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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.

The origins of Intel’s new transistor, and its future: Q&A with Chenming Hu

05/09/11 IEEE Spectrum — Intel has announced a big change to the electronic switches at the heart of its CPUs. Going forward, the firm will be using three-dimensional transistors to take the place of long-used planar devices. The new transistors are a variation on the FinFET, a transistor design that substitutes the flat channel through which electrons flow with a 3-D fin. How did this 3-D design win its way into production? Spectrum asked the coinventor of the FinFET, Chenming Hu, a professor emeritus at UC Berkeley, how the new transistors got their start.

Environmental engineering professor Kara Nelson receives grant for sanitation research

05/02/11 The Daily Californian — UC Berkeley professor of environmental engineering Kara Nelson has been awarded a five-year $100,000 grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation for her unconventional research in sanitation and human waste management. Nelson said she will use the grant money to treat human waste at the point where it is being produced, in an effort to eliminate the amount of contact humans have with fecal pathogens.

On West Coast of U.S., much ado about very little radiation, so far

03/19/11 Los Angeles Times — U.S. scientists and sensors are poised to detect radioactive fallout from Japan's nuclear accident, but aside from a 'minuscule' amount at a Sacramento station, they've found none. The nuclear engineering department at UC Berkeley set up its own independent monitoring Wednesday on top of the campus' Etcheverry Hall. The system looks for gamma rays with energy "signatures" corresponding to radioactive isotopes, said Kai Vetter, a professor in the department. As of Friday morning, Vetter said, they hadn't seen any evidence of suspicious radiation.

Options are few to prevent Japan nuclear catastrophe

03/18/11 Los Angeles Times — As a crack is discovered in a Fukushima spent fuel pool, officials confront two crucial tasks: preventing a runaway chain reaction into the nuclear fuel and maintaining a massive flow of seawater through the damaged pools and reactor vessels. Edward Morse and Per Peterson of UC Berkeley's Department of Nuclear Engineering offer analysis.

Japan dam failure renews focus on California dams

03/17/11 California Watch — As Californians closely watch the catastrophe at Japan's nuclear plants, many engineers are also studying the failure of a dam in Japan's northeast Fukushima prefecture. The extent of the damage is still unknown. "One dam failure is too many," said Nicholas Sitar, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at UC Berkeley.

Japan’s nuclear crisis

03/15/11 KQED Forum — As Japan struggles to contain the worst nuclear emergency since Chernobyl, Michael Krasny talks with experts including Per Peterson, chair of the Nuclear Engineering Department at UC Berkeley, about the potential fallout from the nuclear reactors in Fukushima.

What he learns from earthquakes prepares us for the big one

01/26/11 Contra Costa Times — The findings of Jonathan Bray, professor of geotechnical engineering at UC Berkeley, help determine whether a building can withstand an earthquake. "The science is focused on engineering systems that are supported on or within the earth," he said. "Whether it's foundations for buildings, building an earth dam or constructing a lifeline like a highway, we have to understand the stability of the geology, the soil and the rock."

Dr. Gary Baldwin, CITRIS Director of Special Projects, dies at 67

11/18/10 CITRIS — Dr. Gary Baldwin, Director of Special Projects at the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society, passed away on November 16, 2010, after a short battle with cancer. He will be remembered for his dedication to the CITRIS mission and his earlier work with the GigaScale Systems Research Center. Details regarding memorial services will soon be announced.

Engineering with broad shoulders

11/04/10 — A key tenet of Berkeley Engineering is to educate leaders. To us, engineering leadership extends beyond simply creating new technologies and managing technology innovation. Truly transformative engineering leadership calls for a comprehensive understanding of the economic, legal, social and environmental implications of novel and emerging technologies and services in societal scale systems.

Flight delays cost you $17B, cost U.S. $33B, UC Berkeley study shows

10/18/10 San Francisco Business Times — A study from UC Berkeley's Institute of Transportation Studies crunched numbers from 2007 for the Federal Aviation Administration for a report showing that domestic airline flight delays cost the U.S. economy some $32.9 billion a year, and passengers pay half that cost, or about $16.7 billion. Civil engineering professor Mark Hansen, lead researcher on the study, said it was the first time anyone had analyzed data this way, coming up with a direct cost.

Educating transformational leaders

10/05/10 — Homecoming has a special significance for us this year, as we kick off the weekend on Friday, October 8, with the grand opening of Blum Hall. This dedication represents not only the expansion and renovation of the historic Naval Architecture Building. It is also the culmination of a five-year construction effort that has transformed the north side of campus and provided a new home for the Richard C. Blum Center for Developing Economies.