Competitions

The Jawaharlal sisters appearing on "Shark Tank"

Pi-Bot inventors score $200,000 deal on ‘Shark Tank’

11/02/15 — Berkeley Engineering senior Lavanya Jawaharlal and her sister Melissa, both mechanical engineers, walked away from TV's investment reality show “Shark Tank” with a $200,000 deal that they will put toward taking their STEM robotics education concept nationwide.

Melissa and Lavanya Jawaharlal with their Pi-Bot

Pi-Bot inventors, STEM proselytizers dive into ‘Shark Tank’

10/30/15 — Lavanya Jawaharlal, a senior in mechanical engineering, and her engineer sister Melissa founded STEM Center USA to open up access to the fields of science, technology, engineering and math to more diverse students.

A student sketch from the Interactive Seating class

Interactive seating: New course models design innovation education

08/15/15 — A new course from the Jacobs Institute for Design Innovation reinvents the chair and models a new form of engineering education at Berkeley.

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.

Rube Goldberg drawing of a complicated contraption

A simple task

04/22/15 The Verge — More than a century after his graduation from UC Berkeley with an engineering degree, Rube Goldberg's whimsical machines - symbols of "man's capacity for exerting maximum effort to accomplish minimal results" - are the focus of national competitions and a loving retrospective.

Students race car with just a few drops of gas

04/08/15 ABC-7 News — A team of mechanical engineering students race through the streets of Detroit in a car that employs cutting-edge materials and tools - but very little gas.

Lydia Sohn’s cellular research gains White House notice

09/22/14 Office of Science and Technology Policy — A post to the White House blog last week recognized mechanical engineering professor Lydia Sohn for her prize-winning submission to a foundation-sponsored competition seeking the most compelling ideas for revolutionary life science platform technologies. Sohn's idea? A low-cost, label-free platform to screen, and subsequently sort, single-cells for multiple surface markers.

8 grad students named Siebel Scholars

09/11/14 Siebel Scholars Foundation — Eight Berkeley Engineering graduate students - five from bioengineering and three from EECS - have been selected as Siebel Scholars for 2015, joining a class of 83 of the most talented students from the world's leading graduate schools.

Students digitizing Hearst Museum artifacts

‘HackTheHearst’ to expand public discovery of ancient treasures

09/03/14 — The Hearst Museum of Anthropology is seeking participants for a hackathon this month that will create apps or web interfaces to enable easier, open-source exploration of the museum's digitized collections data and images.

Capstone team takes 2nd in ASME Undergraduate Design Competition

08/14/14 — A team of students in the Fall 2013 Bioengineering Senior Capstone Design course have won Second Place in the American Society of Mechanical Engineers Undergraduate Design Competition this summer.

Cal Seismic Design team with their winning model

Cal Seismic Design shakes up the competition

08/04/14 Daily Clog — The Cal Seismic Design student team finished second in the world in late July's 2014 Undergraduate Seismic Design Competition, held in Anchorage, Alaska.

On the road

06/17/14 — While working in their garage at the Richmond Field Station, the machine shop in Cory Hall, or the Hackerspace, CalSol - the UC Berkeley Solar Vehicle Team - has completely redesigned their competition vehicle. They will have the opportunity to test their new design in an upcoming endurance race that will take them across eight states, from Texas to Minnesota.

Big Ideas@Berkeley 2014: Launching new generations of social innovators

05/14/14 — The annual Big Ideas@Berkeley competition continues to spur Berkeley students to change the world via life-changing innovations. This year's winning projects, honored at the Blum Center for Developing Economies, included a host of Berkeley Engineers representing several disciplines.

Devices: Optimal distillation

05/01/14 — Students in the hands-on Interactive Device Design course researched the distillery business to design an elegant solution to an age-old challenge.

Cal human-powered vehicle crossing the finish line

Cal Human-Powered Vehicle team mends, but does not brake

05/01/14 California magazine — Things were looking bleak for the Berkeley Engineering Human-Powered Vehicle team last weekend, and the timing couldn't have been worse. Just a day before the big ASME regional race, their state-of-the-art vehicle, nicknamed Reuben, crashed and broke in two on the first practice run. Then came a bigger surprise.

Student hackers design new ways to research the Free Speech Movement

04/18/14 — A student team that included EECS undergrads Kevin Casey and Craig Hiller took first place in HackFSM, a 12-day hackathon organized by the Bancroft Library and Digital Humanities@Berkeley that shared the Free Speech Movement's aim to create a free marketplace of ideas.

Whatever floats their boat: Cal team designs canoe of concrete

03/27/14 California magazine — Fish got to swim, birds got to fly, and engineering students got to do wild and wacky things -- like designing, building, and racing canoes made of concrete. And nowhere do they do it better than at Berkeley Engineering, where civil engineering students are working overtime getting this year's canoe, Calamari, ready for the Mid-Pacific Regional Conference in early April.

Winners of DOE energy efficiency innovation award

Students’ energy-efficiency proposal wins ‘Most Innovative’ in DOE competition

03/26/14 Daily Californian — A team of four Berkeley Engineering undergraduates won “Most Innovative” in one of six categories at the Department of Energy's Better Buildings Case Competition for its proposal to improve energy efficiency at universities. Members of the Golden EnergTech team were Nanavati Low (IEOR '16), Daniel Tjandra (ChemE '14), Michael Chang (CEE '15) and Grace Vasiknanonte (MSE '16).

Solar car team works into the night months before next race

11/21/13 Daily Californian — The CalSol team has been hard at work - including nights and football weekends - getting Zephyr, their latest solar-powered car, ready for the July 2014 American Solar Challenge race from Texas to Minnesota.

Berkeley Engineering team builds lamp robot at hackathon

09/09/13 Daily Pennsylvanian — A reporter for the Daily Pennsylvanian student newspaper shadows four Berkeley Engineering students as they try repeat the Berkeley team's 2012 victory at the PennApps Hackathon, the largest such student-run event in the country.