Precious cargo
11/01/12 — Researcher Ting Xu's new nanocarrier delivers drugs directly to tumors, then disassembles to safely leave the body.
Materials science
Powerboost
05/01/12 — Artificial photosynthesis, in which solar energy is converted directly into fuel, may just have gotten an important boost.
Berkeley Engineering professor Ron Gronsky selected as one of Princeton Review’s 300 “Best Professors”
04/03/12 The Daily Californian — Materials science and engineering professor Ron Gronsky is among seven UC Berkeley instructors listed as the country's 300 best professors in a book published by the Princeton Review. "We developed this project as a tribute to the extraordinary dedication of America's undergraduate college professors and the vitally important role they play in our culture, and our democracy," said Robert Franek, senior vice president of content development and publishing at Princeton Review.
Self-assembling nanorods: Berkeley researchers obtain 1, 2 and 3D nanorod arrays and networks
02/01/12 Berkeley Lab — A relatively fast, easy and inexpensive technique for inducing nanorods to self-assemble into one-, two- and even three-dimensional macroscopic structures has been developed by a team of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory researchers. Leading this project was Ting Xu, a polymer scientist who holds joint appointments with Berkeley Lab's Materials Sciences Division and UC Berkeley's Departments of Materials Science and Engineering, and Chemistry.
Berkeley Engineering nanotechnology expert Paul Alivisatos wins Wolf Prize in Chemistry
01/12/12 Nanowerk —
Paul Alivisatos, director of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, UC Berkeley professor of materials science and engineering, and the Larry and Diane Bock Professor of Nanotechnology, has won the prestigious Wolf Foundation Prize in Chemistry for 2012. Alivisatos is an internationally recognized authority on nanochemistry and a pioneer in the synthesis of semiconductor quantum dots and multi-shaped artificial nanostructures.
The brittleness of aging bones – more than a loss of bone mass
08/29/11 Berkeley Lab — New research at Berkeley shows that at microscopic dimensions, the age-related loss of bone quality can be every bit as important as the loss of quantity in the susceptibility of bone to fracturing. Using a combination of x-ray and electron based analytical techniques as well as macroscopic fracture testing, the researchers showed that the advancement of age ushers in a degradation of the mechanical properties of human cortical bone over a range of different size scales. "In characterizing age-related structural changes in human cortical bone at the micrometer and sub micrometer scales, we found that these changes degrade both the intrinsic and extrinsic toughness of bone," says Berkeley Engineering materials scientist Robert Ritchie.
Engineers stick together
04/08/11 — Take a big concrete wall, a few rolls of duct tape and what do you get? A networking opportunity that bonded Berkeley engineering students in more ways than one. To the cheers, applause and overall amusement of scores of onlookers, nine teams of undergraduates affixed one of their peers to a decidedly nonadhesive wall outside the Bechtel Engineering Center with yards of sticky, silvery stuff. The occasion was a first-ever Duct Tape Competition, one of a series of science and socially themed events celebrating UC Berkeley's EWeek.
Hotspots tamed by BEAST: Secrets of mysterious metal hotspots uncovered by new single molecule imaging technique
01/19/11 Berkeley Lab — The secrets behind the mysterious nano-sized electromagnetic "hotspots" that appear on metal surfaces under a light are finally being revealed with the help of a BEAST. Using the Brownian Emitter Adsorption Super-resolution Technique (BEAST), "we were able to map the electromagnetic field profile within a single hotspot as small as 15 nanometers with an accuracy down to 1.2 nanometers, in just a few minutes," says Xiang Zhang, a principal investigator with Berkeley Lab's Materials Sciences Division and the Ernest S. Kuh Endowed Chaired Professor of Mechanical Engineering at UC Berkeley.
Strange new twist: Berkeley researchers discover Möbius symmetry in metamaterials
12/20/10 ScienceBlog — For years, scientists have been searching for an example of Möbius symmetry in natural materials without any success. Now a team of scientists, led by Xiang Zhang of UC Berkeley, has discovered Möbius symmetry in metamaterials - materials engineered from artificial "atoms" and "molecules" with electromagnetic properties that arise from their structure rather than their chemical composition. This discovery opens the door to finding and exploiting novel phenomena in metamaterials.
She paints for power
10/05/10 — What will power our next-generation gizmos? The microdevices, nanodevices and picodevices of the future? Our prediction: the Christine Ho battery. As an MSE graduate student, Ho (B.S.'05, M.S.'07, Ph.D.'10 MSE) developed a novel microbattery technology that promises to not only power the smallest of smart devices but also accelerate a variety of energy applications, from better home energy monitoring systems to large-scale energy storage solutions for wind and solar farms.
Silent and deadly: Smoke from cooking stoves kills poor people
09/23/10 The Economist — The appeal of a stove that produces more heat, more cleanly and with less fuel is clear. But Kirk Smith, a stove specialist at UC Berkeley, points out that most efforts to promote cleaner stoves have flopped. Too much emphasis has gone on technology and talking to people at the top, too little to consulting the women who actually do the cooking. Another lesson of past failures, says UC Berkeley professor Daniel Kammen, who runs the World Bank's clean-energy programs, is the need for better data about how stoves are actually used
Thermoelectrics: A matter of material
06/03/10 — Waste heat: It's when heat produced in a combustive process goes unused, dissipating into the air or water. Automobiles, industrial facilities and power plants all produce waste heat, and a lot of it. A holy grail awaits anyone who can improve the current fossil fuel system. One estimate places the worldwide waste heat recovery market at one trillion dollars, with the potential to offset as much as 500 million metric tons of carbon per year. What's the magic solution? Some Berkeley engineers believe the answer lies not in a sophisticated device, but in materials: specifically, finding a new material with spectacular thermoelectric properties that can efficiently and economically convert heat into electricity.
Blue and gold make green in Silicon Valley
04/07/10 — Clean and green technologies are on the rise in Silicon Valley. Electric car startups like Tesla Motors and solar cell and biofuel innovators are snapping up commercial space, while established companies like Applied Materials are growing their clean energy divisions. “Over the past six years, clean tech's portion of venture [capital] investments has grown from merely 3 percent to more than 25 percent,” reported the San Jose Mercury News in January. The newspaper went on to pronounce clean and green technologies the next great wave of innovation in Silicon Valley. It's no surprise to five Berkeley Engineering alumni who work in the up-and-coming sector.
Tim Sands, Berkeley Engineering alum and former faculty member, appointed executive vice president and provost at Purdue
02/11/10 Purdue University — The Purdue University board of trustees has ratified the appointment of Timothy D. Sands as the university's next executive vice president for academic affairs and provost. A native of California, Sands earned a bachelor's degree with highest honors in engineering physics and a master's degree and doctorate in materials science from UC Berkeley, where he was also a professor of material science and engineering prior to coming to Purdue.
Mother of invention
02/03/10 — Berkeley Engineering alumna Michelle Khine, now an assistant professor of biomedical engineering at UC Irvine, has discovered an inventive scientific approach to fabricating cheap microfluidic devices using Shrinky Dinks. When her method of printing microfluidic patterns on Shrinky Dink sheets -- using a laser-jet printer, then heating them in a toaster oven to create patterns of channels and microwells -- was featured and published online in Lab Chip, it had more downloads in one month than any other paper previously posted by the UK's Royal Society of Chemistry.
Meet the Next Builder of Berkeley Bioengineering
10/08/09 — After 32 years at other universities, Matthew Tirrell joined Berkeley in July, and from his new Stanley Hall office, he ruminates on the job he's just taken, that of Department of Bioengineering chair. "A chair's creativity is needed when faculty members want help getting their ideas enacted -- that's enabling. And sometimes a chair gets a good idea of his or her own and has a chance to lead. Managing is fine, but I like enabling and leading best. I'd like to help this department define what it could be."
Boarding School: Scientist on Wheels
08/03/09 — Daryl Chrzan, a noted researcher in the field of computational materials science, is a diehard skateboarder. Besides carving the bowls at local skate parks, Chrzan loves to think about the science behind the sport. The Berkeley professor of materials science and engineering considers such questions as the physics involved in stunts, the evolution of the skateboard wheel, the limits of a skateboard's strength and even the g-forces experienced in spectacular spills. For the past two years, Chrzan has posed-and tried to answer-those puzzles in a one-unit freshman seminar called Physics and Materials Science of Skateboarding. His hands-on class puts a new spin on a popular, if educationally unsung pastime.
Reverse Charge of the Light Brigade
01/01/09 — Light interacts with glass, water and other transparent materials in long-understood ways that define the capabilities of traditional optical devices. But Professor Xiang Zhang's lab is engineering materials with fundamentally new optical properties that could enable far more powerful microscopes and microchips, denser optical storage, and even -- disclaimers in place -- the very beginnings of an invisibility shield that camouflages objects by bending light around them.
Preserving Vision with Hydrogel
08/02/08 — High axial myopia, or extreme nearsightedness, is one of the world's leading causes of blindness. The condition stems from weakness in the sclera, the eyeball's white outer wall, which causes it to deform even under normal pressure within the eyeball. James Su, a graduate student researcher co-advised by MSE and Bioengineering Professor Kevin Healy and School of Optometry Professor Christine Wildsoet, is developing a promising new treatment for the condition, based on a synthetic biomaterial known as hydrogel.