News Archives - Page 4 of 19 - UC Berkeley Mechanical Engineering

Digging Deep: Inspired by nature, the burrowing mole crab robot is a feat of engineering with real-world applications

The unassuming Pacific mole crab, Emerita analoga, is about to make some waves. UC Berkeley researchers have debuted a unique robot inspired by this burrowing crustacean that may someday help evaluate the soil of agricultural sites, collect marine data and study soil and rock conditions at construction sites. In a study published today in Frontiers…

ME Professor Lisa A. Pruitt Releases Memoir

Congratulations to ME Professor Lisa A. Pruitt on the release of her memoir, Soul of Professor: Memoir of an Un-Engineered Life. “In the world of academia, Professor Lisa Pruitt had it all, being recognized with numerous awards for research, teaching, and mentoring over decades of educational pursuit. As her career rose, Lisa painstakingly created an…

ME Joint Professor Somayeh Sojoudi and ME PhD Student Elizabeth Glista Win “Best of the Best” Paper Award at the 2022 IEEE PES GM

ME Joint Professor Somayeh Sojoudi and ME PhD Student Elizabeth Glista have won a “Best of the Best” Conference Paper Award at the 2022 IEEE Power and Energy Society General Meeting. The paper, titled “A MILP for Optimal Measurement Choice in Robust Power Grid State Estimation,” was selected by the Power System Operation, Planning, and…

Space Enterprise at Berkeley Sets Record with Flight of Fully 3D-Printed Rocket

Last month, ME Student Group Space Enterprise at Berkeley (SEB) conducted a successful flight and recovery of low-altitude demonstrator LAD-8, the world’s first fully 3D-printed rocket of its scale. The vehicle reached just over 8,000 feet above ground level and a top speed of 850 ft/s. In addition to proving a recovery system that supports…

From a mechanic in the Navy to mechanical engineering at Berkeley

Can you introduce yourself? My name is Rj Kelsey, and I’m a transfer student from Mountain House, California. What are you interested in studying, and why? Mechanical engineering. I was a mechanic in the Navy, and it kind of got me into the engineering world, so I went with that after I got out. How…

ME Assistant Professor Kosa Goucher-Lambert Receives ASME 2022 Young Investigator Award

ME Assistant Professor Kosa Goucher-Lambert has received the 2022 Young Investigator Award in Design Theory and Methodology from the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. This 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…

Haitian-American engineer makes history as first Black president of Rice University

Reginald DesRoches is riding a wave of successes in his academic career, Five years ago, the renowned civil engineer joined Rice University’s School of Engineering. He followed the auspicious start with the promotion to vice provost two years later. On July 5, the fifth anniversary of his arrival on campus, he started his first day…

South LA grad earns $3.5M in scholarships, accepted to 39 universities, heading to Berkeley

SOUTH LOS ANGELES (KABC) — Ever since Jaden Hunter was a little boy growing up in South Los Angeles, he’s always been focused on his education. This year he graduated at the top of his class from Crenshaw Arts Tech Charter High with 4.7 grade point average and was named co-valedictorian. “I felt good because my hard work…

ME Joint Professor Peter Hosemann Wins DOE Research Grants

ME Joint Professor Peter Hosemann is the lead PI of two winning Department of Energy research grants. The project entitled “High throughput mechanical testing of additively-manufactured materials,” sponsored by DOE NEUP, will develop new approaches to generate a large number of mechanical property and microstructural data on additively manufactured metals. These data will then be…

Fired Up for the Future

As another potentially devastating wildfire season begins, California is facing a shortage of wildland firefighters. To meet this challenge, the Marin County Fire Department and UC Berkeley have partnered to form FIRE Foundry (Fire, Innovation, Recruitment and Education), a program that recruits young adults from underrepresented communities for a career in fire service and trains them on…

David Schaffer: Research that takes risks must be supported

David Schaffer remembers sitting on his father’s lap as a child, curiously delving into science books and crafting mnemonic phrases that instilled in him the building blocks of biology. “He was a biochemist who would make up these silly rhymes that helped me remember microorganisms or parts of the body, like, ‘Your sternum can burn’em,’”…

Lisa Anne Torres receives 2022 Outstanding GSI Award in Engineering

The Graduate Division and Graduate Student Instructor (GSI) Teaching and Resource Center recently presented Lisa Anne Torres with the Outstanding GSI Award in Engineering. The Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor Award honors over 200 UC Berkeley GSIs each year and recipients are nominated from within their teaching department. She received this award for the E295: Communications for Engineering…

Innovative Early-Career Engineers Selected to Participate in The Grainger Foundation Frontiers of Engineering 2022 Symposium of the National Academy of Engineering

Eighty-four highly accomplished early-career engineers have been selected to take part in the National Academy of Engineering’s The Grainger Foundation Frontiers of Engineering 2022 U.S.-based symposium. Engineers who are performing exceptional research and technical work in a variety of disciplines will come together for the two-and-a-half day event. The participants — from industry, academia, and…

Oliver O’Reilly, Victoria Plaut selected as 2022-23 vice provosts

UC Berkeley selected Oliver O’Reilly as the vice provost for undergraduate education and Victoria Plaut as the vice provost for faculty. Previously the interim vice provost for the same position, O’Reilly now serves the full role of supporting “diversity, equity, inclusion, belonging and justice efforts” starting July 1, according to a campus press release. “I’m…

UC Berkeley advances cyber-physical systems research as part of $6 million NSF project

A new project funded by the National Science Foundation will revamp the way we engineer the cyber-physical systems (CPSs) underpinning self-driving vehicles and aviation controls, enabling safer and more reliable autonomous transportation systems. The NSF announced a $6 million grant for a five-year, multi-institutional project for research to resolve key engineering challenges of CPSs. The project…

Parallel Journeys, Lasting Legacies

When Reggie DesRoches assumes the presidency of Rice University on July 1, he will become the fifth Black leader of a top research institution. He will also be the third Black president in the 65-member Association of American Universities who attended the UC Berkeley College of Engineering, along with Gary May, now the chancellor of the…

Patrick Lai, MEng ’19 (ME): “Product design is at the intersection of art and engineering.”

Patrick Lai earned a Mechanical Engineering degree from Berkeley MEng in 2019. Here, he discusses his interest in creative design as well as his discovery of and passion for product design.

Oliver O’Reilly is Berkeley’s new vice provost for undergraduate education

Oliver O’Reilly, whose 30-year career at UC Berkeley is characterized by a deep passion for teaching and student success, will be the campus’s new vice provost for undergraduate education starting this Friday, July 1, officials announced today. O’Reilly has been interim vice provost for undergraduate education during the past year. A mechanical engineering professor who’s…

Perovskite development heralds quantum breakthrough

“This is exciting,” said Xiang Zhang, Bao’s collaborator, now president of Hong Kong University but who completed this research as a mechanical engineering faculty member at UC Berkeley. “We show that XY spin lattice with a large number of coherently-coupled condensates that can be constructed as a lattice with a size up to 10×10.” Its…

Researchers devise a new way to detect and quantify SARS-CoV-2 in pooled samples

Testing wastewater for SARS-CoV-2 is one way public health departments are monitoring the spread of COVID-19 within their communities, but dilution in these large, pooled samples can prevent accurate readings of viral levels. Motivated by this challenge, UC Berkeley researchers have developed a new, more sensitive method for detecting and quantifying this virus in large…

“Together Again” at annual Fung Institute end of year showcase

On Thursday, May 5, 2022, the Fung Institute community gathered at the Mudd Hall Lawn to highlight year long projects from both the graduate Master of Engineering and undergraduate Fung Fellowship student teams. The “Together Again” theme celebrated the first in-person end of year showcase since before the COVID-19 pandemic. More than 100 teams showcased…

Bakar Fellows program names seven new Spark Award recipients

From artificial ligaments and a novel approach to cancer treatment to “soft” batteries and a way to give voice to silent speech, new innovations from UC Berkeley faculty are getting a big vote of support from the Bakar Fellows program. Seven faculty members have been selected to receive the 2022 Bakar Fellows Spark Award, which…

ME Professor Lisa Pruitt Awarded 2022 Brown Engineering Alumni Medal

Brown Engineering has named North Carolina State professor Christine Grant ’84 and University of California, Berkeley professor Lisa Pruitt Sc.M. ’90, Ph.D. ’93 as its 2022 Brown Engineering Alumni Medal (BEAM) winners. The presentation of the BEAM medals took place at the annual engineering awards dinner held over Commencement and Reunion weekend. The BEAM award…

UC Berkeley researchers develop COVID-19 detection for large samples

UC Berkeley researchers have created a method to detect and quantify COVID-19 in a large sample. Their study, published in Analytical Chemistry on May 18, introduces the method of detecting an intact virus by exogenous-nucleotide reaction, or DIVER. This quantifies the amount of virus in a pool without being affected drastically by dilution. The method…

Berkeley students flip, float and experiment on zero gravity flight

Image of Steve Boxall in zero gravity chamber

Last week, two teams of UC Berkeley researchers had the opportunity to test their experiments — and stomachs — aboard ZERO-G’s G-Force One, an aircraft that flies in a series of parabolic arcs to mimic the zero gravity conditions of space flight. During the flight, which took off and landed at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport on…

UC Berkeley graduate Alberto Ibarra: ‘Succeed through the thorns’

When I was a kid, I remember watching my mom water her garden. She put a lot of time and effort into her small, budding rose bushes, treating them with love and rich soil. And every spring, they would bloom with big, vibrant colored petals in front of our two-bedroom apartment. People would walk by…

Capstone Spotlight: Lunar Kinetic

Each year, Berkeley MEng candidates embark on a two-semester capstone experience where they work with faculty or industry partners to bring solutions for real-world problems to life with engineering skills and leadership practices. Here, we place a spotlight on the capstone experience of the Lunar Kinetic capstone team.

ME Alum Ryan Shelby Receives Mark Bingham Award for Excellence in Achievement by Young Alumni

ME Alum Ryan Shelby (M.S. ’08, Ph.D. ’13) has received the 2022 Mark Bingham Award for Excellence in Achievement by Young Alumni. All recipients of the 2022 Achievement Awards will be honored tonight, Thursday, May 12, 2022 at the Berkeley Charter Gala. The Gala will take place at the Residence Inn Berkeley at 2121 Center…

ME Lecturer Ala Moradian Elected ASME Fellow

ME Lecturer Ala Moradian has been elected a Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME). The ASME Committee of Past Presidents confers the Fellow grade of membership on worthy candidates to recognize their outstanding engineering achievements. Nominated by ASME Members and Fellows, an ASME Member has to have 10 or more years of…

Study of aqueous salt solutions deepens our understanding of icy planets’ oceans

Researchers at UC Berkeley, in collaboration with the University of Washington, have developed a new way to measure properties of salty water that may help us better understand whether the icy moons in the far reaches of our solar system can support life. In a study published in Cell Reports Physical Science, a team of researchers…