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Simulations yield clues to how cells interact with surroundings

03/22/13 Berkeley Lab — Cells interact constantly with their surroundings, but it's very difficult to observe the main player in this interaction – a protein called integrin. Mohammad Mofrad, associate professor of bioengineering and mechanical engineering, and bioengineering graduate student Mehrdad Mehrbod have developed a computer model of integrin that gives researchers a new way to explore how the protein connects a cell's inner and outer environments.

Researchers use metamaterials to observe giant photonic spin Hall effect

03/22/13 Berkeley Lab — Engineering a unique metamaterial of gold nanoantennas, Berkeley Lab researchers, led by Berkeley mechanical engineering professor Xiang Zhang, were able to obtain the strongest signal yet of the photonic spin Hall effect, an optical phenomenon of quantum mechanics that could play a prominent role in the future of computing.

BIOFAB engineers cooperate to establish precision grammar for programming cells

03/22/13 SynBERC — Researchers at BIOFAB, a collaboration among academia, industry and government, have created a professional-grade collection of public domain DNA parts, in effect establishing rules for the first language for engineering gene expression and greatly increasing the reliability and precision by which biology can be engineered. Bioengineering professor Adam Arkin is BIOFAB's co-director.

Connected Corridors aims to boost efficiency of existing roads

03/18/13 Berkeley Research — Connected Corridors, a project led by engineering professors Alex Bayen and Roberto Horowitz, is developing technologies to help Caltrans gather and analyze traffic data. A goal of the research: to make existing roadways more efficient, rather than launching new highway-construction projects.

EECS alumni Micali and Goldwasser win Turing Award

03/18/13 Association for Computing Machinery — Ph.D. EECS alumni Silvio Micali and Shafi Goldwasser have been named winners of the ACM Turing Award, considered the Nobel Prize of computer science. The two, both now computer science professors at MIT, pioneered the field of provable security, which laid the mathematical foundations that made modern cryptography possible.

Berkeley Engineering ranks among top 3 graduate schools

03/13/13 U.S. News & World Report — Along with MIT and Stanford, Berkeley Engineering is once again ranked among the top three schools for graduate study, according to the Best Graduate Schools 2014 guidebook from U.S. News & World Report. All departmental programs earned spots in the top 10, with No. 1 rankings going to computer science and environmental engineering.

Assembly honors Weili Dai for ‘Breaking the Glass Ceiling’

03/05/13 Sacramento Business Journal — Marvell co-founder Weili Dai, B.S. '84 CS, was one of 11 remarkable California women honored Monday by the state assembly's Legislative Women's Caucus with a "Breaking the Glass Ceiling" award, saluting her work as an entrepreneur and technology pioneer.

Return of the Borg: How Twitter rebuilt Google’s secret weapon

03/05/13 Wired — Borg is a Google software system that coordinates tasks across the search giant's vast fleet of servers. At Twitter, a small team of engineers has built a similar system using Mesos, an open-source software platform developed by UC Berkeley researchers. Ben Hindman, who founded the Mesos project as an EECS Ph.D. student, now oversees its use at Twitter.

The worldwide reach of Berkeley Engineering

03/05/13 — Global problems demand global cooperation. To tackle a wide range of challenges, from clean energy and intelligent infrastructure to cost-effective healthcare delivery, we are launching ambitious research and teaching partnerships with a number of international colleagues.

Riding the wave

03/05/13 — A member of the Berkeley faculty for less than two years, mechanical engineer Reza Alam is already making waves. His efforts to “cloak” objects at sea could one day help shield oil drilling platforms, wind turbine towers or data-collecting buoys from rough seas. His inspiration came from beyond his field: “I was reading papers about electromagnetic cloaking and started thinking, can we do something similar in fluids?”

No idle hands

03/05/13 — Alum Christian Fernandez says he was never a poster-boy student. Now, almost a decade after leaving campus, he is having a run of successful ventures. The computer programmer-turned-entrepreneur is juggling a couple of up-and-coming projects: a collaborative tech space, Ace Monster Toys, in West Oakland, and Hackbright Academy, a training ground for female programmers.

From Kenya to California

03/05/13 — Growing up in western Kenya, Lilian Kabelle had always dreamed of going to Berkeley-only 10,000 miles, an acceptance letter and the means stood in her way. Now, as a MasterCard Foundation Scholar, Kabelle is attending Berkeley at no cost as part of a $500 million education initiative to provide full scholarships for students in developing countries who exemplify a “give back” ethos.

Bob Bea, the master of disaster

02/25/13 Men's Journal — Civil engineering professor Bob Bea, who leads off testimony this week in the trial of BP and other companies involved in the 2010 Deepwater Horizon blowout, is profiled for his work as "the nation's foremost forensic engineer ... the guy to call when levees break or oil rigs explode – to sift through the wreckage, assign blame, and try to prevent the same mistakes again."

‘Sprawl-Tuned’ insect bot skitters all over the place

02/22/13 IEEE Spectrum — Berkeley's Biomimetic Millisystems Lab has posted a video of a new, six-legged robot called STAR, for Sprawl-Tuned Autonomous Robot. The tiny mechanism can adapt its limbs to scramble over and under obstacles and run along smooth and rough surfaces.

Former dean David Hodges honored by Silicon Valley engineers

02/22/13 Silicon Valley Engineering Council — David Hodges, professor emeritus of electrical engineering and computer sciences and former dean of the College of Engineering, was one of four eminent technologists inducted into the Silicon Valley Engineering Hall of Fame at this week's SVEC Engineers Week banquet.

Who should share the responsibility for sustainability?

02/19/13 Environmental Leader — In a blog post for environmental and energy managers, David Dornfeld, professor and chair of mechanical engineering, writes about finding ways to include all the costs of a product into the price the consumer pays, insuring that everyone pays their “fair share” and encouraging innovation.

The science of bionic limbs

02/18/13 NBC TV — NBC Learn's Science of Innovation series for teachers focuses on the creation of robotic exoskeletons by mechanical engineering professor Homayoon Kazerooni and his team at the Berkeley Robotics and Human Engineering Laboratory.

SkyDeck wins Catalyst Award

02/15/13 Haas Newsroom — SkyDeck, the UC Berkeley startup accelerator in downtown Berkeley, won the Catalyst Award at the first-ever East Bay Innovation Awards celebration. The year-old SkyDeck is a collaboration between the College of Engineering, the Haas School of Business, and the Vice Chancellor for Research Office.

Manufacturing: Innovation’s secret sauce

02/07/13 — Thanks to our new master of engineering program and other initiatives, we're educating a new generation of entrepreneurial engineers with transformative products and services in mind. But to drive these innovative ideas to market, they will need manufacturing know-how as well.