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Berkeley Hyperloop capsule

Building the Berkeley Hyperloop

10/24/16 — Berkeley Hyperloop, currently crowdfunding for a January 2017 launch, is taking on an ambitious design challenge — and it’s part of a rich ecosystem of Berkeley students applying classroom learning and hands-on design skills to real-world challenges.
Fire-cleared area in Yosemite

Wildfire management vs. suppression benefits forest and watershed

10/24/16 — An unprecedented 40-year experiment in Yosemite National Park, led by a team of Berkeley civil and environmental engineers, strongly supports the idea that managing fire, rather than suppressing it, makes wilderness areas more resilient to fire, with the added benefit of increased water availability and resistance to drought.
Drawing of rural well-water treatment system

Berkeley startup helps people find out what they’re drinking

10/04/16 California magazine — SimpleWater, launched by a team of Berkeley engineers and entrepreneurs, offers a water-testing and product-recommendation service called Tap Score that helps users of private wells learn about and treat potential contaminants in their drinking water.
Millennium Tower in San Francisco

A sinking skyscraper and a deepening dispute

09/23/16 New York Times — The sinking and leaning Millennium Tower in San Francisco is highlighting the risks posed by San Francisco's relatively unfettered rash of skyscraper-building, both because of the quality of the soil and the city's position between two major earthquake faults. "This is the first sentinel telling us maybe we should be a little more careful," says civil engineering professor Nicholas Sitar.
Eleanor Allen delivering her TEDx talk on access to water

Why water is a women’s issue

08/22/16 — Every year, half a million children die from drinking contaminated water. In a TEDx talk in Denver, Eleanor Allen (M.S.'97 CE) explains why access to water is a women's issue.
The mountainous headwaters of the East River catchment, located in the Upper Colorado River Basin

Lab to lead new watershed study

08/04/16 Berkeley Lab — Geophysicist Susan Hubbard (Ph.D'98 CEE), Berkeley Lab's associate director for earth and environmental sciences, will head up a three-year DOE initiative to quantify how mountainous watershed floods, drought, fire and early snowmelt affect the downstream delivery of water, nutrients, carbon and metals.
Cal Marching Band

Better marching through algorithms

07/15/16 — Using computer code and a little ingenuity, an introductory engineering course helped solve a confounding problem for the Cal Marching Band.
Daniel Zayas at Rio Olympics site

CEE alumnus pursues gold-medal career

06/10/16 — From London to Sochi to Rio, Daniel Zayas (B.S'12) has built a career that unites his triple passions for engineering, travel and sports.
Artist

On the road to driverless cars

05/24/16 Berkeley Science Review — How Berkeley research, including foundational work by PATH plus recent advances in engineering and computer science, is fundamental to industry progress on automated transportation.
Postdoctoral researcher Florence Bonvin and David Sedlak use liquid chromatography as one of their tools to track chemical contaminants in water supplies

Hazards and opportunities in the pipeline

05/10/16 Berkeley Research — Environmental engineering professor David Sedlak, whose book Water 4.0 calls for a new revolution in urban water systems, is studying the fate of chemical contaminants in wastewater, seeking better ways to treat and clean the water we depend on.
Stephen Mahin and Anil Aswani

Siebel Energy Institute announces new grant winners

05/05/16 Marketwired — The Siebel Engineering Institute has awarded a second set of $50,000 seed grants to teams developing proposals that accelerate energy science research. The fifteen teams include two Berkeley Engineers, structural engineering professor Stephan Mahin (a lead researcher) and IEOR's Anil Aswani.
Madeline Foster-Martinez at the marsh organ she built at Richmond Field Station

Restoring tidal marshlands

05/01/16 — Are biosolids the answer to making tidal wetlands less vulnerable to storm surges similar to that of Hurricane Katrina? Doctoral student and Louisiana native Madeline Foster-Martinez is working to find out.
Postdoc researcher Chinmayee Subban and Ashok Gadgil are refining an affordable water treatment technology to produce fresh drinking water from brackish water

The search for smarter energy and water strategies

04/25/16 Berkeley Research — Environmental engineering professor Ashok Gadgil, principal investigator for a $64 million joint U.S.-China research center, is seeking innovative ways to meet the energy and water needs of both developing and industrial societies.

Watching snow melt

04/11/16 — The collaborative Sierra Net project builds wireless sensor networks in major California watersheds to modernize the way the state's water supply is measured.