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Devices & inventions

2015 Capstone Expo

Students engineer solutions to industry challenges

12/16/15 — Three energy-related devices developed by students in the Fung Institute for Engineering Leadership's Master of Engineering capstone project course are featured in a video from the Berkeley News team.
QuakeCAFE mobile website

QuakeCAFE: A mobile wake-up call for Californians

12/16/15 CITRIS — No one likes to be reminded that there's a 99.7% chance that California will experience a major earthquake in the next 30 years. But a little preparedness can go a long way, and a new mobile-friendly website called QuakeCAFE can help.
Mushroom-based stools

Making furniture from fungi

12/16/15 Scientific American — For three years, doctoral mechanical engineering student Sonia Travaglini has been studying inventor Phil Ross's mushroom composite as a sustainable alternative to wood, plastic and other materials.
Chenming Hu and Paul Wright

Three scientists elected to National Academy of Inventors

12/15/15 — The National Academy of Inventors has elected three UC Berkeley faculty members to its ranks in honor of their innovation and creativity leading to patented inventions that have made a tangible impact on society. The new members include Chenming Hu, an EECS professor in the graduate school, and Paul Wright, the A. Martin Berlin Chair in Mechanical Engineering.
Dan Fletcher

Dan Fletcher named to Foreign Policy’s 2015 Global Thinkers list

12/03/15 Foreign Policy — Bioengineering professor Daniel Fletcher has been named a top innovator of 2015 by Foreign Policy magazine for his development of the CellScope Loa, a 3D-printed plastic base that turns a cell phone into a disease-finding video microscope.
Tae Joon Seok and Sangyoon Han

Berkeley Engineering team wins $10,000 for cloud-storage innovation

11/23/15 Daily Californian — The EECS graduate student duo of Tae Joon Seok and Sangyoon Han has come away with $10,000 after winning third place in a national competition among collegiate inventors for their cloud-technology innovation, called the Silicon Waveguide Array Photonic Switch.
Eko Core stethoscope

The superior stethoscope

11/20/15 Time — The Eko Core smart stethoscope, developed by CEO Connor Landgraf (B.S'13, M.Eng'14 BioE) and his team at Eko Devices, has been named one of the 25 best inventions of 2015 by Time magazine.

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.
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.
Avideh Zakhor

3-D mapping your world with a backpack

11/02/15 KQED Quest — EECS professor Avideh Zakhor has extended 3-D mapping and rendering - what she calls ‘reality capture' - to interior spaces through a laser-equipped backpack that collects thousands of data points, then stitches them together into a 3-D model.

Sophie’s super hand

11/01/15 — Born with symbrachydactyly, eight-year-old Sophie doesn't have fully developed finger bones in her left hand, but with the help of a CITRIS Invention Lab team, she is the new user of a 3-D printed super hand.
Bioengineering professor Kevin Healy

Microscopic models of the human heart

11/01/15 — Bioengineering professor Kevin Healy and his team have developed a “heart on a chip” and “heart on a dot,” potentially opening more accurate and efficient drug screening methods.
Cellscope process diagram to detect parasitic worms

CellScope Loa

11/01/15 — This fall, the CellScope team has adapted their device to analyze images of parasitic Loa loa worms to determine the safety of a treatment for river blindness (onchocerciasis).
Building the shake table

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.
JustMilk device to deliver nutrients with breast milk

Fortifying breast milk

11/01/15 — Mechanical engineering professor Alice Agogino has teamed up on a project that is providing safe nutrient delivery to newborns.
BRETT with EECS professor Pieter Abbeel.

Q+A with BRETT

11/01/15 — “How can we get a robot to think about situations it's never seen before?” asks EECS professor Pieter Abbeel. In this Q&A, BRETT, resident robot in Abbeel's lab, describes its experiences with deep learning.
Diagram of smart cap function

Print and plug

11/01/15 — 3-D printers are expanding the possibilities for innovation with personal devices. To demonstrate the potential, mechanical engineering professor Liwei Lin printed a spoil-detecting milk carton cap.

Spider-inspired silken threads

11/01/15 — Where some people see mere cobwebs, David Breslauer sees nature's most robust fiber. Now the bioengineering Ph.D.'s company, Bolt Threads, has learned how to mimic spider silk in the lab - without spiders.