Marvin Lopez joins college as director of student programs
01/14/16 — Marvin J. Lopez, long active in industry discovering and developing university talent, joins the college on January 19 as director of student programs.
Students
Bioengineer Shang Song named to 30 Under 30
01/05/16 Forbes — Bioengineering Ph.D. student Shang Song, co-founder of Rynm health, has been named to Forbes magazine's 30 Under 30. Rynm will collect and aggregate chronic disease data from patients to create meaningful pictures of community health in developing countries.
Grad students’ payment platform wins $250K startup challenge
12/18/15 — An Internet of Things payments platform, DotDashPay, created by two computer science Ph.D. candidates, has won the inaugural UC Berkeley Startup Challenge sponsored by Pejman Mar Ventures.
Lavanya Jawaharlal on females of color in STEM
12/16/15 Blum Center — Mechanical engineering senior Lavanya Jawaharlal talks about her hopes that STEM Center USA, the nonprofit startup she founded with her sister, can help shatter the glass ceiling for women in STEM fields.
Students engineer solutions to industry challenges
12/16/15 — Three energy-related devices developed by students in the Fung Institute for Engineering Leadership's Master of Engineering capstone project course are featured in a video from the Berkeley News team.
Building an organ in the marsh
12/16/15 — A Louisiana native and environmental engineering Ph.D. student, Madeline Foster-Martinez is studying the fluid dynamics of a local marsh to better understand tidal wetland restoration.
Making furniture from fungi
12/16/15 Scientific American — For three years, doctoral mechanical engineering student Sonia Travaglini has been studying inventor Phil Ross's mushroom composite as a sustainable alternative to wood, plastic and other materials.
Evolution of the (forced) smile
12/04/15 MIT Technology Review — Mining a vast database of high-school yearbook photos, EECS Ph.D. candidate Shiry Ginosar and her team used a machine-vision algorithm to reveal the change in hairstyles, clothing and even smiles over the past century.
3D printed assistive technology gets boost from UC Berkeley designathon
12/01/15 3Dprint.com — Several Berkeley engineering and design organizations held a 3D Printing Designathon for assistive technology at Sutardja Dai Hall on Nov. 14-15 commemorating the 25th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act.
Berkeley Engineering team wins $10,000 for cloud-storage innovation
11/23/15 Daily Californian — The EECS graduate student duo of Tae Joon Seok and Sangyoon Han has come away with $10,000 after winning third place in a national competition among collegiate inventors for their cloud-technology innovation, called the Silicon Waveguide Array Photonic Switch.
Of war, water and working to fix South Sudan
11/18/15 — Civil engineering undergrad Akol Kuan brought tales of his native South Sudan to Oakland's Beacon Day School, where sixth graders had just finished reading A Long Walk to Water, a novel that follows the hardships and heartbreaks of two Sudanese 11-year-olds.
Celebrating World Toilet Day, reinventing sanitation
11/17/15 — United Nations World Toilet Day on Nov. 19 is environmental engineering doctoral student William Tarpeh's main chance - a time to proselytize about all things sanitation. For mechanical engineering grad student Emily Woods, it's a boost for Sanivation, the company she co-founded to convert human feces into charcoal for a poor community in Kenya.
The problem with ‘help’ in global development
11/10/15 SSIR — To move beyond good intentions, the development paradigm must shift toward collaboration, community involvement, and empowerment, writes mechanical engineering Ph.D. candidate Julia Kramer in a commentary for the Stanford Social Innovation Review.
Pi-Bot inventors score $200,000 deal on ‘Shark Tank’
11/02/15 — Berkeley Engineering senior Lavanya Jawaharlal and her sister Melissa, both mechanical engineers, walked away from TV's investment reality show “Shark Tank” with a $200,000 deal that they will put toward taking their STEM robotics education concept nationwide.
Will STEM education be the child left behind?
11/02/15 NPR — Berkeley Engineers And Mentors (BEAM), a student volunteer group that teaches an after-school STEM program at a Berkeley elementary school, was featured in a Morning Edition report on the budget a policy hurdles facing STEM education.
Pi-Bot inventors, STEM proselytizers dive into ‘Shark Tank’
10/30/15 — Lavanya Jawaharlal, a senior in mechanical engineering, and her engineer sister Melissa founded STEM Center USA to open up access to the fields of science, technology, engineering and math to more diverse students.
Campus opens career center for grad students, post-docs
10/28/15 — With the opening of the Graduate Professional Services Center in Sproul Hall, UC Berkeley graduate students and postdocs now have a place to go for help exploring how their studies can prepare them for career paths, both within and beyond academia.
Undergrad research on the rise at Cal
10/27/15 Blum Center — A team of six young EECS students working in the Computational Imaging Lab, whose LED array dome extended the reach of the CellScope microscope, exemplifies the mutual benefits of research by undergraduates at UC Berkeley.
EnableTech: Engineering for accessibility
10/20/15 — The new EnableTech student group aims to develop creative solutions to minimize challenges presented by disability.
GM Foundation funding connects engineers with underserved communities
09/18/15 — A poster session focused on community engagement and improvement brings together students in the Engineering Scholars as Engaged Scholars program and their supporters from the GM Foundation.