Devices: Ninja walker
10/07/14 — One team in Professor Amy Herr's senior capstone bioengineering course came up with an elegant solution to improve on walkers for the elderly and infirm that don't fit into tight spaces: the Ninja Walker.
News
Engineering improvements for the world
10/06/14 Washington Post — A new generation of development engineers, “dedicated to using engineering and technology to improve the lot of the world's poorest people,” is emerging around the world, write Dean Shankar Sastry and Lina Nilsson, innovation director of the Blum Center for Developing Economies, in a Washington Post op-ed article.
Our cities’ water systems are becoming obsolete. What will replace them?
10/06/14 Vox — In an extensive interview with Vox, civil engineering professor David Sedlak, co-director of the Berkeley Water Center, discusses the challenges facing urban water systems, which evolved in response to three major crises but are now facing a fourth.
Waller, others gain funding for interdisciplinary big-data research
10/02/14 — EECS assistant professor Laura Waller, who hopes to use new computational tricks to turn simple microscopes into cutting-edge imaging machines, is one of 14 researchers who will receive $1.5 million over the next five years as part of the the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation's Data-Driven Discovery Initiative.
Cybertools offer new channels for free speech, but grassroots organizing still critical
10/02/14 — Scholars from CITRIS, the Blum Center and EECS assess the ways the Internet and online tools have changed how social movements operate and communicate in the 50 years since the Free Speech Movement.
Mechanical engineering’s bright future
09/29/14 CBS SF Bay Area — Mechanical engineering chair David Dornfeld is interviewed by San Francisco’s CBS affiliate station about the state of the field and industry.
Spanish version of the California Report Card
09/24/14 — On National Voter Registration Day, CITRIS launched a new Spanish version of their California Report Card to introduce Spanish-speaking Californians, 30 percent of the state's population, to this high-tech civic engagement tool developed by Berkeley engineering faculty.
Lydia Sohn’s cellular research gains White House notice
09/22/14 Office of Science and Technology Policy — A post to the White House blog last week recognized mechanical engineering professor Lydia Sohn for her prize-winning submission to a foundation-sponsored competition seeking the most compelling ideas for revolutionary life science platform technologies. Sohn's idea? A low-cost, label-free platform to screen, and subsequently sort, single-cells for multiple surface markers.
PEER issues preliminary report on Napa quake
09/22/14 Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research Center — PEER has published a preliminary report on the Aug. 24 South Napa earthquake, drawing on the extensive observations of faculty, staff and students who were deployed to the region in the days following the magnitude 6.0 quake.
What could collapse the Golden Gate Bridge?
09/19/14 KALW — At the movies, the Golden Gate Bridge has been leveled by earthquakes, apes, even a mega-shark. But how would the iconic span fare in more realistic disaster scenarios? Civil engineering professor Abolhassan Astaneh-Asl helps KALW radio figure it out.
ME alumna Tami Bond receives MacArthur ‘genius grant’
09/19/14 Daily Californian — Tami Bond (M.S.'95 ME), a civil and environmental engineering professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, was named a MacArthur Fellow on Wednesday for her research on the effects of black carbon emission and atmospheric pollution on global climate and human health.
USAID is incubating start-ups to tackle poverty problems
09/17/14 Los Angeles Times — Seeking entrepreneurial solutions to poverty, the US Agency for International Development has bet a million dollars on Gram Power, the brainchild of two Berkeley Engineering grads who aim to bring electricity to rural India while slowing climate change at the same time.
EECS researcher creates controllable flying insects using TI technology
09/12/14 Texas Instruments — EECS associate professor Michel Maharbiz spends his days studying the "beautiful systems" of the insect world, and applying that knowledge to building the tiniest of flying objects.
Defining development engineering
09/12/14 — Development engineers elude easy definition, but they are trained as multi-tooled tacticians creating holistic solutions to technical challenges that are interlaced with social and political complexities.
8 grad students named Siebel Scholars
09/11/14 Siebel Scholars Foundation — Eight Berkeley Engineering graduate students - five from bioengineering and three from EECS - have been selected as Siebel Scholars for 2015, joining a class of 83 of the most talented students from the world's leading graduate schools.
Bakar research fellows make their case in Silicon Valley
09/09/14 — Sixteen Bakar Fellows, including several Berkeley Engineering faculty members, recently presented their research ideas to a a packed room of potential investors on Sand Hill Road.
UC helps build resources, revenue at private Armenian university
09/08/14 San Francisco Chronicle — American University of Armenia, an unusually open institution in a typically authoritarian region, gets lots of support from the University of California, including AUA's new president, Armen Der Kiureghian, a civil engineering professor on leave from UC Berkeley.
UC Berkeley and Tsinghua University launch research and graduate education partnership
09/06/14 — UC Berkeley and Tsinghua University have signed an agreement to establish a joint institute in the city of Shenzhen in South China to promote research collaboration and graduate student education. First areas of focus for the institute will be nanotechnology and nanomedicine, low-carbon and new energy technologies, and data science and next-generation Internet.
Berkeley students launch health tech incubator
09/05/14 Daily Californian — A group of UC Berkeley students, led by co-founders Taner Dagdelen and Zachary Zeleznick, both bioengineering juniors, have launched what they call the first-ever student-run health tech incubator.
Innovator aims to combat global warming from the rooftops down
09/04/14 California magazine — George Ban-Weiss (Ph.D. '08 ME) is all about being cool: Not only does coolness figuratively define his work as a professional jazz bassist, it almost literally defines his career as a scientist.