Thanking the Academy
02/10/15 — James O'Brien, an EECS professor, walks the red carpet for a technical achievement award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
News
Breakthrough Technologies to Shape Our Future
02/10/15 — Arati Prabhakar, director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), will deliver a View From the Top lecture, “Breakthrough Technologies to Shape Our Future,” on campus this Friday, Feb. 13, 2015.
Per Peterson appointed executive associate dean
02/06/15 — Per Peterson, the William and Jean McCallum Floyd Professor in the nuclear engineering department, has joined the college's leadership team as executive associate dean.
Berkeley, Stanford excel at producing VC-backed entrepreneurs
02/05/15 Tech Cocktail — A report from the research firm PitchBook shows that Stanford and UC Berkeley rank first and second, respectively, in producing successful entrepreneurs with venture capital backing.
CEE’s Jon Bray elected to engineering academy
02/05/15 — Jonathan Bray, who holds the Faculty Chair in Earthquake Engineering Excellence, has been elected to the National Academy of Engineering for his contributions to earthquake engineering and advances in mitigation of surface faulting,
Study reveals how oxygen is like kryptonite to titanium
02/05/15 — Materials scientists at Berkeley Engineering have discovered how titanium, prized for its strength and corrosion resistance, becomes brittle with just a few extra atoms of oxygen. The discovery could open the door to expanded use of the lightweight metal.
Optical antenna enables LEDs to rival lasers
02/04/15 Berkeley Lab — A Berkeley Lab team, led by EECS professor Eli Yablonovitch, has used an external optical antenna to greatly enhance the spontaneous emission of light from a semiconductor nanorod. This advance opens the door to LEDs that can replace lasers for short-range optical communications.
Devices: Sun Fridge
02/03/15 — Alumnus Steve Lanzisera (Ph.D'09 EECS) is part of a Berkeley Lab effort to design a portable solar-powered refrigerator to safely deliver vaccines to the developing world.
Gordon and Betty Moore endow chair to honor UC Berkeley engineering professor Paul Gray
02/03/15 — Paul R. Gray, former executive vice chancellor and provost at UC Berkeley and former dean and professor emeritus in Berkeley's College of Engineering, has been honored with the naming of a distinguished faculty chair at Berkeley, endowed by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore and his wife, Betty.
Nobel laureate and laser inventor Charles Townes dies at 99
01/29/15 — Charles Hard Townes, a professor emeritus of physics at the University of California, Berkeley, who shared the 1964 Nobel Prize in Physics for invention of the laser and subsequently pioneered the use of lasers in astronomy, died early Tuesday, Jan. 27, in Oakland.
Graphene advances as viable silicon substitute
01/27/15 — A new study demonstrating a way to control the movement and placement of electrons in graphene moves the wonder material a major step closer to knocking silicon off as the dominant workhorse of the electronics industry. Among the study's lead authors is Berkeley Engineering's Lane Martin, associate professor of materials science and engineering.
Breaking the sound barrier in deaf communication
01/21/15 — Thibault Duchemin (M.Eng'14 IEOR), who grew up as the only hearing person in his family, has developed a novel communications tool called Transcense.
Forbes’ “30 Under 30” includes Eko stethoscope
01/20/15 California magazine — The SkyDeck Berkeley startup accelerator landed two teams on Forbes magazine's "30 Under 30" list of the brightest entrepreneurial stars, including Eko Devices (founded by Berkeley bioengineer Connor Landgraf), which developed the Core digital stethoscope.
What makes pop, pop?
01/13/15 — Three engineers work by day at one of the nation's premier research labs; by night, they color-code transcriptions of pop songs. It could be the setup to a new prime-time sitcom. Or, perhaps, the wacky backstory of another successful startup.
Beyond clean water: A development engineer profile
01/13/15 Blum Center — Listening to a dry academic lecture on flood prediction while monsoons flooded a fifth of Pakistan sparked a humanitarian drive in Syed Imran Ali, now a Blum Center postdoc pursuing his vision of safe water delivery through development engineering.
Mainstreaming science in the movies
01/13/15 berkeleyByte — Energy engineering undergrad Alison Ong discusses how Hollywood has been giving STEM fields a boost lately - The Imitation Game, Interstellar, The Theory of Everything - and notes the tension between good science and good storytelling.
Sangiovanni-Vincentelli named ACM fellow
01/09/15 Association for Computing Machinery — EECS professor Alberto Sangiovanni-Vincentelli has been named a 2014 fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery for his contributions to electronic design automation.
Identifying Seaborg’s lost plutonium
01/08/15 Physics Central — A tiny radioactive fleck - rediscovered in a bucket on its way to a disposal site - may well be the first sample of plutonium big enough to be seen by the naked eye, produced in 1942 by the element's discoverer, Glenn Seaborg.
The impact of falling oil prices on your wallet
01/05/15 WalletHub — In a recent Ask the Experts column, Robert Bea, professor emeritus of civil and environmental engineering, discusses the precipitous drop in oil prices and its likely effect on the economy.
World class
01/01/15 — U.S. News & World Report ranks Berkeley Engineering as one of the top three engineering universities in the world.