Innovations

Research & News from Berkeley Engineering

Innovations Home Innovations Volume 3, Issue 4, May 2009 Archive

Dean’s Message

Women Find a Home at Berkeley Engineering

From Monica Tanza, a mechanical engineering senior interested in sustainable design, to Cagla Meral, a civil and environmental engineering Ph.D. student working on greener cement, women are pursuing their ambitions at Berkeley Engineering.

The representation of women in the college’s student body is slightly higher than nationwide numbers: Using 2006–07 figures, nearly 20 percent of our undergraduates are women, compared with 17.5 percent in engineering colleges nationwide; and 25 percent of our master’s and Ph.D. students are women, compared with 22 percent nationwide.

However, this is Berkeley, which never aspires to be just average. Our peer MIT awards 38 percent of its engineering bachelor’s degrees to women. As the pool of prospective engineers and scientists continues to diversify given demographic and educational trends, we must do all we can to make Berkeley Engineering an even more compelling option for women students.

As dean, I am leading a college-wide effort to attract and retain more women, working from a set of key observations:

We must have abundant research opportunities, with financial incentives wherever possible, for undergraduates and graduate students alike.
Our students must be able to connect their studies to the big problems facing society and the potential for high-impact outcomes. This helps explain why women are better represented in such fields as environmental engineering and bioengineering.
We must do all we can to support student groups like the Society of Women Engineers, which provides a home for leadership activities and makes the role of women even more visible in the college.

We will be challenging ourselves in the next few years to boost the number of women in the student body and prepare them—as we do with all our students—to lead technological innovation in the global economy. Please watch for updates on this topic, and feel free to share with us any insights or suggestions you may have.

S. Shankar Sastry

Dean, College of Engineering
Roy W. Carlson Professor of EECS, BioE & ME
Director, Blum Center for Developing Economies

Email Dean Sastry

Upcoming Events

Spring Reception for Graduates: Monday, May 11, 5–6:30 p.m.
Join our graduating seniors for a reception at the Betty & Gordon Moore Lobby in Hearst Memorial Mining Building and welcome them to the alumni community. RSVP by May 7 by e-mailing bears@berkeley.edu.

Spring 2009 Engineering Commencement: Saturday, May 23, 8:30 a.m.–12:00 p.m.
The annual commencement ceremony at the Greek Theatre features a keynote address by Coleman Fung (B.S.’87 IEOR), CEO and founder of Open Link Financial, Inc., and hundreds of happy graduates. For details, go to http://www.coe.berkeley.edu/events/college-of-engineering-commencement-ceremony.ics.

UC Berkeley European Symposium: Thursday, May 28
Hear top Berkeley Engineering faculty speak at Siemens Corporate Headquarters in Munich for an all-day symposium. Dean Shankar Sastry, CITRIS director Paul Wright and others address the role of cutting-edge research in meeting the challenges of energy use and point-of-care health care. For more, go to http://www-bsac.eecs.berkeley.edu/events/8764300078/.

Click here to read or contribute comments.

In This Issue:

Drug Delivery, Nanoscale

Roughly the size of a matchstick, a slender titanium tube could become a pint-sized weapon against chronic hepatitis C and a host of other debilitating diseases. Three UCSF/UC Berkeley doctoral students are designing a tiny implantable device capable of delivering steady and minute quantities of potent drugs into the bloodstream. The Nano Precision Pump could reduce serious side effects caused by injections of far larger doses of medicine—improving patient quality of life, compliance and cure rates, the students say.

See full story.

A Fix for Memorial Stadium

If the Hayward Fault ruptures during a Cal home game, Memorial Stadium fans would be in for a wild ride. But they should be safe—even if they’re seated in the most vulnerable end-zone sections. That’s the outcome that David Friedman (B.S.’75 CE) envisions for the massive retrofit of UC Berkeley’s landmark but seismically poor football venue. Friedman, senior principal at San Francisco–based Forell/Elsesser Engineers, is the lead engineer for the stadium’s renovation. Built in 1923, Memorial Stadium straddles the Hayward Fault and is in need of seismic upgrades.

See full story.

Engineering Better Disaster Relief

Scheduling problems, which involve searching for an optimal or near-optimal schedule for a set of tasks, are notoriously complex because simple searches are overwhelmed by their explosively vast number of possibilities. But with large-scale manufacturing and distribution operations, fractional improvements in scheduling can have large-scale impacts on the bottom line, which is why industrial engineers are routinely called upon to create customized sophisticated strategies for specific scheduling problems. Now, Professor Rhonda Righter has applied industrial engineering–style analysis to a different type of scheduling problem: after a mass casualty event, such as a natural disaster, a wreck or an attack, how should a medical emergency response team allocate its attention to patients, in order to save the most lives?

See full story.

Innovations is published online by the Marketing and Communications Office of the UC Berkeley College of Engineering. The Innovations mission is to illuminate groundbreaking research at the College of Engineering that will dramatically change our lives tomorrow.

Innovations Editor: Patti Meagher
Writers: Abby Cohn, Karen Rhodes, Paul Spinrad
Interim Web Manager: Wally Ye
Web Developer: Aleksandr Vladimirskiy

Subscribe or send comments to the Engineering Marketing and Communications Office: innovations@coe.berkeley.edu