Q+A on the future of our cities
04/26/21 — Professor Marta González discusses how the pandemic and climate change are affecting urban areas.
Infrastructure
Tracking COVID-19 in our sewers
10/29/20 — Berkeley civil engineers have developed a rapid, low-cost and effective method to test for the presence of the coronavirus in wastewater flowing through municipal sewer systems
Why the U.S. leads in power outages
08/19/20 Popular Science — Our grid is outdated, run down and vulnerable to climate change, says Berkeley electrical engineer Alexandra von Meier; microgrids are one potential solution
‘Horrible sequence of mistakes’: How contractors botched a bridge project
08/11/20 — Berkeley civil engineers Robert Bea and William Ibbs weigh in on cascading problems with a massive Madera County bridge over the planned route of the state's much-delayed bullet train
Light shows the way to build ‘smart’ infrastructure
07/01/20 Berkeley Research — Kenichi Soga, Chancellor's Professor in civil and environmental engineering, is using fiber-optic cables to monitor structures ranging from tunnels to building foundations
Jack Moehle receives top earthquake engineering award
03/05/20 — The Earthquake Engineering Research Institute bestowed Moehle, a professor of civil and environmental engineering, with the George W. Housner Medal
Two Berkeley Engineering professors named to NAE
02/06/20 — Per Peterson and Paulo Monteiro are among 78 Berkeley Engineering faculty members in the National Academy of Engineering
Get the lead out
10/25/19 — More than 18 million people in the United States are at risk from water pipes that leach lead. Now, researchers led by civil and environmental engineering professor Ashok Gadgil have devised a novel solution to this problem.
Towers in earthquake country — designers say the new ones are safe to their core
10/15/19 San Francisco Chronicle — Jack Moehle, professor of structural engineering, comments on the safety of towers that have transformed San Francisco's skyline over the past decade.
Waze hijacked L.A. in the name of convenience. Can anyone put the genie back in the bottle?
08/21/19 Los Angeles Magazine — Traffic apps, like Waze, turned L.A. neighborhoods into "shortcuts." Los Angeles Magazine recently spoke to UC Berkeley's Alex Bayen and Susan Shaeen about how we got here and whether this trend can be reversed.
How can companies like Airbnb, Lyft or Uber help in disasters?
06/19/19 — Berkeley Engineering researchers suggest that emergency management agencies and local relief organizations should leverage Airbnb, Lyft, Uber and private citizens to ensure equity in emergency evacuations.
PEER grant to improve seismic safety of natural gas infrastructure
05/17/19 PEER — The California Energy Commission awarded a $4.9 million grant to the Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research Center on May 15 to improve the seismic risk assessment of natural gas storage and pipeline infrastructure.
Dubai Electricity and Water Authority partnership advances ‘future energy’ educational program
05/04/19 — UC Berkeley and the Dubai Electricity and Water Authority (DEWA) are teaming up to establish a new educational program to accelerate infrastructure systems for sustainable energy.
Shifting gears
05/01/19 — The integration of self-driving vehicles requires policy decisions that consider how travel behavior will shift with the introduction of new mobility choices.
Berkeley research makes lead pipes safe
04/03/19 American Chemical Society — UC Berkeley researchers develop a rapid, cost-effective method to make lead pipes safe.
Transbay Terminal’s cracked beams may be vulnerable
09/27/18 NBC Bay Area — Calling cracks in specially fabricated beams at San Francisco's new Transbay Terminal potentially “catastrophic,” Rune Storesund, executive director of UC Berkeley's Center for Catastrophic Risk Management, said, “You want to be looking at imperfections in the steel.”
NSF funds extreme events reconnaissance network
08/15/18 PEER — The National Science Foundation has awarded a grant to the Structural Extreme Events Reconnaissance (StEER) Network, which aims to improve reporting and coordination by the natural hazards engineering community in the aftermath of earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes and other extreme events. UC Berkeley is one of StEER's three primary nodes.
A seismic change in predicting how earthquakes will shake tall buildings
06/28/18 New York Times — "There are going to be large changes coming" in the calculation of risk faced by by tall buildings during a major West Coast earthquake, adjunct civil and environmental engineering professor Norman Abrahamson told a conference of earthquake engineers in Los Angeles.
Dam scanning
06/01/18 — CEE professor Robert Kayen used lidar technology to evaluate the health of the Hume Lake Dam.
Berkeley water engineer lands 2018 ‘Slammy’
05/04/18 Graduate Division — At the UC-wide Grad Slam competition on May 3, environmental engineering doctoral student Joseph Charbonnet brought home the first-place ‘Slammy' - and $9,000 in prize money - for his three-minute talk on using manganese-coated sand to capture, clean and re-use stormwater.