Students

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.

A high-stepping boot camp

03/02/11 — They slept in yurts and went six days with virtually no cell phones or Internet service. But for 59 Berkeley Engineering undergraduates, spending their semester break at a woodsy Sonoma County retreat was the journey of a lifetime. The students were participants in Berkeley Engineering's first-ever LeaderShape Institute, a national program that trains young people to lead with integrity and make significant contributions to better the world. They returned to Berkeley focused, energized-and ready to take on new challenges. Voicing the sentiments of many, Paul Zarate, a second-year mechanical engineering student, says, “It was for sure worth missing a week out of your winter break. It was awesome.”

Can-do engineers

02/02/11 — What did you do over the holiday break? Fifty-nine of our extraordinary undergraduates spent six action-packed, 15-hour days at the Alliance Redwoods Camp in Occidental, California, learning how to tap into their highest potential for leadership through a program called the LeaderShape Institute.

Microsoft’s Xbox Kinect beyond hackers, hobbyists

01/10/11 San Francisco Chronicle — Microsoft's Kinect, a motion-tracking peripheral for the Xbox console that is packed with an irresistible blend of cameras and sensors, is finding popularity among researchers such as UC Berkeley engineering graduate student Patrick Bouffard. Working out of Professor Claire Tomlin's lab, Bouffard built a Kinect-enhanced robotic helicopter that perceives objects in its path. A video of the device has been a viral hit on YouTube.

Uncommon in every way: Engineers in intercollegiate sports

12/14/10 — Consider these numbers: Of 35,838 students at Berkeley this year, 4,665 are engineers. Of 800 athletes in intercollegiate sports, only a handful-fewer than five at any one time-are working toward an engineering degree. The combination is rare because any sane, reasonable person would wonder: How on earth do you pursue one of Cal's most difficult academic programs while playing for its most demanding teams? In their own distinct way, three members of this rarefied circle, Richard Fisher, Sati Hsu Houston and Dustin Muhn, have managed to do it successfully. Read about them and watch them in action in a dynamic slideshow.

Berkeley Engineering grad student uses Kinect to create flying AI robot

12/07/10 Eng Tips — EECS grad student Patrick Bouffard, working with Professor Claire Tomlin from the Hybrid Systems Lab, has used Microsoft's Kinect controller to create a quadcopter which can maneuver around obstacles autonomously. The developers attached the Kinect hardware to the device which delivers a point cloud to the on-board computer and allows the vehicle to map its surroundings and move about intelligently. A video documenting the project and posted on YouTube is on track for going viral.

Engineering with broad shoulders

11/04/10 — A key tenet of Berkeley Engineering is to educate leaders. To us, engineering leadership extends beyond simply creating new technologies and managing technology innovation. Truly transformative engineering leadership calls for a comprehensive understanding of the economic, legal, social and environmental implications of novel and emerging technologies and services in societal scale systems.

UC researcher puts buildings through earthquakes

10/14/10 ABC News — It is an uncomfortable fact for Californians that most of the structures in which we live and work pre-date the latest earthquake building codes. So how will those buildings fare in the next big one and how can we best fix them? Wael Hassan's dissertation at UC Berkeley looks at older forms of structural engineering to see how they will hold in a major earthquake. (Video)

Educating transformational leaders

10/05/10 — Homecoming has a special significance for us this year, as we kick off the weekend on Friday, October 8, with the grand opening of Blum Hall. This dedication represents not only the expansion and renovation of the historic Naval Architecture Building. It is also the culmination of a five-year construction effort that has transformed the north side of campus and provided a new home for the Richard C. Blum Center for Developing Economies.

Inspiring the next generation

09/08/10 — As the fall semester 2010 kicks off, the campus is buzzing not only with students but also with capital improvements at the heart of the Berkeley Engineering quadrant. These projects represent the continuation of our strategic plan to transform the educational experience for our 2,800-plus undergraduates.

Laundry robot achieves another landmark, this time pairing your socks

08/24/10 Popular Science — A team of UC Berkeley researchers interested in domestic applications for robotics has shown that Willow Garage's PR2 robot can be a handy household companion, namely laundry-folding. Now, they've shown that if you give PR2 a sock it can employ its keen ability for repetitive hand motions to that other regularly recurring chore: pairing socks.

A 4.00 at Berkeley Engineering? Meet Reid Zimmerman

08/09/10 — Of the 4,767 seniors who graduated this spring from UC Berkeley, 25 of them earned an A in every class, a perfect GPA. Reid Zimmerman is one of them. That record, along with a portfolio of outstanding leadership, character and extracurricular involvement, helped catapult the civil and environmental engineering graduate into the final round of consideration for this year's University Medal, UC Berkeley's most distinguished honor given to a graduating senior.

Economy pushes grads to stay in school

07/15/10 The Wall Street Journal — Some of Silicon Valley's best and brightest have decided not to immediately venture out into the work force. Instead, they are opting for graduate school. That applies to many of the latest engineering graduates from Stanford University, the University of California, Berkeley, and other local schools. According to several of this year's Berkeley electrical-engineering and computer-science grads and officials at Stanford, more engineering students of the class of 2010 opted to continue on with graduate degrees than in past years.

New biotech book by two Berkeley Engineers named in NPR’s Summer’s Best Science Books

07/14/10 National Public Radio — "How To Defeat Your Own Clone And Other Tips For Surviving The Biotech Revolution," by UC Berkeley bioengineering Ph.D. Kyle Kurpinski and bioengineering lecturer Terry D. Johnson, offers up a detailed contingency plan for a future of biotechnological marvel. They've engineered a whirlwind tour that leaves you amused, yet newly fluent in bioengineering and human genetics. Their premise may be fantasy, but the science is real, and the authors' comic book spunk delivers a serious message.