Faculty

Ashok Gadgil: The humanitarian inventor

03/09/15 IEEE Spectrum — Named one of IEEE Spectrum's Engineering Heroes for 2015, the civil and environmental engineering professor's work on water purification, cookstoves and arsenic removal has helped tens of millions of people worldwide.

Engineering is: Saving the world with cookstoves

KQED e-book explores engineering through cookstoves

03/02/15 KQED Quest — KQED's new Engineering Is… e-book series launches with the Berkeley Darfur cookstove, developed by environmental engineering professor Ashok Gadgil to improve the lives of refugees in the war-torn Darfur region of Sudan.

In memoriam: William L. Garrison, civil engineer and transportation expert

03/02/15 — William L. Garrison, a professor emeritus of civil engineering and an expert in the ways innovation and technological change occur in the field of transportation, has died at age 90.

Bringing the invisible to light

02/27/15 Berkeley Research — EECS professor Laura Waller is working on computational imaging methods for quantitative phase microscopy, which can be applied in a variety of scientific and industrial settings. Her work is supported by the Bakar Fellows Program for young faculty whose work holds commercial promise.

Ken Goldberg at the World Economic Forum

Forget the Singularity, let’s talk Multiplicity

02/26/15 Robohub — EECS and new media professor Ken Goldberg recaps his trip to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, where he talked about artificial intelligence and took part in a debate on "Will Machines Make Better Decisions Than Humans?"

Data and development: The Mezuri platform

02/25/15 Blum Center — Computer science professor Eric Brewer, leader of the Technology and Infrastructure for Emerging Regions (TIER) group, talks about his platform to better understand development projects through integrated data analysis.

John Dueber (right) and bioengineering graduate student Zach Russ examine a culture of indigo-producing E. coli bacteria.

Greener blue jeans

02/23/15 Berkeley Research — The indigo that dyes your favorite pair of jeans blue is wildly popular, but very "dirty" to synthesize chemically. Bioengineering professor and Bakar fellow John Dueber thinks he has found an environmentally green way for industry to churn out the dye without toxic compounds.

Ana Claudia Arias with a printed electronic circuit

Wearable circuits could extend MRI’s reach

02/13/15 Berkeley Research — EECS associate professor Ana Claudia Arias is creating new wearable electronics based on printed circuits, to allow easier and better MRI imaging of sick infants, among others.

Per Peterson appointed executive associate dean

02/06/15 — Per Peterson, the William and Jean McCallum Floyd Professor in the nuclear engineering department, has joined the college's leadership team as executive associate dean.

Optical antenna enables LEDs to rival lasers

02/04/15 Berkeley Lab — A Berkeley Lab team, led by EECS professor Eli Yablonovitch, has used an external optical antenna to greatly enhance the spontaneous emission of light from a semiconductor nanorod. This advance opens the door to LEDs that can replace lasers for short-range optical communications.

A collage of the work and life of Charles Townes (Collage by Sarah Wittmer)

Nobel laureate and laser inventor Charles Townes dies at 99

01/29/15 — Charles Hard Townes, a professor emeritus of physics at the University of California, Berkeley, who shared the 1964 Nobel Prize in Physics for invention of the laser and subsequently pioneered the use of lasers in astronomy, died early Tuesday, Jan. 27, in Oakland.

Stripes showing differences in electron density in graphene

Graphene advances as viable silicon substitute

01/27/15 — A new study demonstrating a way to control the movement and placement of electrons in graphene moves the wonder material a major step closer to knocking silicon off as the dominant workhorse of the electronics industry. Among the study's lead authors is Berkeley Engineering's Lane Martin, associate professor of materials science and engineering.

Sangiovanni-Vincentelli named ACM fellow

01/09/15 Association for Computing Machinery — EECS professor Alberto Sangiovanni-Vincentelli has been named a 2014 fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery for his contributions to electronic design automation.

The impact of falling oil prices on your wallet

01/05/15 WalletHub — In a recent Ask the Experts column, Robert Bea, professor emeritus of civil and environmental engineering, discusses the precipitous drop in oil prices and its likely effect on the economy.

atomic structure of a ferroelectric material

Discovery advances ferroelectrics in quest for lower power transistors

12/17/14 CITRIS — Berkeley engineers describe the first direct observation of a long-hypothesized but elusive phenomenon called “negative capacitance” in ferroelectric material, which could open the door to a radical reduction in the power consumed by transistors and the devices containing them.

Study reveals resilience of Roman architectural concrete

12/15/14 — An international research team studying the mortar used to build ancient Roman architectural marvels, led by Marie Jackson of civil and environmental engineering, has found a secret to the material's resilience - formation during curing of a crystalline binding hydrate that prevents microcracks from propagating

Heavy truck entering the Caldecott Tunnel

Air pollution down thanks to California’s regulation of diesel trucks

12/12/14 Berkeley Lab — Detailed measurement of emissions from thousands of heavy trucks in the Bay Area by Berkeley Lab air quality scientists, led by adjunct professor Thomas Kirchstetter and professor Rob Harley, both of civil and environmental engineering, showed a dramatic reduction in pollutants in the wake of aggressive new regulations implemented by the California Air Resources Board.