News

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.

A collage of the work and life of Charles Townes (Collage by Sarah Wittmer)

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.

Stripes showing differences in electron density in graphene

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.

Eko Devices founders with Core stethoscope

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.

A hands-on demonstration of the newest Oculus Rift.

Maker hero: Alumnus Jack McCauley on Guitar Hero, Oculus and the future of making

12/19/14 Berkeley Innovators — Jack McCauley (EECS ’86), the inaugural speaker in the Berkeley Innovators Lecture Series, told a packed auditorium how his lifelong passion for tinkering brought him a path-breaking career in hardware engineering and design.

atomic structure of a ferroelectric material

Discovery advances ferroelectrics in quest for lower power transistors

12/17/14 CITRIS — Berkeley engineers describe the first direct observation of a long-hypothesized but elusive phenomenon called “negative capacitance” in ferroelectric material, which could open the door to a radical reduction in the power consumed by transistors and the devices containing them.

graduate student Aislan Foina discusses drones with Expo attendees

Students show off ‘autonomous vehicles’ at L.A. Drone Expo

12/16/14 — Berkeley Engineering students joined civil engineering professor Raja Sengupta at the first-ever Drone Expo in Los Angeles on Saturday, demonstrating their “unmanned autonomous vehicles” to a crowd of hobbyists and enthusiasts.

Jay Keasling, Jennifer Doudna and Richard Mathies

Berkeley innovators named fellows of National Academy of Inventors

12/16/14 — Three UC Berkeley faculty members whose innovations have launched startups and whole new areas of research, including biochemical engineer Jay Keasling, have been named fellows of the National Academy of Inventors.

Study reveals resilience of Roman architectural concrete

12/15/14 — An international research team studying the mortar used to build ancient Roman architectural marvels, led by Marie Jackson of civil and environmental engineering, has found a secret to the material's resilience - formation during curing of a crystalline binding hydrate that prevents microcracks from propagating

Heavy truck entering the Caldecott Tunnel

Air pollution down thanks to California’s regulation of diesel trucks

12/12/14 Berkeley Lab — Detailed measurement of emissions from thousands of heavy trucks in the Bay Area by Berkeley Lab air quality scientists, led by adjunct professor Thomas Kirchstetter and professor Rob Harley, both of civil and environmental engineering, showed a dramatic reduction in pollutants in the wake of aggressive new regulations implemented by the California Air Resources Board.