News

Adam Arkin wins DOE’s 2013 Lawrence Award

04/16/14 Berkeley Lab — Bioengineering professor Adam Arkin, director of Berkeley Lab's Physical Biosciences Division and a biologist who is recognized as a leading authority on the evolutionary design principles of cellular networks and populations and their application to systems and synthetic biology, has been named one of six recipients of the 2013 Ernest Orlando Lawrence Award, the Department of Energy's highest scientific honor.

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."

Email innovator Eric Allman named to Internet Hall of Fame

04/09/14 Internet Society — Software pioneer Eric Allman (B.S.'77 EECS, M.S.'80 CS), whose creation of the sendmail program in the 1980s made possible email as we know it today, has been inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame. Joining him as a member of the class of 2014 is the late Douglas Engelbart (Ph.D.'55 EE), father of the computer mouse.

Executive education for engineers, by engineers

04/04/14 — Berkeley Engineering's newest offering: Executive and Professional Education, extends the college's educational mission by providing non‐degree engineering and leadership education to executives and engineering professionals.

Measuring your DNA health

04/04/14 — Sometime soon, Sylvain Costes (Ph.D'99 NE) hopes that annual medical checkups will include a simple blood test to determine levels of DNA damage. The list of things assaultive to the body's basic building blocks is long - radiation, ultraviolet light and toxins, to name a few - and errors occur even during normal cell division. The body continually repairs this damaged DNA, but sometimes, the routine repair process can fail. DNA damage and genetic mutations can lead to serious health problems like cancer, immunological disorders, neurological disorders and premature aging.

Control design at Lift Labs

04/04/14 — Anupam Pathak's (B.S'04 ME) idea to build a device to assist people with Parkinson's disease or essential tremor evolved from helping soldiers survive combat. Pathak started his mechanical engineering doctoral research at the University of Michigan at the height of U.S. troop deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan in 2004. Field reports showed that large numbers of freshly minted troops, with little experience in war zones, were facing stress-induced tremors during combat situations. A soldier with shaky hands is dangerous; the situation was so bad that tremor was affecting casualty rates.

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.

Ashok Gadgil named an I-House alumni of the year

04/03/14 International House — Ashok Gadgil, a prolific inventor and Berkeley professor of civil and environmental engineering, and philanthropist Wendy Schmidt have been selected as Alumni of the Year 2014 by International House at UC Berkeley.

Dermatologically derived

04/01/14 The Scientist — Inspired by turkey skin, bioengineering professor Seung-Wuk Lee's team has devised a bacteriophage-based sensor whose color changes upon binding specific molecules.

More woes for high-speed rail

03/31/14 San Francisco Business Times — The $68 billion cost estimate for a Los Angeles-to-San Francisco high-speed rail network is far too low, and the system may be eclipsed by emerging technologies before the 30-year project is completed, civil engineering professor C. William Ibbs warned the state Senate transportation committee last week.

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.

Winners of DOE energy efficiency innovation award

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).

Fukushima radiation near Half Moon Bay? Not so fast…

03/24/14 Contra Costa Times — Japanese radioisotopes aren't lurking in the sand at Miramar Beach, the California Department of Public Health said in a final report debunking suggestions that the beach contained radioactive material from the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster. "Nuclear radiation is something you can't smell, see and feel; it tends to scare people" said UC Berkeley nuclear engineering professor Kai Vetter, leader of the school's Rad Watch project, which has tested West Coast air, rain, milk and fish without finding any evidence that Fukushima-related contamination poses a health threat.

Berkeley scientists advance on-chip inductor technology

03/21/14 EE Times — Berkeley scientists led by mechanical engineering professor Liwei Lin report they have found a way to advance on-chip inductor technology, a breakthrough that could lead to a new generation of miniature electronics and wireless communications systems.

Student entrepreneurs in SkyDeck incubator

New ideas and technology spreading from campus faster than ever

03/19/14 — Backed by a vibrant startup culture that serves as the engine of economic growth for much of the Bay Area, UC Berkeley has established several new programs that support the translation of university research into real-world solutions. One key element is the SkyDeck startup incubator, a collaboration of Berkeley Engineering, the Haas School of Business and the Office of the Vice Chancellor of Research.

Corporate-funded academic inventions spur increased innovation, analysis says

03/19/14 — Academic research sponsored by industry has a strong track record of leading to innovative patents and licenses, challenging assumptions that corporate support skews science toward inventions that are less accessible and less useful to others than those funded by the government or non-profit organizations, according to a new analysis.

UC Berkeley taps its old mine shaft to study Hayward Fault

03/17/14 San Francisco Chronicle — More than 70 years after UC Berkeley's mining school was absorbed into the College of Engineering, earthquake researchers studying the Hayward Fault plan to install seismographs and high-frequency microphones inside the Lawson Adit -- a rocky mine shaft stretching east from Hearst Memorial Mining Building that was built by Berkeley students a century ago.

Ad for reddit Ask Me Anything with Berkeley nuclear engineers

AMA brings nuclear engineers to Reddit

03/14/14 Daily Clog Science — In an Ask Me Anything session this week on Reddit, six professors from UC Berkeley's department of nuclear engineering answered questions ranging from concerns about thorium reactor design to environmental monitoring in Fukushima.

Making sense of big data

03/12/14 Berkeley Research — Ben Recht is looking for problems. Recht, an assistant professor with dual appointments in EECS and statistics, develops mathematical strategies that help researchers cut through blizzards of data to find what they're after, be they urban planners or online retailers.

Berkeley Engineering garners four No. 1 rankings

03/11/14 U.S. News & World Report — In the U.S. News & World Report rankings of graduate programs released Tuesday, Berkeley Engineering ranked 1st in computer science, environmental engineering, civil engineering, and electrical engineering. Bioengineering moved from 10th to 7th. All programs remain ranked in the top 10.