Washington calling
The White House has tapped two of Berkeley Engineering’s own for leadership on critical presidential initiatives.
Faculty honors and awards
Berkeley Engineering faculty receive the most prestigious awards and honors bestowed by academic and professional societies, foundations and other civic organizations. Among these are nearly six dozen active and emeriti faculty who hold membership in the National Academy of Engineering.
Berkeley Engineering professor Ron Gronsky selected as one of Princeton Review’s 300 “Best Professors”
Materials science and engineering professor Ron Gronsky is among seven UC Berkeley instructors listed as the country’s 300 best professors in a book published by the Princeton Review. “We developed this project as a tribute to the extraordinary dedication of America’s undergraduate college professors and the vitally important role they play in our culture, and our democracy,” said Robert Franek, senior vice president of content development and publishing at Princeton Review.
Dr. David Dornfeld receives AMT’s Charles F. Carter Jr. Advancing Manufacturing Award
Dr. David Dornfeld, Chairman of the Department of Mechanical Engineering and the Laboratory for Manufacturing and Sustainability at UC Berkeley, has received the Association of Manufacturing Technology’s Charles F. Carter Jr. Advancing Manufacturing Award. Dr. Dornfeld is specifically recognized for his research toward advancing the understanding of burr formation and prevention, sustainable manufacturing, micro-machining, precision manufacturing and chemical-mechanical planarization
Ashok Gadgil wins Zayed Future Energy Prize’s Lifetime Achievement Award
UC Berkeley civil and environmental engineering professor Ashok Gadgil has won the Lifetime Achievement award of the 2012 Zayed Future Energy Prize. The $3.5 million prize recognizes and rewards innovation, leadership and longterm vision in renewable energy and sustainability. Gadgil was recognized for “his sustainable humanitarian work in Darfur — providing energy efficient cooking stoves known as Berkeley-Darfur stoves, cutting the need for firewood by 55 percent.”
Berkeley Engineering nanotechnology expert Paul Alivisatos wins Wolf Prize in Chemistry
- Paul Alivisatos, director of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, UC Berkeley professor of materials science and engineering, and the Larry and Diane Bock Professor of Nanotechnology, has won the prestigious Wolf Foundation Prize in Chemistry for 2012. Alivisatos is an internationally recognized authority on nanochemistry and a pioneer in the synthesis of semiconductor quantum dots and multi-shaped artificial nanostructures.
Berkeley Engineering professor Carlo H. Séquin wins 2012 Mathematical Art Exhibition Award
Carlo H. Séquin, professor of electrical engineering at computer sciences at UC Berkeley, has received an award for his mathematical sculpture, “Lawson’s Minimum-Energy Klein Bottle,” in the Mathematical Art competition hosted by the American Mathematical Society. Séquin has been creating abstract geometrical art since the early 1980s, and created the winning artwork using a program called Sculpture Generator 1, “which allows me to explore many more complex ideas…and to design and execute…geometries with higher precision.”