Berkeley Engineering

Educating leaders. Creating knowledge. Serving society.

Home > News

Faculty

Farewell

05/02/12 — Obituaries for Berkeley Engineering faculty and alumni

Q+A on excellence and diversity

05/01/12 — Berkeley Engineer sat down with Oscar Dubon, associate dean for equity and inclusion, and Executive Associate Dean Fiona Doyle to learn more about the college's efforts to attract a diverse range of highly qualified students.

Charles K. (Ned) Birdsall, professor emeritus of electrical engineering, dies at 86

04/21/12 San Francisco Chronicle — Charles Kennedy ("Ned") Birdsall, Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, and a pioneering inventor and educator in microwave tubes and plasma physics, died March 6, 2012, at his home in Lafayette. He was 86. Ned joined the Electrical Engineering Department in 1959, launching a four-decade academic career. Ned became known as a pioneering inventor and educator whose contributions to plasma science have made lasting impacts on communications and other

Introducing the Kuh Distinguished Lecture Series

04/17/12 — I recently had the honor of introducing a new annual lecture series to the college community. Thanks to a generous gift from Professor Emeritus Ernest Kuh and his wife, Bettine, we now have the opportunity to hear from the world's most creative and inspiring scientists and engineers tackling our most pressing problems.

Berkeley and Stanford launch networking research center

04/10/12 Stanford University — Berkeley Engineering professor Scott Shenker is co-director of the new Open Networking Research Center, which is exploring software-defined networking (SDN) as a paradigm for making networks simpler and less expensive while expanding their capacities. Industry sponsors include Cisco, Google, Hewlett-Packard and Intel.

Berkeley group digs in to challenge of making sense of all that data

04/09/12 The New York Times — Michael Franklin, a professor of computer science and director of the AMP Lab, talks about the challenges of working with Big Data in the New York Times. Last month, the National Science Foundation awarded $10 million to Berkeley's AMP Expedition.

Internet voting: Will democracy or hackers win?

02/16/12 PBS NewsHour — While it seems like everything can be done online these days, that's not actually the case when it comes to elections. Science correspondent Miles O'Brien explores the security, logistical and secrecy challenges of Internet voting. David Wagner, professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences at UC Berkeley, joins the conversation.

The many faces of excellence

02/09/12 — Many pathways lead to education and a life's work in engineering, and we are committed to ensuring parity and opportunity each step of the way. I am very pleased to share news of several developments here in the College that are helping us to diversify the face of engineering.

College launches new energy engineering major

02/09/12 — The College of Engineering has launched a new major-driven largely by undergraduate interest-that focuses in a comprehensive way on the generation, transmission and storage of energy, with additional courses on energy policy. Beginning in fall 2012, the new interdisciplinary Energy Engineering major will be offered through the Engineering Science Program and extract from the best energy-related courses already offered by the College. “The objective of this major is to produce students who are well-rounded energy experts,” says Tarek Zohdi, mechanical engineering professor and chair of the Engineering Science Program.

Berkeley Engineering professor Anil Chopra to be keynote speaker at first Panama Canal Engineering Congress

01/31/12 Dredging Today — UC Berkeley civil and environmental engineering professor Anil K. Chopra has been confirmed as one of the notable presenters to speak at the "Panama Canal 2012 International Engineering and Infrastructure Congress." The first-ever Congress, organized by the Panama Canal Authority, will be held in April in Panama City and will convene more than 40 experts from 10 countries, who will discuss large scale projects and future trends in the maritime industry. Chopra will share an earthquake analysis and well as design and safety evaluations of concrete gravity dams.

Thinking makes it go

01/17/12 San Francisco Magazine — It's the stuff of science fiction: a marriage of brain and computer that allows the disabled to walk, the mute to speak, and all of us to control our reality with our thoughts alone. The visionary scientists at the Center for Neural Engineering and Prostheses, the Bay Area's bold new research hub, are making it a reality. Several Berkeley Engineering professors are involved, including Jan Rabaey, Jose Carmena and Michel Maharbiz.

Berkeley engineer reduces violence against Darfuri women through better cooking technology

01/03/12 San Jose Mercury News — Zam Zam refugee camp in North Darfur is home to 200,000 refugees fleeing the civil war in Sudan. Women in the camps cook over open fires and then walk for miles through dust and desolation to search for firewood. Every wood-collecting trip exposes women to rape by Sudanese militiamen. UC Berkeley's Ashok Gadgil thought the women of Darfur deserved better cooking technology. So he not only worked with the women to develop a better stove, he also created a local market for it.

Computers implanted in brain could help paralyzed

12/27/11 San Francisco Chronicle — It sounds like science fiction, but scientists around the world are getting tantalizingly close to building the mind-controlled prosthetic arms, computer cursors and mechanical wheelchairs of the future. Jose Carmena, a neuro-engineer at UC Berkeley and co-director of the Center for Neural Engineering and Prostheses at Berkeley and UCSF, puts his thoughts succinctly: "There's going to be an explosion in neural prosthetics."

Computer scientists may have what it takes to help cure cancer

12/05/11 The New York Times — Berkeley Engineering professor David Patterson discusses how computer scientists will fight the war on cancer by taking on the Big Data challenges of information processing, genome sequencing, cloud computing, crowd-sourcing and other complex tasks. Patterson argues, "Given that millions of people do have and will get cancer, if there is a chance that computer scientists may have the best skill set to fight cancer today, as moral people aren't we obligated to try?"

California turns to Chinese company, labor to build most of new Bay Bridge span

10/19/11 Public Radio International — Much of the actual construction of San Francisco's new Bay Bridge was actually done in China. The bridge was then shipped piece by piece to the port of Oakland for assembly. California officials have estimated that they'll save at least $400 million by relying on low-wage Chinese labor. UC Berkeley civil engineering professor William Ibbs says doing it this way makes a lot of sense.

Hybrid Wisdom Labs launches a speedy, scalable engine for visualizing customer insight

10/19/11 TechCrunch — Ken Goldberg, a professor of New Media, Robotics, and Industrial Engineering at UC Berkeley, launched an interesting new startup from the stage of The Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco today, called Hybrid Wisdom Labs. The startup, according to its founder, has emerged from "more than a decade of robotics and social media research at UC Berkeley."

Berkeley Lab tests cookstoves for Haiti

09/28/11 PhysOrg.com — The developers of the fuel-efficient Berkeley-Darfur Stove for refugee camps in central Africa, including Berkeley Engineering professor Ashok Gadgil, are at it once again, this time evaluating inexpensive metal cookstoves for the displaced survivors of last year's deadly earthquake in Haiti.

Tracking the mighty microbe

08/18/11 — Jillian Banfield studies very, very small things, but her work is vast in its scope and impact. So vast, in fact, that her discoveries have implications for space, the human body and nearly everything in between. Banfield, a biogeochemist, geomicrobiologist and professor of materials science and engineering, studies microbes-their function and potential both individually and in groups. “Microorganisms are essentially everywhere,” says Banfield, “and they carry out all the really essential transformations that drive earth's biogeochemical cycles.”

Sumbat Der Kiureghian: A son’s tribute to his father’s unique style, creativity

06/11/11 The Armenian Mirror-Spectator — Dr. Armen Der Kiureghian is the Taisei Professor of Civil Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, and the winner of numerous awards and patents. He is also a dedicated son and art lover, who wants to shed light on the legacy of his late father, painter Sumbat Der Kiureghian. His efforts have culminated in a beautiful coffee-table book, The Life and Art of Sumbat, filled with the paintings of his father, which often captured Iranian village life, as well as traditional Armenian life.