Scholars on scooters
08/14/14 — Students zip around campus on electric scooters while learning about energy, transportation and vehicle-to-grid systems in a new civil engineering class.
Infrastructure
Water 4.0
05/02/14 — An excerpt from civil and environmental engineering professor David Sedlak's new book, Water 4.0: The Past, Present and Future of the World's Most Vital Resource, which calls for major changes in urban water systems.
Q+A on L.A. seismic study
05/01/14 — Jack Moehle, professor of civil engineering, talked to Berkeley Engineer about his recently completed seismic study of unreinforced concrete buildings in Los Angeles, and its impact.
More woes for high-speed rail
03/31/14 San Francisco Business Times — The $68 billion cost estimate for a Los Angeles-to-San Francisco high-speed rail network is far too low, and the system may be eclipsed by emerging technologies before the 30-year project is completed, civil engineering professor C. William Ibbs warned the state Senate transportation committee last week.
Reducing the risk of earthquake collapse in California cities
03/04/14 Contra Costa Times — In a guest commentary, four California professors, including Berkeley Engineering's Jack Moehle, write about their joint research into the seismic risks posed by older concrete buildings, and the methods and costs of mitigating that risk.
Building a super bowl
11/01/13 — An insider's look into the construction of the new Levi's Stadium, the NFL's first LEED Gold stadium and among the fastest ever constructed.
Study gives glimpse of crowd-sourced commuting future
12/10/12 New Cities Foundation — Sharing real-time information about traffic or other transportation delays provides drivers and riders greater control over their commute, and it could help local authorities improve transportation planning, says a new study conducted by CITRIS researchers in partnership with San Jose and Ericsson.
For good design, start with the end user
06/26/12 — “If you're an engineer and you're working on a project to improve parks, you could stay in a lab. Or you could go to up to Tilden Park and get a fuller context of what visitors experience,” says Lora Oehlberg, a mechanical engineering graduate student and an instructor in a sequence of classes known as the human-centered design course thread.
Berkeley bywords: Made in the U.S.A.
08/18/11 — When it comes to manufacturing know-how, Berkeley Engineering is the College of Big Shoulders. From minuscule chips to massive aircraft, we invent the tools and methods that power the assembly lines of American manufacturing.
Under construction: Engineering the Bay Bridge
04/08/11 — Slated to open in late 2013, the new eastern span of the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge is meant to do what the old one didn't: withstand a major Bay Area earthquake, sustain only limited damage and quickly admit emergency vehicles and traffic. It must deliver a performance to match its “lifeline” designation. It's also a lifeline for Marwan Nader (M.S'89, Ph.D'92 CE)-because he's bet his career on it. Read part 2 of our story and watch a slideshow of the new Bay Bridge construction.
Superstructure rising
03/02/11 — Not long after the Loma Prieta quake struck, Marwan Nader (M.S'89, Ph.D'92 CE) gazed at the hole in the Bay Bridge as he stood a safe distance away, part of a Berkeley team inspecting the damage. Twenty-two years later, he's still standing on the bridge, so to speak. As lead design engineer of the self-anchored suspension (SAS) bridge, he is responsible for the standout architectural feature of the new portion of the bridge that will replace the old eastern span.
Wheels of change in South Africa
12/14/10 — More than 9 million South African children walk to school every day. Three million walk for more than an hour, and in the rural countryside, some walk more than four hours. “It's madness,” says Louis de Waal (M.S'72 CEE), who grew up in rural South Africa and spent his professional life designing and building thousands of kilometers of roads there, many of which opened up inaccessible places deep in the country's interior. Now retired, De Waal is on a mission to improve mobility for all South Africans, especially in rural areas. The goal, says the 73-year-old Cape Town resident, is to keep children in school and help adults reach work more easily, ultimately easing poverty and slowing the flood of people forced to move to urban areas for work.
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.
On a Yosemite cliff, listening
05/05/10 — About every 10 days, falling rock shatters the tranquility of Yosemite National Park. "It's a dynamic place," says park geologist Greg Stock. "Rockfall is the most powerful geologic force acting on the park today. The goal is to eventually predict rockfalls and better constrain the hazard." Enter Valerie Zimmer, a Berkeley geoengineering Ph.D. student who launched her doctoral work studying rockfall in mines using tiny acoustic sensors to document the rock mechanics and geophysical forces underground.
A Fix for Memorial Stadium
05/02/09 — If the Hayward Fault ruptures during a Cal home game, Memorial Stadium fans would be in for a wild ride. But they should be safe-even if they're seated in the most vulnerable end-zone sections. That's the outcome that David Friedman (B.S'75 CE) envisions for the massive retrofit of UC Berkeley's landmark but seismically poor football venue. Friedman, senior principal at San Francisco–based Forell/Elsesser Engineers, is the lead engineer for the stadium's renovation. Built in 1923, Memorial Stadium straddles the Hayward Fault and is in need of seismic upgrades.