News

N.C. A&T names Berkeley Engineering alumna as new engineering dean

05/20/11 Greensboro News & Record — Robin N. Coger has been named dean of N.C. A&T's College of Engineering. Coger is the founder and director of the Center for Biomedical Engineering Systems at the UNC-Charlotte and a professor in the Mechanical Engineering and Engineering Science Department at William States Lee College of Engineering. Coger earned her bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering from Cornell University, and received a master's and doctorate in that field from UC Berkeley.

Exoskeleton lets UC Berkeley grad take a huge step

05/15/11 San Francisco Chronicle — When Austin Whitney, a paralyzed 22-year-old UC Berkeley student, rose from his wheelchair and stepped across the commencement stage on Saturday to shake Chancellor Robert Birgeneau's hand, the crowd of 15,000 at Edwards Stadium went wild with cheers, as if witnessing a miracle. A team of UC Berkeley mechanical engineers - four doctoral students led by Professor Homayoon Kazerooni - have been developing a computerized body brace called an exoskeleton they believe will be good enough to transform thousands of wheelchair users into walking people in a couple of years, and for an affordable price.

The origins of Intel’s new transistor, and its future: Q&A with Chenming Hu

05/09/11 IEEE Spectrum — Intel has announced a big change to the electronic switches at the heart of its CPUs. Going forward, the firm will be using three-dimensional transistors to take the place of long-used planar devices. The new transistors are a variation on the FinFET, a transistor design that substitutes the flat channel through which electrons flow with a 3-D fin. How did this 3-D design win its way into production? Spectrum asked the coinventor of the FinFET, Chenming Hu, a professor emeritus at UC Berkeley, how the new transistors got their start.

Berkeley Engineering alum Gary May named dean of engineering at Georgia Tech

05/06/11 Technique — Gary May, professor and chair of the School of ECE at Georgia Institute of Technology, was named Dean of the College of Engineering on May 6, 2011, following an international search. "I am very excited. I think this a dream job. Who wouldn't want to be the Dean of Engineering at school where they sing about engineering in the fight song?" May said. May completed his master's and doctoral degrees at the University of California, Berkeley.

Building the bio toolkit

05/04/11 — In the 1970s, the Berkeley-bred SPICE (Simulation Program with Integrated Circuit Emphasis) revolutionized microelectronics by creating a toolkit now used worldwide as the standard for circuit design. Our new Synthetic Biology Institute (SBI), launched on April 25, aims to repeat this feat with biological and chemical engineering.

Moving data at the speed of light

05/04/11 — Modern computing has a looming data traffic problem. Sometime in the next decade, experts say, processors will not be able to deliver better performance, because integrated circuits will have reached their capacity. Commonly described as interconnect bottleneck, this phenomenon means that computers, regardless of their processing speed, will be incapable of moving data any faster. But Berkeley engineers, led by Connie Chang-Hasnain, have recently developed a groundbreaking process that could solve the vexing problem of interconnect bottleneck and lead to a new class of faster, more efficient microprocessors.

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.

Of mice and livers

05/04/11 — Humans and mice have more in common than just an affinity for cheese. The two mammals share about 99 percent of their genes, making mice a useful model for studying human health and disease. There are, however, stark differences between their livers, the organ that removes metabolized drugs from the blood. When it comes to drug trials, this can create problems, as testing on mice often fails to accurately show a drug's toxicity to humans. But Alice A. Chen (B.S'03 BioE) has devised a technology that could result in faster, safer and more efficient drug development. She has created a humanized mouse with a tissue-engineered human liver, allowing researchers to predict how a new drug could affect humans at a much earlier point in the development process.

Environmental engineering professor Kara Nelson receives grant for sanitation research

05/02/11 The Daily Californian — UC Berkeley professor of environmental engineering Kara Nelson has been awarded a five-year $100,000 grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation for her unconventional research in sanitation and human waste management. Nelson said she will use the grant money to treat human waste at the point where it is being produced, in an effort to eliminate the amount of contact humans have with fecal pathogens.

PEER presents briefing on Japan earthquake and tsunami

04/27/11 Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research Center — The Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research Center will give a public briefing presenting the preliminary results of a U.S. research team's reconnaissance trip to Japan to survey damage from the 9.0 magnitude Tohoku earthquake and ensuing tsunami of March 11, 2011. The briefing, to be held on April 28, is jointly organized by the PEER, GEER, and EERI's Learning from Earthquakes Program.

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.

Under construction: Engineering the Bay Bridge

04/08/11 — Slated to open in late 2013, the new eastern span of the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge is meant to do what the old one didn't: withstand a major Bay Area earthquake, sustain only limited damage and quickly admit emergency vehicles and traffic. It must deliver a performance to match its “lifeline” designation. It's also a lifeline for Marwan Nader (M.S'89, Ph.D'92 CE)-because he's bet his career on it. Read part 2 of our story and watch a slideshow of the new Bay Bridge construction.

Engineers stick together

04/08/11 — Take a big concrete wall, a few rolls of duct tape and what do you get? A networking opportunity that bonded Berkeley engineering students in more ways than one. To the cheers, applause and overall amusement of scores of onlookers, nine teams of undergraduates affixed one of their peers to a decidedly nonadhesive wall outside the Bechtel Engineering Center with yards of sticky, silvery stuff. The occasion was a first-ever Duct Tape Competition, one of a series of science and socially themed events celebrating UC Berkeley's EWeek.

Two labs, two high-impact missions

04/08/11 — Two new research ventures at Berkeley Engineering have boundary-shattering visions for the future of computing. Jointly unveiled at the recent Berkeley EECS Annual Research Symposium (BEARS), these labs have distinct missions. The Swarm Lab will advance work in tiny wireless sensors capable of linking our homes, cities and bodies to the cyber world. The AMPLab will focus on solutions to the growing challenge of storing, accessing and analyzing a deluge of data that has begun overwhelming today's technology.

Businesses born on campus: Students pitch start-ups

04/07/11 Berkeleyside — Six student teams, made up largely of Cal post-grads, who pitched their start-up concepts to a panel of veteran entrepreneurs and potential sponsors were finalists in Cal's Venture Lab program, part of the university's Center for Entrepreneurship and Technology founded by UC Berkeley engineering Professor Ikhlaq Sidhu. The event, called "Entrepreneurship in the Global Marketplace," promised winners either a $5,000 grant from Alibaba.com or a $10,000 Acceleration Award from the Plug and Play Tech Center.

PRIME and France’s Arts et Métiers ParisTech School announce a partnership with UC Berkeley

03/23/11 PRLog — Arts et Métiers ParisTech has finalized an exchange agreement for graduate students and researchers with UC Berkeley. The agreement will enable the exchange of graduate students, researchers, and faculty in science, technology, research and engineering fields between the institutions. "Arts et Métiers students are renowned among our faculties for their scientific excellence and their strong motivation. This is an exciting opportunity to increase their presence among us," said David Dornfeld, Chair of the Mechanical Engineering Department at UC Berkeley.

On West Coast of U.S., much ado about very little radiation, so far

03/19/11 Los Angeles Times — U.S. scientists and sensors are poised to detect radioactive fallout from Japan's nuclear accident, but aside from a 'minuscule' amount at a Sacramento station, they've found none. The nuclear engineering department at UC Berkeley set up its own independent monitoring Wednesday on top of the campus' Etcheverry Hall. The system looks for gamma rays with energy "signatures" corresponding to radioactive isotopes, said Kai Vetter, a professor in the department. As of Friday morning, Vetter said, they hadn't seen any evidence of suspicious radiation.

Atomic fuel stored at U.S. plants poses risks similar to Japan facilities

03/18/11 Bloomberg — U.S. nuclear power plants that store thousands of metric tons of spent atomic fuel pose risks of a crisis like the one unfolding in Japan, where crews are battling to prevent a meltdown of stored fuel, nuclear safety experts said. Nuclear plants weren't designed with the intention of storing their spent fuel permanently, said Bozidar Stojadinovic, a professor in the department of civil and environmental engineering at UC Berkeley. "The plants have always been designed with the idea that the fuel will be taken care of," Stojadinovic said. "The government promised to do that."

Radioactive particles arriving in the Bay Area, but pose no risk, say UC scientists and health officials

03/18/11 San Jose Mercury News — While public health officials downplayed fears that a plume from Japan's crippled nuclear reactors was descending on California, scientists at UC Berkeley declared they were already detecting radioactive particles from 5,000 miles across the ocean. The differing accounts illustrated the confusion on the fallout from Japan's crisis, but scientists and public health experts agreed that whatever radiation may drift to California and the West Coast will be too minuscule to pose any health risks. "We see evidence of fission particles -- iodine, cesium, barium and krypton, a whole dog's breakfast of radiation," said Ed Morse, professor of nuclear engineering at UC Berkeley, whose students have set up a monitor on the rooftop of the campus's Etcheverry Building.

Options are few to prevent Japan nuclear catastrophe

03/18/11 Los Angeles Times — As a crack is discovered in a Fukushima spent fuel pool, officials confront two crucial tasks: preventing a runaway chain reaction into the nuclear fuel and maintaining a massive flow of seawater through the damaged pools and reactor vessels. Edward Morse and Per Peterson of UC Berkeley's Department of Nuclear Engineering offer analysis.