News

Despite glitches, electronics make cars safer

02/11/10 National Public Radio — Do all the fancy electronics cars need to squeeze 40 or 50 miles out of a gallon of gas mean we've compromised on safety? "Absolutely not," says Simon Washington, director of the Safe Transportation Research and Education Center at the University of California, Berkeley. He says that when carmakers are faced with a trade-off between safety and fuel economy, safety typically wins.

A Shackleton reaches the South Pole

02/09/10 ABC News — Navy Commander Scott Shackleton, fifth cousin of the great explorer and assistant dean for capital projects and facilities in the College of Engineering at UC Berkeley, found his opportunity to follow in Sir Ernest Shackleton's footsteps. For the last three weeks, Cmdr. Shackleton served as an operations officer at McMurdo Station, near the Antarctic coast, as part of this year's Operation Deep Freeze, the annual resupply mission for the research personnel who live on Antarctica year-round.

Arun Sarin named Knight of the British Empire

02/06/10 United Kingdom Foreign and Commonwealth Office — Berkeley Engineering alumnus Arun Sarin (M.S.'78 MSE), former CEO of Vodafone and recipient of the Berkeley Engineering Innovation Award, has been named a Knight of the British Empire by the Queen of England for services to the communications industry.

U.S. Green Building Council approves sustainability studies courses offered by UC Berkeley Extension

02/04/10 PR Newswire — UC Berkeley Extension today announced its new designation as a U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) Education Provider. USGBC sets the standards for the green building industry in the United States and abroad through its Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Green Building Rating System certification program. UC Berkeley Extension is the first continuing education program at the University of California, and one of the few public continuing education programs in the country, to offer USGBC-approved course credits.

When the going gets tough, engineers get going

02/03/10 — I am honored and excited to have been tapped to serve as acting dean while Dean Sastry is on leave this spring to join his wife, EECS professor Claire Tomlin, in Stockholm during her appointment as the Tage Erlander Guest Professor at the Royal Institute of Technology. For those of you who don't know me, I have been on the College of Engineering faculty for 26 years and chair of the Mechanical Engineering Department for the last six. I know we will accomplish a lot during these next six months.

Mechanized marvels

02/03/10 — Their ingenious designs integrate mechanical and electrical systems into working prototypes that may zoom, zing, fly, agitate, pull, dispense or write their way into engineering glory. At the end of every semester, students in ME 102 "Mechatronics" demonstrate their final mechanical engineering design projects for the public during an open house in Etcheverry Hall. "It was almost overwhelming to see what the students could not only dream up but also fabricate and test in such a short amount of time," says graduate student instructor Sarah Wodin-Schwartz.

Mother of invention

02/03/10 — Berkeley Engineering alumna Michelle Khine, now an assistant professor of biomedical engineering at UC Irvine, has discovered an inventive scientific approach to fabricating cheap microfluidic devices using Shrinky Dinks. When her method of printing microfluidic patterns on Shrinky Dink sheets -- using a laser-jet printer, then heating them in a toaster oven to create patterns of channels and microwells -- was featured and published online in Lab Chip, it had more downloads in one month than any other paper previously posted by the UK's Royal Society of Chemistry.

Anti-medical school, pro health

02/03/10 — No offense to medical schools, but students last fall liked taking "Anti-Medical School," a new graduate seminar at Berkeley. While medical schools generally teach what is known in medicine, Anti-Medical School explores what is unknown and unsolved in medicine, and that's what students found compelling. At each weekly lecture, like the one on Alzheimer's taught by neurologist and neuroscientist Adam Gazzaley, a UCSF physician presents a problem in need of an engineering solution in hopes of engaging the students in solving thorny, real-world clinical challenges as part of their master's or doctorate research.

Mining destruction for data to help others

02/01/10 Los Angeles Times — In the aftermath of events like the Haiti quake, teams of 'disaster researchers' rush to the scene to study what happened. It's not morbid curiosity: Their work will alleviate future catastrophes. "We're not waiting for these things to happen, and we don't want them to happen," said Jonathan Bray, chairman of the Geo-engineering Extreme Events Reconnaissance Association and professor of civil and environmental engineering at UC Berkeley. "But when they do, we want to be able to learn the lessons that can be learned."

Berkeley Bioengineering professor Mohammad Mofrad Receives NSF CAREER Award

01/29/10 National Science Foundation — Berkeley Bioengineering Assistant Professor Mohammad Mofrad has received a 2010 National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program award. CAREER awards are given to young researchers in science and engineering who have also translated their work into significant education activities.

Bacteria transformed into biofuel refineries

01/27/10 Scientific American — The bacteria responsible for most cases of food poisoning in the U.S. has been turned into an efficient biological factory to make chemicals, medicines and, now, fuels. UC Berkeley bioengineering professor Jay Keasling and his colleagues have manipulated the genetic code of Escherichia coli, a common gut bacteria, so that it can chew up plant-derived sugar to produce diesel and other hydrocarbons.

Engineer: Construction methods at heart of Haiti quake tragedy

01/26/10 Oakland Tribune — Haiti's construction industry is to blame for hundreds of thousands of deaths in a tragedy that will repeat itself unless there are changes to building practices there, a Berkeley engineer said Tuesday. In one of the first technical reports on this month's earthquake, Eduardo Fierro, president of BFP Engineers, presented his preliminary findings at UC Berkeley following a week of reconnaissance in Haiti that started just two days after the magnitude 7.0 quake struck Jan. 12.

Michael Barclay – Wilson Sonsini attorney and EECS alum known as ‘Keeper of All Knowledge’ – retiring

01/26/10 Law.com — Attorney Michael Barclay (Berkeley Engineering alumnus, M.S. '74 EECS) is retiring after 17 years with the Silicon Valley firm Wilson Sonsini, where he hasn't strayed far from his electrical engineering roots: He wears big, thick-rimmed glasses and is known as the "keeper of all knowledge" by his colleagues. He plans to travel, study guitar and volunteer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Professor Alper Atamturk named DoD National Security Fellow

01/25/10 Department of Defense — Alper Atamturk, professor of industrial engineering and operations research at UC Berkeley, was named by the the U.S. Department of Defense as one of 11 distinguished university faculty scientists and engineers forming the 2010 class of its National Security Science and Engineering Faculty Fellowship program. NSSEFF provides grants to top-tier researchers from U.S. universities to conduct unclassified, basic research that may transform DoD's capabilities in the long term.

Professor John Dracup elected AGU Fellow

01/25/10 Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering — UC Berkeley civil and and environmental engineering faculty member John Dracup, Professor of the Graduate School, has been elected a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union, a special tribute for those who have had a significant impact on their field within the earth and space sciences.

Year of enduring success

01/23/10 TimesLeader.com — Berkeley Engineering alum Timothy O'Donnell had a big '09 in pro triathlons, highlighted by a world title in Australia. "I still have a lot of unfinished business in the sport," says O'Donnell, whose future career goals include winning the Ironman Triathlon World Championship and an Olympic gold medal.

Haiti quake raises flags on U.S. hot spots

01/23/10 CBS News — Researchers tell us America gets a "B+" for knowing what causes earthquakes, but a "C+" when it comes to securing infrastructure. Short-term predictions are simply not possible yet, and earthquakes can happen in places you wouldn't expect. Khalid Mosalam, an engineering professor at UC Berkeley, works in one of 15 university labs across the U.S. testing port stability, how much stress steel beams can handle and what happens inside a building during an earthquake. "Any heavy content of the building if not secured to the walls of the building, they would tend to be tossed around," Mosalam said, adding that such objects would also cause injuries or worse.

DNA factory launches

01/21/10 TheScientist.com — California synthetic biologists are launching a production facility that will provide free, standardized DNA parts for scientists around the world. BIOFAB aims to boost the ease of bioengineering with "biological parts" that are shared resources, standardized and reliable enough that they can be switched in and out of a genome like electronic parts in a radio. Adam Arkin, BIOFAB's codirector and a professor of bioengineering at UC Berkeley, says the group has already hired scientists who are in the lab, making constructs.

Could robot cockroaches help Haiti earthquake victims?

01/19/10 FOXNews.com — Tech wizards at UC Berkeley's Department of Electrical Engineering are developing mini-robots to help locate earthquake survivors easily, cheaply, and quickly, without jeopardizing the lives of rescuers. They're made of cardboard, plastic, and parts of computers and bits of old toys, and operated by remote control. The goal of the project: to develop swarms of the cheap, diminutive robots that can hunt down the survivors of disasters and relay the location of survivors back to the surface.

Robots could assist in quake search and rescue

01/18/10 ABC News — Earthquake rescues could be made safer and faster with a new robot being developed at UC Berkeley by engineering grad students Paul Birkmeyer and Kevin Peterson with Professor Ron Fearing.