Faculty

What could collapse the Golden Gate Bridge?

09/19/14 KALW — At the movies, the Golden Gate Bridge has been leveled by earthquakes, apes, even a mega-shark. But how would the iconic span fare in more realistic disaster scenarios? Civil engineering professor Abolhassan Astaneh-Asl helps KALW radio figure it out.

EECS researcher creates controllable flying insects using TI technology

09/12/14 Texas Instruments — EECS associate professor Michel Maharbiz spends his days studying the "beautiful systems" of the insect world, and applying that knowledge to building the tiniest of flying objects.

William Tarpeh at the Berkeley Water Center

Defining development engineering

09/12/14 — Development engineers elude easy definition, but they are trained as multi-tooled tacticians creating holistic solutions to technical challenges that are interlaced with social and political complexities.

Bakar Fellow Michel Maharbiz of EECS explaining neural dust

Bakar research fellows make their case in Silicon Valley

09/09/14 — Sixteen Bakar Fellows, including several Berkeley Engineering faculty members, recently presented their research ideas to a a packed room of potential investors on Sand Hill Road.

UC helps build resources, revenue at private Armenian university

09/08/14 San Francisco Chronicle — American University of Armenia, an unusually open institution in a typically authoritarian region, gets lots of support from the University of California, including AUA's new president, Armen Der Kiureghian, a civil engineering professor on leave from UC Berkeley.

Ramesh named associate director at Berkeley lab

08/29/14 Berkeley Lab — Ramamoorthy Ramesh, Purnendu Chatterjee Endowed Chair in Energy Technologies and professor of materials science and engineering and physics, has been named to the new position of associate laboratory director for energy technologies at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Last-minute mergers endanger drivers, worsen traffic jams

08/28/14 San Francisco Chronicle — The "jerk merge," where drivers cut into a traffic lane at the last possible moment, is "probably the most disruptive to traffic" and should be a target of police action, says Michael Cassidy, professor of civil and environmental engineering.

Wafer used to build "organoid chips"---chips that mimic the behavior of the human body.

New ‘biochips’ that mimic our bodies could speed development of drugs

08/27/14 Wired — Researchers in the labs of Berkeley bioengineers Kevin Healy and Luke Lee are collaborating on a project to recreate parts of the human body on chips. The research aims to find ways to get tissue to live and mimic how real organs function in order to eliminate years of animal and human testing of medical treatments.

Professor Seung-Wuk Lee is interviewed on Danish TV

Bioengineering research on Danish TV

08/26/14 Jyske Bank — The Danish television program “Tech and City” filmed an episode at UC Berkeley showcasing bioengineering professor Seung-Wuk Lee's virus-electric energy work, and the CellScope project from professor Dan Fletcher's lab, explained by PhD alum and lecturer Frankie Myers.

Software for blending and averaging images

New tool makes a single picture worth a thousand – and more – images

08/14/14 — New software developed by UC Berkeley computer scientists seeks to tame the growing sea of visual data by generating an "average" photo that can represent many thousands of related images.

Antimalarial drug based on Berkeley technology shipped to Africa

08/13/14 Berkeley Lab — The road from lab bench to market can be long, but UC Berkeley's Jay Keasling has been patient. Thirteen years after he discovered how to make an antimalarial drug in microbes, the product - the world's first semisynthetic antimalarial drug - has been shipped from Italy to Africa to bolster the fight against this killer disease.

Berkeley Engineering launches Girls in Engineering summer camp

08/08/14 — STEM fields come to life for East Bay middle schoolers at summer camp.

Bottling up sound waves

08/07/14 Berkeley Lab — Berkeley Lab researchers, led by Berkeley Engineering materials science professor Xiang Zhang, have developed a technique for generating self-bending acoustic bottle beams that hold promise for ultrasonic imaging and therapy, and for acoustic cloaking, levitation and particle manipulation.

Photo editing tool enables object images to be manipulated in 3-D

08/06/14 R&D Magazine — A team including EECS professor Alexei Efros, formerly of Carnegie Mellon but now at Berkeley, created a photo editing tool that lets users manipulate images in 3-D so that objects can be turned or flipped and even originally hidden surfaces can be exposed.

New technology could help farsighted computer users see without glasses

07/31/14 CBS News — UC Berkley professor Brian Barsky's experiments could solve a common modern problem. He's developing software designed to help anyone who has to wear glasses every time they look at a computer or smartphone.

Video showing how vision correction technology works

Vision-correcting display makes reading glasses so yesterday

07/29/14 — Researchers at UC Berkeley are developing vision-correcting displays that can compensate for a viewer's visual impairments to create sharp images without the need for glasses or contact lenses.

Rep. Scott Peters and Jay Keasling at House committee hearing

On Capitol Hill, Keasling calls for ‘national initiative’ to boost bioengineering

07/21/14 — UC Berkeley professor and synthetic-biology pioneer Jay Keasling was on Capitol Hill Thursday, stressing the need for a federal strategy to ensure continued U.S. leadership in a field he said can yield significant medical benefits for people throughout the world.

Tiny laser sensor heightens bomb detection sensitivity

07/20/14 — UC Berkeley researchers, led by mechanical engineering professor Xiang Zhang, are developing ultra-sensitive bomb detectors using tiny laser sensors that could detect incredibly minute concentrations of explosives.

Nanolasers on silicon to provide faster data transmission

07/14/14 LiveScience — New technology in development at Berkeley Engineering promises to ensure that fiber optic networks will be able to keep pace with consumer demand for speed and seamless data flow. The work, led by EECS professor Connie Chang-Hasnain, involves growing lasers (called nanoneedles) on silicon , the base layer of choice for electronic devices.

Databricks Spark plans: Big data Q&A

07/01/14 Information Week — Ian Stoica, computer science professor and CEO of Databricks, talks about his company's bold vision to make Databricks and its Apache Spark core, developed in UC Berkeley's AMPLab in 2009, into big data's epicenter of analysis.