The Lin Lab’s New Hybrid Supercapacitor is Super-Charged

Originally published in Berkeley Lab News on December 2017. In research that could lead to next-generation energy storage systems, a team of Foundry scientists and users have developed a way to make a new kind of supercapacitor. By coating carbon nanotube electrodes with titanium disulfide, the researchers developed a method to create a supercapacitor with the highest…

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ME Professor Carlos Fernandez-Pello Awarded the Howard W. Emmons Invited Plenary Lectureship by the IAFSS

ME Professor Carlos Fernandez-Pello has been awarded the Howard W. Emmons Invited Plenary Lectureship by the International Association of Fire Safety Science IAFSS. As part of the award, Professor Fernandez-Pello gave the Plenary Lecture at the IAFSS’s 12th International Symposium on Fire Safety Science on current fire science interest. His paper, “Wildland Fire Spot Ignition…

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ME Professor David Steigmann Wins 2017 Acta Mechanica Sinica Best Paper Award

ME Professor David Steigmann has won the 2017 Acta Mechanica Sinica AMS Best Paper Award for his paper titled, “Mechanical response of fabric sheets to three-dimensional bending, twisting, and stretching.” The AMS Best Paper Award was established to “foster original and innovative scientific research in the field of mechanics.” AMS is an international journal published…

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ME Professor Mark Mueller Receives ABB Research Award 2017

Photo by: Giulia Marthaler ME Assistant Professor Mark Mueller has received the ABB Research Award 2017 for his doctoral thesis on drones. The award, in honor of Hubertus von Gruenberg, is given to outstanding postdocs whose research has specific real-world applications, potential for innovation, and benefits society and the environment. Professor Mueller’s award-winning research focuses…

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ME Ph.D. Student Hossein Heidari Wins Young Researcher Award at μTAS 2017

ME Ph.D. student Hossein Heidari received the Young Researcher Poster Award at the 21st International Conference on Miniaturized Systems for Chemistry and Life Sciences (μTAS 2017). The award, sponsored by The Society for Chemistry and Micro-Nano Systems (CHEMINAS), recognizes excellence among participants at the conference. Heidari’s award-winning poster focused on his work with ME Professor Hayden Taylor on…

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ME Ph.D. Student Negar Mehr Wins WTS-OC Scholarship

ME Ph.D. student Negar Mehr has been awarded a Graduate Scholarship from the Orange County chapter of Women’s Transportation Seminar (WTS). WTS is an international organization “committed to excellence in the transportation industry and provides opportunities for member career advancement through the exchange of information, ideas, and experiences.” The award will be presented at the Annual…

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ME Professor Boris Rubinsky Receives Medal and Honorary Membership from the Romanian Academy of Technical Sciences

ME Professor Boris Rubinsky has been awarded the Medal of the Romanian Academy of Technical Sciences, and also made an Honorary Member of the academy. The academy is an “autonomous, non-governmental entity, organized as a national forum of scientific personalities in engineering sciences. It has the purpose to promote debates, initiatives, research, technical creation and…

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MPC Lab Members Win 2017 IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering Best Paper Award

ME PhD candidate Ashwin Carvalho and former PostDoc Stéphanie Lefévre, along with ME Professor Francesco Borrelli, have won the 2017 IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering Best Paper Award. The award, given by the IEEE Robotics Automation Society, recognizes the best paper published in the previous calendar year, and is judged on technical merit, originality, potential…

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MEng Graduates Win Innovation by Design Award

Article originally published by the Jacobs Institute on September 11, 2017. Tabla, a project created by students Adam Rao a medical student at UCSF and a student in the UC Berkeley/UCSF joint PhD program in bioengineering, Chen Bao and Jorge Ruiz both 2017 Berkeley M.Eng graduates, has been named the winner of the student category of Fast Company‘s 2017 Innovation by…

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Honda STEAM Connections Tour Visits UC Berkeley Ahead of Season Finale

ATLANTA Sept. 6, 2017 – Verizon IndyCar Series driver Max Chilton and Cara Adams, chief engineer for Bridgestone Americas Motorsports, will be the featured presenters during the Honda STEAM Connections Tour event Wednesday, Sept. 13, on the University of California campus in Berkeley. The 9:30 a.m.-2 p.m. event at Hearst Mining Circle in the Berkeley…

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ME Professor Alice Agogino Wins 2017 ASME Design Theory and Methodology Award

Sponsored by the ASME Design Engineering Division, ME Professor Alice Agogino was awarded the 2017 Design Theory and Methods Award. The award recognizes “sustained and meritorious contributions to research education service training of researchers or practitioners overall leadership in advancing the field or any combination of these in the field of Design Theory and Methodology.”…

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ME Undergrads Take 3rd Place in NASA Aeronautics University Design Challenge 2016-2017

A UC Berkeley student team placed among the finalists awarded the top three prizes in the NASA Aeronautics Design Challenge 2016-1017. The competition, which drew entries from 26 different teams, evaluated the quality and feasibility of each submission: a design proposal for a commercial supersonic business jet that would theoretically meet NASA’s performance criteria and…

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ME PhD Student Yumeng Liu Wins Outstanding Paper Award at Transducers 2017

ME PhD student Yumeng Liu, along with his fellow Lin Lab members Huiliang Liu, Yong Cui and Takeshi Hayasaka, have won the Outstanding Paper Award at the 19th IEEE International Conference on Solid-State Sensors, Actuators and Microsystems Transducers 2017 in Kaohsiung, Taiwan. In the winning paper, Lin Lab members demonstrated “a new AC sensing scheme based on…

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ME Doctoral Student Sonia Travaglini is Thinking Inside the Cardboard Box

Article originally published in the Berkeley Science Review By Sonia Travaglini How do you help someone thousands of miles away in an Indian slum fix their roof, or someone in the African urban jungle access cervical cancer screening? You might think of sending some money, or perhaps supporting some charitable agencies. But in recent years…

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CalSol Comes in First Place at Formula Sun Grand Prix

Photo credit: Chris Cartland Campus solar vehicle team comes in 1st at Formula Sun Grand Prix Originially published in The Daily Californian on July 10, 2017 By Atira Nair | STAFF On Saturday, CalSol, a campus solar vehicle team, won the Formula Sun Grand Prix, or FSGP, an annual nationwide solar vehicle track race. The…

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ME Graduate Student Chengzhi Shi & ME Professor Xiang Zhang Work to Bring High-Speed Communications to the Deep Sea

Photo Credit: Merilyn Chung/Berkeley Lab Could This Strategy Bring High-Speed Communications to the Deep Sea? Originally published by the Berkeley Lab News Center on June 27, 2017 by Sarah Yang 510 486-4575 A new approach to&nbspsending acoustic waves through water could potentially open up the world of high-speed communications to activities underwater, including scuba diving, remote ocean…

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ME Adjunct Professor David Horsley & EECS Professor Bernhard E. Boser Awarded NSF/IUCRC Alexander Schwarzkopf Prize

ME Adjunct Professor David Horsley and Professor Bernhard E. Boser (EECS), have been awarded the Alexander Schwarzkopf Prize for Technological Innovation by the National Science Foundation NSF’s Industry/University Cooperative Research Centers Program I/UCRC, for their work with the Berkeley Sensor and Actuator Center BSAC. The prize is awarded annually, in the name of Dr. Alexander Schwarzkopf, who…

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MEng Capstone Team Laika Wins the 2017 Fung Institute Mission Award

The Master of Engineering Capstone team Laika has won the 2017 Fung Institute Mission Award for their work on the ULTRA Underactuated Lightweight Tensegrity Robotic Assistive Spine Tensegrity Quadruped robot. This award is voted on by staff at the Fung Institute, and is given to the MEng team that best exemplifies the mission of the…

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ME Undergraduate Student Ankita Joshi Wins KIDS FIRST: David L. Kirp Prize

ME undergraduate student Ankita Joshi has been awarded the 2017 KIDS FIRST: David L. Kirp Prize by the Institute for the Study of Societal Issues at the University of California, Berkeley. The KIDS FIRST prize “rewards students engaged in new or ongoing work that demonstrates a commitment, whether in education or other domains, to creating…

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‘ME Students Vote to Recognize ME Professors Alam, Dames & Szeri with First Annual ME Excellence in Teaching & Mentoring Awards’

A note from Chair of the Department of Mechanical Engineering, Roberto Horowitz: Dear Department of Mechanical Engineering Community, I am delighted to announce the first recipients of a set of newly instituted awards to promote excellence in teaching and mentoring in our Department. There are three awards, one for undergraduate teaching, one for teaching graduate-level…

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ME Professor Alice Agogino and Grace O’Connell Awarded CITRIS Seed Funding for Their Work on 3D Printed Prosthetic Hands

ME Professors Alice Agogino and Grace O’Connell have been awarded the CITRIS and the Banatao Institute’s 2017 Core Seed Funding. The funding was awarded for their project “Million Hands: Prosthetic Hands for Children Through and Open Source Platform, 3D Printers and Sensors.” With this project, researchers from the University of California, Berkeley and Davis will…

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ME Professor Grace O’Connell Awarded Signatures Innovation Fellowship

ME Assistant Professor Grace O’Connell has been awarded the 2017-2018 Signatures Innovation Fellowship. The fellows program “supports innovative research by UC Berkeley researchers in the data science and software areas with a special focus on projects that hold commercial promise.” O’Connell was awarded the fellowship, with ME graduate student Bo Yang, a member of O’Connell’s…

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ME Graduate Students Team Up in the O’Reilly Lab to Test Their Shoe-String Theory

shoe strings

Photo by Christopher Daily-Diamond Shoe-string theory: Science shows why shoelaces come untied By Brett Israel, Media Relations brett.israel@berkeley.edu, 510 643-7741 Berkeley – A new study by mechanical engineers at UC Berkeley finally shows why your shoelaces may keep coming untied. It’s a question that everyone asks, often after stopping to retie their shoes, yet one…

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