, brings its illustrious past forward to continually improve seismic safety.
Transit trends
11/01/15 — While not known for fast responses to the market, automakers are now making modifications to suit the sharing economy, which is growing by 35 percent a year. If only they could do something about poor driving practices, most notably, the jerk merge.
Build Change founder delivers CEE Distinguished Lecture
10/15/15 — Watch: Alumnus Elizabeth Hausler Strand, the founder and CEO of Build Change, is making homes safer, worldwide.
Khalid Mosalam appointed director of Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research Center
10/12/15 — Khalid M. Mosalam, Taisei Professor of Civil Engineering at UC Berkeley, has been appointed director of the Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research Center, a multi-institutional research and education center headquartered at Berkeley.
Pocket-sized docent tours
09/24/15 — For years, Arthur Bart-Williams (B.S'88 CE) had plans to build better tour-guide technology. Now he's done just that.
‘License plates’ for drones could hold rogue operators accountable
08/20/15 — Berkeley engineers from the Lightcense project are testing a kind of license plate for drones - a rectangular array of bright, multicolored LEDs attached to the underside of a craft - that they think could help make drone operators more accountable.
Pioneering shaking table continues to be innovative
08/12/15 Structure magazine — Built in 1972, PEER's shaking table at the Richmond Field Station continues to make waves. With smart technology and other enhancements, the venerable testing device - the largest six-degree-of-freedom table in the U.S. - advances the science of earthquake engineering.
What are the ethics of humanitarian technology?
07/30/15 Engineering for Change — At this spring's Humanitarian Technology conference, Syed Imran Ali, a postdoctoral fellow in environmental engineering at the Blum Center for Developing Economies, questioned whether, in their zeal to help the world's financially and physically impoverished, engineers are acting in a manner that meets the professional obligation to “first, do no harm.”
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.