Civil engineering

Large ceiling beams at the Transbay Terminal

Transbay Terminal’s cracked beams may be vulnerable

09/27/18 NBC Bay Area — Calling cracks in specially fabricated beams at San Francisco's new Transbay Terminal potentially “catastrophic,” Rune Storesund, executive director of UC Berkeley's Center for Catastrophic Risk Management, said, “You want to be looking at imperfections in the steel.”

Surveying expert James Anderson dies at 92

08/30/18 — Professor James Anderson, civil and environmental engineering faculty member for 25 years and an expert on the theory and practice of surveying, died on Aug. 23; he was 92.

Discarded cup carried to storm drain by runoff water

Engineered sand zaps storm water pollutants

08/30/18 — Berkeley engineers have created a new way to remove contaminants from storm water using mineral-coated sand, potentially addressing the needs of water-stressed communities that are searching for ways to tap the abundant and yet underused source of fresh drinking water.

House and car destroyed by tornado in Texas. Photo by Volkan Yuksel / Wikimedia Commons

NSF funds extreme events reconnaissance network

08/15/18 PEER — The National Science Foundation has awarded a grant to the Structural Extreme Events Reconnaissance (StEER) Network, which aims to improve reporting and coordination by the natural hazards engineering community in the aftermath of earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes and other extreme events. UC Berkeley is one of StEER's three primary nodes.

Construction cranes on the Los Angeles skyline

A seismic change in predicting how earthquakes will shake tall buildings

06/28/18 New York Times — "There are going to be large changes coming" in the calculation of risk faced by by tall buildings during a major West Coast earthquake, adjunct civil and environmental engineering professor Norman Abrahamson told a conference of earthquake engineers in Los Angeles.

Alvarez-Cohen to lead academic planning for campus

06/18/18 — Lisa Alvarez-Cohen, the Fred and Claire Sauer Professor of Environmental Engineering, has been named as Berkeley's next vice provost for academic planning, effective July 1.

Mashup of photo of McLaughlin Hall and the Mechanical and Electrical Engineering Building (date unknown) with photos of current students

Then & now

06/02/18 — Over the past 150 years, Berkeley Engineering has created a legacy of innovation and public service.

Scans comparing the Hume Lake Dam before and after drainage

Dam scanning

06/01/18 — CEE professor Robert Kayen used lidar technology to evaluate the health of the Hume Lake Dam.

Joseph Charbonnet and his Grad Slam presentation

Berkeley water engineer lands 2018 ‘Slammy’

05/04/18 Graduate Division — At the UC-wide Grad Slam competition on May 3, environmental engineering doctoral student Joseph Charbonnet brought home the first-place ‘Slammy' - and $9,000 in prize money - for his three-minute talk on using manganese-coated sand to capture, clean and re-use stormwater.

Grad program rankings edge still higher

03/19/18 — In the latest U.S. News & World Report rankings of graduate programs, Berkeley Engineering and its departments held steady or moved higher in all categories, including electrical engineering joining CEE as the top-ranked program in the nation.

Dam scanning

02/16/18 — Two civil engineering students built a 3-D model of Berkeley's campus to better understand what's going on with one of California's many aging dams.

Cheap, efficient cookstoves are small-tech solution with big payoff

02/13/18 — Ashok Gadgil, professor of civil and environmental engineering, redesigned a simple technology - the wood cookstove - to help women in refugee camps in Darfur, Sudan. The inexpensive and efficient Darfur stove not only reduced the danger of gathering firewood in the war-torn region, it also reduced health and climate risks from excessive smoke.

Stephen Mahin, earthquake engineering expert, dies at 71

02/13/18 — Civil and environmental engineering professor emeritus Stephen A. Mahin, former director of the Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research Center, passed away on February 9. He was a world-renowned expert in earthquake engineering, with wide-ranging teaching, research and professional contributions to the field.

Why traffic apps make congestion worse

01/30/18 — Has your smartphone traffic app ever led you into a traffic jam? Professor and traffic engineer Alexandre Bayen, director of UC Berkeley's Institute of Transportation Studies, is working on smarter apps that will actually talk to one another to prevent clogged freeways and city streets.

High-speed rail tunnel construction site

Trump infrastructure plan’s tunneling claims raise questions

01/05/18 Newsweek — The Trump administration contends that underground tunnels to carry high-speed rail lines can be built without a dime of federal funding. But critics, including civil and environmental engineering professor C. William Ibbs, head of Berkeley's Construction Management program, suggest there's nothing easy about that kind of tunneling, and it will surely require government oversight.

Illustration of autonomous vehicle situation on city street

Are we going too fast on driverless cars?

12/15/17 Science — Automakers, high-tech companies and politicians are solidly behind self-driving cars and trucks as a sure path to a better, more mobile society. But research on the social, economic and environmental effects of autonomous vehicles is sparse - something Berkeley transportation engineers are seeking to remedy.

Winning students Eric Munsing, Allen Tang, Soeren Kuenzel and Jake Soloff with their prize check

Grad students win $100,000 in data science contest

12/04/17 — A team of UC Berkeley graduate students with serious data science and analysis skills, including EECS MS student Allen Tang and CEE Ph.D. candidate Eric Munsing beat teams from the likes of Harvard, MIT and Oxford to win the $100,000 top prize in an international data science competition staged by the hedge fund Citadel.

A ‘stillsuit’ for cities

11/06/17 — Berkeley water expert David Sedlak, a professor of civil & environmental engineering, says cities may soon have to develop their own version of the science fiction novel Dune's "stillsuit" to recycle wastewater for drinking.

Case studies in forward thinking

11/01/17 — Nine Berkeley Engineering faculty members share some of their forward-looking work and how it might impact what's to come.

High-speer rail demo outside the Capitol in Sacramento

13.5-mile tunnel will make or break California’s bullet train

10/23/17 LA Times — A critical part of California's high-speed rail project is a 13.5-mile tunnel through the Diablo Range - a landmark project whose costs may greatly exceed initial expectations. "This is not good news for taxpayers of California," says civil engineering professor William Ibbs, who has consulted on similar rail projects around the world.