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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.

Bioengineering faculty members Amy Herr and Sanjay Kumar receive NSF CAREER Awards

Berkeley Bioengineering Assistant Professors Amy Herr and Sanjay Kumar have received 2011 National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program awards. CAREER awards are given to young researchers in science and engineering who have also translated their work into significant educational activities. Herr is a leading researcher in microscale biomarker detection technology, and Kumar is a pioneer in molecular cell dynamics and the mechanobiology of the cytoskeleton.

Charles A. Desoer receives IEEE Gustav Robert Kirchhoff Award

IEEE, the world’s largest association for the advancement of technology, has awarded the Gustav Robert Kirchhoff Award to the late Charles A. Desoer, professor emeritus of electrical engineering and computer sciences, for crucial conceptual research contributions to the behavior and the use of electrical circuits and systems.

Teachers at the top of their game

Berkeley faculty know their material. Yet to teach it so that students not only understand but find inspiration and wonder in it, takes special talent and dedication. In April, civil and environmental engineering professor Juan Pestana-Nascimento and associate professor Dan Klein of electrical engineering and computer sciences joined two other faculty members elsewhere on campus in receiving the Berkeley 2010 Distinguished Teaching Award. In the award’s 51-year history, only 236 faculty have received it, among the thousands who have taught Berkeley courses.

UC Berkeley professor James Demmel receives 2010 IEEE Computer Society Sidney Fernbach Award

James Demmel, UC Berkeley professor of mathematics and of computer sciences, has been named the recipient of the 2010 IEEE Computer Society Sidney Fernbach Award for his contributions to high-performance linear algebra software. The software he has helped develop is used by hundreds of sites worldwide, including all U.S. Department of Energy national laboratories, NASA research laboratories, many universities, and companies in the aerospace, environmental, pharmaceutical and other industries.

Carey is winner of 2010 HP Innovation Research Program Award

Professor Van P. Carey of UC Berkeley’s Mechanical Engineering Department is among a select group of professors worldwide that have been selected to receive awards as part of Hewlett Packard’s 2010 Innovation Research Program. The award will provide $100K for the 2010-2011 academic year in support of Carey’s research. The project led by Professor Carey teams him with HP’s Sustainable IT Ecosystem Lab in an effort to develop compact and accurate models of the energy use in data centers.

Pisano awarded Columbia University 2009 Egleston Medal for Distinguished Engineering Achievement

Albert P. Pisano, Professor and Department Chair of Mechanical Engineering and currently serving as Acting Dean of the College of Engineering at Berkeley, has been unanimously elected to receive Columbia University’s 2009 Egleston Medal for Distinguished Engineering Achievement. Pisano was elected to receive the award for his “extraordinary pioneering work in the field of micro-electromechanical systems.”