Competitions

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.

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.

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.

Go Bears!

05/13/13 — As engineers we compete. New ideas, technologies and solutions come about only if we act as their champion. Sometimes the difference between an idea being realized or being left to wither in the planning phases can be a competitive spark that makes us want to improve things. As I take stock of the 2012–13 academic year, I am again impressed by the achievements of our students-and by their competitive nature.

Sink or swim

02/07/13 — To test new modeling software from DARPA, teams of students from mechanical engineering professor Homayoon Kazerooni's ME 102B mechatronics design class spent months building a fleet of amphibious vehicles, along with other inventions and novel devices. Then in early December, they put their creations to the test on the soggy volleyball court behind Soda Hall - with splashy results.

Fabricating the ApoCALypse

11/01/12 — CEE Steel Bridge team competed against 600 students from 47 engineering schools in May 2012 to win the national title.

Olympic-caliber engineer

11/01/12 — Olympic rower and mechanical engineering student Olivier Siegelaar relates his experiences as an Olympian and student-athlete.

The year of the ApoCALypse: Steel Bridge Team wins nationals

06/26/12 — Berkeley's Steel Bridge Team, based in the civil and environmental engineering department, won the 2012 national steel bridge title on May 25 and 26. Roughly 600 students from 47 engineering schools from across the country gathered to compete and test their steel structure design, fabrication and construction skills during this year's competition at Clemson University.

UC Berkeley Steel Bridge Team takes first place at Nationals

05/31/12 — The CEE Steel Bridge team and their entry, ApoCALypse, took first overall at the 2012 ASCE/AISC Student Steel Bridge Competition held at Clemson University, South Carolina over the Memorial Day weekend. "We held our breath when they announced third place (Cal Poly), and when MIT got second, we started cheering like crazy--for them--and for us, because we knew we were first," said Sabrina Odah, bridge project manager.

Rowing on to nationals

04/17/12 — Student engineers from more than a dozen western universities gathered in late March for a weekend of ambitious civil and environmental engineering competitions. Berkeley was the host campus for this year's Mid-Pacific Regional Conference, put on by the American Society of Civil Engineers. At Quarry Lakes in Fremont, concrete canoe teams raced in heats. Berkeley's team, aboard their new canoe GraffiCal 2.0, came in second place. Along with first-place winner University of Nevada, Reno, Berkeley advances to the 25th annual National Concrete Canoe Competition in Reno in mid-June.

‘Rayce’ down under

11/29/11 — For the first time since its founding in 1990, CalSol, Berkeley Engineering's solar car team, competed in the international World Solar Challenge (WSC). Held in October in Australia, the WSC drew 37 solar-powered cars to a weeklong “rayce” crossing 3,000 kilometers of the barren Outback from Darwin to Adelaide. CalSol's Impulse team members posted these reports from the field.

Airport design class team wins FAA competition

07/22/11 Institute of Transportation Studies — The Federal Aviation Administration awarded four undergraduates from Dr. Jasenka Rakas' airport design class a first prize for their proposal to improve airport efficiency. Their paper, "Collaborative Gate Assignment," suggests airlines and airport operators share gates as well as real-time information on gate utilization in order to reduce the time, fuel and emissions that are wasted when an arriving aircraft must wait on the tarmac for a gate to open.