BSC Partner News

UC Berkeley’s annual Big Ideas contest honored this year’s crop of outstanding social projects targeting money matters, water technology and cultural taboos during a special awards celebration at the Blum Center for Developing Economies.

The humble bicycle propelled AIDS orphan Chris Ategeka from rural East Africa to UC Berkeley, driving him to success as a mechanical engineer, inventor and social entrepreneur. Now he is empowering his former countrymen, one bicycle at a time, to repay the random acts of kindness that allowed him to live his dream.

New technology developed by engineers at UC Berkeley is using wireless signals to provide real-time, non-invasive diagnoses of brain swelling or bleeding. The device could potentially become a cost-effective tool for medical diagnostics and to triage injuries in remote areas.

“I am young, have time and am willing to take the risk. We want to innovate and deliver awesome engineering products,” says mechanical engineering major Timothy Lee in a story examining the passion of student entrepreneurs and UC Berkeley's expanding efforts to nurture them.

Kevin Wang always had the teaching bug in him. Now the 2002 EECS alumnus and Microsoft developer is combining his passion and his profession through Technology Education and Literacy in Schools (TEALS), an initiative founded by Wang and supported by Microsoft that places high-tech professionals as part-time teachers in high schools.

Graduating senior Daniel A. Price, who will pursue research in medical diagnostic equipment at Oxford University this fall as a Rhodes Scholar, talks about his studies, his research and future plans.

In the basement of Davis Hall, Hamed Hamedifar (Ph.D.’12 CEE) is rattling scale models of levees on a shake table, aiming to bolster the strength of levees in places like the California Delta.

Ritankar Das, a double major in bioengineering and chemical biology, caps off his whirlwind tenure at UC Berkeley this month by being named the year’s top graduating senior. At 18, Das is the youngest University Medalist in at least a century.

Reporting on the Wall Street Journal’s annual “Highest-Paid College Majors” list, the Daily Clog notes that seven out of the 10 majors listed were off-shoots of engineering, which is good news for Cal students.

Jitendra Malik and Bin Yu, both professors of electrical engineering and computer sciences, and Frances Hellman, of physics and materials science & engineering, are among 10 UC Berkeley faculty members named Wednesday as new members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Pioneers in Engineering, a Berkeley Engineering student group, has won $25,000 in the Zipcar Students with Drive contest for reaching out to underprivileged high schools and promoting education in science, technology and engineering through a robotics competition.

Ritankar Das, 18, a junior double-majoring in bioengineering and chemical biology, has been selected as a 2013 Goldwater scholar, the premier undergraduate award of its type in these fields.

Bob Bea, professor of civil engineering and an internationally recognized veteran of disaster investigations, shared his assessment of the Deepwater Horizon blowout at an April 17 talk on campus. He called the event a “system disaster” that exemplified a “failure to learn” from past mistakes.

Two Berkeley Engineering professors, metallurgical engineer Tom Devine and mechanical engineer Robert Ritchie, field questions about why 32 high-strength threaded steel anchor rods in the new eastern span of the Bay Bridge weakened and snapped.