News

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.

Managing disasters with small steps

01/18/10 The New York Times — After studying reconstruction work in western India following a 2001 earthquake that killed more than 20,000 people, Berkeley Engineering alumna Elizabeth A. Hausler founded Build Change to help communities build earthquake-resistant housing. Her organization is now developing a plan to help rebuild homes in Haiti, where many of the destroyed buildings were made of concrete block, without adequate reinforcement against shaking.

UC Berkeley engineer to help rebuild safer Haiti

01/15/10 CBS News — A UC Berkeley engineer who founded a non-profit that builds earthquake-resistant homes in developing nations says many of the deaths in the devastating temblor in Haiti could have been avoided. Her organization, Build Change, has helped to design and build more than 5,300 earthquake-resistant homes in China and Indonesia. Hausler plans to go to Haiti in late February or March so her group will not be in the way of search and rescue efforts.

Asian Pacific Fund awards engineering dean S. Shankar Sastry

01/08/10 San Francisco Business Times — The San Francisco-based Asian Pacific Fund on Friday named two recipients of the fourth annual Chang-Lin Tien Education Leadership Awards, which recognize the accomplishments and leadership of Asian Americans working in higher education. S. Shankar Sastry, dean of the College of Engineering, UC Berkeley, and Meredith Jung-En Woo, dean of the College and Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, University of Virginia, each will receive an unrestricted grant of $10,000.

Top 10 cleantech universities in the U.S. for 2010

01/07/10 Berkeley Lab — UC Berkeley ranks second in a survey of U.S. academic institutions best suited to take advantage of cleantech trends by fostering a pipeline of collaboration of businesses, universities, state initiatives, investors and research dollars.

Leaders in science, advocacy, media to judge 2010 Biotech Humanitarian Award

01/05/10 Biotechnology Industry Organization — The Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO) announced a distinguished panel of judges -- including Jay Keasling, professor of bioengineering at UC Berkeley -- to evaluate nominations for The Biotech Humanitarian Award and select the 2010 Honoree. BIO created the award to recognize an everyday hero who has helped to heal, fuel and feed the planet through their work in the broad biotech arena.

Restoring Our Health Care System to Health

12/15/09 — Some economists attribute about 50 percent of the annual rise in health care costs to medical technology. Technological advances have allowed doctors to treat previously untreatable conditions and prolong both the duration and quality of life. However, as engineers, we believe that new technology opens up greater access and that scalability holds the power to drive down costs. Witness, for example, Moore's Law at work in the area of information and communications technology.

Dr. Song’s Cure for Sick Computers

12/15/09 — Malware is tough to defeat. Once a piece of malicious software such as a virus or worm attacks, it might take days or weeks before computer security professionals release a fix or other countermeasure, says EECS associate professor Dawn Song (Ph.D.'02 EECS). But Song -- named one of Technology Review's 2009 Young Innovators Under 35 -- has created what she calls a "game-changing" technology in the security landscape, significantly cutting the amount of time it takes security analysts to address a malware problem.

Engineering the Magic

12/15/09 — At the most magical place on earth, industrial engineer Brian Loo (B.S.'09 IEOR) has worked in restaurants, analyzing food and beverage service, and in entertainment, doing workforce planning and forecasting. He has even worked on the railroad, optimizing process design and crowd flow. Last August, Loo joined the Workforce Planning team at Disneyland. Following a childhood of family vacations to Disneyland in Anaheim, California, and internships there and at Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida, Loo is now a bona fide "Cast Member," the term used for all Disney employees, each an integral part of the show.

Oh! The Beauty and Joy of Computing

12/15/09 — "Fun. Easy to learn. Can relate to it." That's what students were saying about a new introductory computing course at Berkeley, established by Dan Garcia, Brian Harvey, Colleen Lewis (B.S.'05 EECS) and George Wang, that will alter the way young people perceive the field. Called "The Beauty and Joy of Computing," the two-unit freshman/sophomore seminar teaches non-majors basic programming skills while exploring big picture topics such as abstraction, world-changing applications and the social implications of computing.

Sustainable Energy Solutions

11/13/09 — Next month, representatives from around the world will convene at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in hopes of providing the broad outline for a new agreement that will reduce greenhouse gas emissions to sustainable levels. It is critical that, unlike Kyoto, the new agreement simultaneously provide for sustainable growth and energy utilization.

A Reality Check on High-Speed Rail for California

11/13/09 — In November 2008, California voters passed a $9.95-billion bond issue to build a bullet train that would zip passengers between San Francisco and Los Angeles via the Central Valley at speeds up to 220 miles per hour. A few months later, the Obama administration threw its heft behind the high-speed rail concept by offering nearly $10 billion to HSR projects. Clearly, many Americans are smitten with the romance of the rails. But last month, at an overflow symposium at UC Berkeley, a panel of experts in the fields of transportation engineering and city and regional planning urged caution.