What’s next?
05/01/12 — Berkeley Engineer asked undergraduates to tell us about their upcoming ventures.
Students
Berkeley Engineering student makes “ridiculously automated dorm”
04/30/12 Berkeleyside — UC Berkeley student Derek Low is nothing if not inventive. A few months ago Low set out to make his Berkeley dorm room as fully automated as possible. The result, as you can see in the video he uploaded to YouTube, is BRAD: the Berkeley Ridiculously Automated Dorm. Through remote controlled lighting and curtains, Low's room manages to wake him up, put him to sleep and provide the right ambiance for homework and even romance. Its "party mode" is particularly impressive.
Mechanical engineering doctoral student Christopher Ategeka receives Chancellor’s Award for Public Service
04/10/12 Cal Corps — Christopher Ategeka, UC Berkeley doctoral student in mechanical engineering, has received the Graduate Student Award for Civic Engagement, one of the honors offered as the Chancellor's Award for Public Service. Ategeka, who also received his B.S. from Berkeley Engineering, recounted his formidable journey to Berkeley from his rural Ugandan village in a commencement address in May
NSF grant funds computer-assisted programming project
04/05/12 Penn News — UC Berkeley engineers, led by computer scientist Ras Bodik, will join the University of Pennsylvania and seven other research institutions in a project to make computer programming faster, easier and more intuitive. Dubbed ExCAPE, the project is led by Penn and funded by a five-year, $10 million grant from the National Science Foundation's Expeditions in Computing program.
Berkeley Engineering grad students design an ‘EcoFridge’ that uses 40 per cent less energy
02/10/12 BusinessGreen — Imagine an environmentally friendly household refrigerator that is affordable and helps break people's energy-wasting habits when they use the appliance. That is what team of UC Berkeley grad students in engineering and industrial design students from the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico envisioned when they were asked by appliance manufacturer Mabe to develop a cost competitive fridge that is kinder to the environment than others available to consumers in Mexico.
Three Berkeley Engineering students named finalists for 2012-2013 Hertz Fellowship
02/09/12 Wall Street Journal MarketWatch — The Fannie and John Hertz Foundation has announced fifty finalists for the 2012-2013 Hertz Fellowship, chosen from over 600 applicants. Considered the nation's most generous support for graduate education in the applied sciences and engineering, the Hertz Fellowship is valued at more than $250,000 per student, with support lasting up to five years. Berkeley Engineering students David Barth (ME), Nicholas Boyd (EECS) and Sean Lubner (ME) have been selected.
The many faces of excellence
02/09/12 — Many pathways lead to education and a life's work in engineering, and we are committed to ensuring parity and opportunity each step of the way. I am very pleased to share news of several developments here in the College that are helping us to diversify the face of engineering.
College launches new energy engineering major
02/09/12 — The College of Engineering has launched a new major-driven largely by undergraduate interest-that focuses in a comprehensive way on the generation, transmission and storage of energy, with additional courses on energy policy. Beginning in fall 2012, the new interdisciplinary Energy Engineering major will be offered through the Engineering Science Program and extract from the best energy-related courses already offered by the College. “The objective of this major is to produce students who are well-rounded energy experts,” says Tarek Zohdi, mechanical engineering professor and chair of the Engineering Science Program.
Diesel truck emissions in Oakland fall sharply
01/17/12 Institute of Transportation Studies — Recent field studies conducted by UC Berkeley civil and environmental engineering professor Robert Harley and his research team show that emissions of unhealthy pollutants from diesel trucks in West Oakland have been reduced by half in a matter of months, as a result of state regulations that banned the oldest, dirtiest trucks and set deadlines for retrofitting middle-aged trucks with diesel particle filters.
Bergeron Scholars Program for Women comes to UC Berkeley
01/11/12 Wall Street Journal MarketWatch — Sandra and Douglas G. Bergeron have announced the establishment of a scholarship-mentorship endowment at UC Berkeley for undergraduate women pursuing careers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. The program assists high-potential women with financial awards and a one-on-one mentorship program. In addition, each Bergeron Scholar will gain access to a comprehensive suite of support resources from UC Berkeley's Division of Equity & Inclusion.
‘Rayce’ down under
11/29/11 — For the first time since its founding in 1990, CalSol, Berkeley Engineering's solar car team, competed in the international World Solar Challenge (WSC). Held in October in Australia, the WSC drew 37 solar-powered cars to a weeklong “rayce” crossing 3,000 kilometers of the barren Outback from Darwin to Adelaide. CalSol's Impulse team members posted these reports from the field.
Cal, Stanford students battle IBM supercomputer
11/17/11 CBS News — Two days before the Big Game, students from UC Berkeley and Stanford battled IBM supercomputer Watson in a game of Jeopardy. While Watson came in first in the "IBM Watson Stanford/Berkeley Jeopardy! Challenge," Berkeley placed second, only a thousand points short of Watson, the best performance yet of any student team against the supercomputer. Watch video.
Field report from Nicaragua
10/17/11 — David Olmos (B.S'11 ME) spent his summer working with the nonprofit organization blueEnergy in Central America as part of an internship with Cal Energy Corps, a program launched in spring 2011 to help develop sustainable energy and climate solutions around the world. Now a graduate student in mechanical engineering, Olmos sent this report from the field.
We welcome 1,400 new engineering leaders
09/12/11 — Remember your first week at college? Chances are you're still in touch with the friends you made during that time. Mindful of how formative those early days can be – not to mention the entire college experience – we put a lot of thought and effort into welcoming more than 900 incoming first-year and transfer students to Berkeley Engineering for 2011–12
Tough act to follow
08/18/11 — MIT rejected him. CalTech rejected him. So did Duke and UCLA. But Berkeley saw potential in the teenager from a small Catholic high school in Modesto, and from the time he arrived on campus, Matthew Zahr didn't disappoint. The civil and environmental engineering student graduated this spring with a 3.988, earning his major's top undergraduate award, the department citation, and was nominated, along with four others, for Berkeley's highest undergraduate honor, the University Medal.
Graduation walk, reinvented
06/07/11 — Last month, on May 14, my faculty colleagues and I watched with great pride as more than 1,100 graduates crossed the Greek Theatre stage and walked into the world. Some will go on to more schooling, others to new careers, but all shared a cool, dry Saturday afternoon to mark this major milestone in their lives.
Speaking from experience
06/07/11 — As one of the student speakers at Berkeley Engineering's commencement last month, Christopher Ategeka (B.S'11 ME) recounted his formidable journey to Berkeley from the rural Ugandan village of his childhood. His odyssey entailed unimaginable heartbreak and hardship. For Ategeka, who will return to Berkeley in the spring of 2012 to begin a doctoral program in mechanical engineering, luck as well as a positive outlook helped get him where he needed to go. There was one tool, however, that also played a pivotal role in his success: the bicycle.
A pillow fight on auto-pilot
06/07/11 — The breezeway between McLaughlin and O'Brien halls looks like an electronic components store after an explosion. Color-coded wires, screwdrivers, white sprockets and power tools litter the floor-wherever there isn't a student standing, squatting or lying. In teams of fives and sixes, these local high school engineers are working hard to build robots for the final competition of Pioneers in Engineering (PiE), a robotics competition run by Berkeley Engineering students.
Sun-driven and Australia-bound
05/04/11 — To build a car powered completely by the sun, a team of Berkeley students is burning lots of midnight oil. A year-and-a-half in the making, a sleek vehicle called Impulse was unveiled at Cal Day and is on track to compete in the world's premier solar car race this October. Behind the effort is the 73-member crew of CalSol, the campus's student-run solar vehicle team. This fall, 15 to 20 students will withdraw from school for the semester to participate in CalSol's first-ever entry in the World Solar Challenge, an 1,800-mile road race across Australia.
An engineer’s duty
04/08/11 — When disaster strikes, all of us feel compelled to respond. Japan's devastating earthquake on March 11 called forth our faculty and students to help in ways only an engineer can.