Bot on a budget
05/01/14 — Lavanya Jawaharlal, with her sister Melissa, co-founded STEM Center USA and developed the affordable Pi-Bot robot kit to increase access to science, technology, engineering and math fields.
Students
Cal Human-Powered Vehicle team mends, but does not brake
05/01/14 California magazine — Things were looking bleak for the Berkeley Engineering Human-Powered Vehicle team last weekend, and the timing couldn't have been worse. Just a day before the big ASME regional race, their state-of-the-art vehicle, nicknamed Reuben, crashed and broke in two on the first practice run. Then came a bigger surprise.
Student hackers design new ways to research the Free Speech Movement
04/18/14 — A student team that included EECS undergrads Kevin Casey and Craig Hiller took first place in HackFSM, a 12-day hackathon organized by the Bancroft Library and Digital Humanities@Berkeley that shared the Free Speech Movement's aim to create a free marketplace of ideas.
Students show off design projects from TI lab
04/15/14 Texas Instruments — As the first anniversary of the Texas Instrument-funded Electronics Design Lab approaches, TI highlights some of the cool student projects -- from a tic-tac-toe board to an autonomous quadcopter -- that were made possible through this $2.2 million teaching lab and adjoining "maker lounge."
Be the change, Code the Change
04/04/14 — Christine Loh first heard of “Code the Change” in a Facebook post as a junior electrical engineering and computer science major in 2012. Shortly after, she and classmate Brian Tseng (Class of 2016) launched a Berkeley chapter of the national organization, began hosting a student-run course, and connected eager classmates with more than a dozen nonprofit organizations in need of technical help.
Whatever floats their boat: Cal team designs canoe of concrete
03/27/14 California magazine — Fish got to swim, birds got to fly, and engineering students got to do wild and wacky things -- like designing, building, and racing canoes made of concrete. And nowhere do they do it better than at Berkeley Engineering, where civil engineering students are working overtime getting this year's canoe, Calamari, ready for the Mid-Pacific Regional Conference in early April.
Students’ energy-efficiency proposal wins ‘Most Innovative’ in DOE competition
03/26/14 Daily Californian — A team of four Berkeley Engineering undergraduates won “Most Innovative” in one of six categories at the Department of Energy's Better Buildings Case Competition for its proposal to improve energy efficiency at universities. Members of the Golden EnergTech team were Nanavati Low (IEOR '16), Daniel Tjandra (ChemE '14), Michael Chang (CEE '15) and Grace Vasiknanonte (MSE '16).
Berkeley team takes its energy innovation to Capitol Hill
02/28/14 — A research team from Berkeley Engineering and the Berkeley Lab appeared on Capitol Hill Thursday to show off their innovation in energy efficiency: a backpack-mounted system for quickly mapping energy use throughout a building and identifying ways to reduce it
Revamped computer science classes attracting more women
02/18/14 San Francisco Chronicle — A gender flip in computer science classes -- with more women than men enrolled in an introductory course -- shows UC Berkeley at the vanguard of a tech world shift, beginning to see a payoff in efforts to attract more women to a field where they have always been vastly underrepresented.
Berkeley, Stanford, UCLA, Caltech unite to boost number of minority Ph.D. students, faculty
02/13/14 — An unprecedented alliance formed among four elite West Coast universities aims to remedy a seemingly intractable nationwide problem: Too few underrepresented minority Ph.D. students in the mathematical, physical and computer sciences and in engineering are advancing to postdoctoral and faculty ranks at top-tier research universities.
CS junior buzzes his way into Jeopardy! college tournament
02/12/14 Daily Californian — UC Berkeley junior Kevin Shen, a mathematics and computer science double major, could win up to $100,000 as he represents his school in the Jeopardy! College Championship, airing this month on the TV game show.
A ‘game-changer’ for HIV/AIDS
02/12/14 — Second-year bioengineering doctoral student Sylvia Natividad-Diaz may have found a way around a persistent obstacle in the treatment of HIV/AIDS-identifying when an HIV-positive patient's condition is worsening before irreversible symptoms are evident. Having that information allows health care providers to deliver the right medications at the right time, leading to better outcomes.
Electric cars go cross-country
02/10/14 Berkeley Energy & Resources Collaborative — Santiago Miret, a Ph.D. student in materials science and engineering, writes about range anxiety by electric vehicle owners, and how it has prompted a pair of recent coast-to-coast road trips by drivers of the Tesla Model S.
Symposium spotlights clean-technology solutions
01/10/14 — Through the Cleantech to Market program, UC Berkeley students work with campus and Berkeley Lab scientists to bring new, environmentally friendly innovations to the world via commercialization.
Dreams of the world: Flight simulation of robotic birds
12/18/13 National Geographic — Cameron Rose, an EECS grad student whose research focuses on flapping-winged robots in flight, dreams of one day helping the field of robotics achieve "something even close to the level of maneuverability and control that animals possess," he told National Geographic. "I also dream to use my knowledge and passion for robotics to encourage other African American students to pursue similar paths."
Helping dissenters evade foreign eavesdropping
11/05/13 San Francisco Chronicle — Yahel Ben-David, a computer science doctoral student, has been working with other Berkeley Engineering researchers to create an Android application that will allow activists and citizens to communicate anonymously even when oppressive governments try to shut down communications channels.
Creek life
11/01/13 — Grad student Aysha Massell works to restore the storied Strawberry Creek on campus.
Cypriot BioE student receives HHMI award
09/11/13 — Elena Kassianidou left her home to come study in the United States seven years ago. Now pursuing a Ph.D. in bioengineering at Berkeley, she recently became the first student from Cyprus - and the first Berkeley-UCSF bioengineering student - to be awarded the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's (HHMI) prestigious International Predoctoral Fellowship.
Oxford-bound
05/13/13 — Graduating senior Daniel A. Price, a double major in bioengineering and electrical engineering and computer sciences with a minor in physics, was selected as one of this year's Rhodes Scholars. Next fall at Oxford University, Price will pursue research in medical diagnostic equipment. Here he tells us more about his studies, his research and future plans.
PiE wins big
05/13/13 — Pioneers in Engineering (PiE) is a Berkeley student group that runs a mentorship program to engage teenagers in science and technology. April was a busy month for PiE. They won $25,000 in a national competition sponsored by Ford and Zipcar. Then, only days after an event held on campus to celebrate that big win, PiE held a competition of their own-they hosted a robotics challenge game for two dozen high school teams.