in the news A troupe of graduate division deans and graduate students from each of UC’s 10 campuses went to Sacramento in May to remind legislators of graduate education’s important and historic role in research and the economic well-being of the state. The individual students, among them Berkeley Ph.D. candidates Holly Brown (of Earth and Planetary Science) and Gabriel Lopez (of Bioengineering), encapsulated their own projects (hers in earthquake early warning for California, his in synthetic biology methods that might produce new drugs, fuels, or materials). As a group, they underlined the UC system’s major role in American graduate education. Among their facts: n As
of 2009, seven percent of the nation’s graduate students were in graduate school at UC campuses, winning 20 to 30 percent of the most competitive and prestigious fellowships in science, art, and the humanities.
n One
fourth of all UC and California State University faculty received their Ph.D.’s from a UC graduate program.
n The
UC awarded nearly two-thirds of the 5,923 doctorates earned in California in 2007-08.
n The
Berkeley campus alone produces more Ph.D.’s than any other American university.
Julie Kang, a psychology graduate student at UC Riverside, stated the case more baldly than most: “Without graduate students, (the university) quite honestly would come to a screeching halt. It’s graduate students who are conducting the research, who are coming up with the fresh new ideas.” Santa Cruz doctoral student Walter Heady, who works on saving threatened steelhead, said, “We are the individuals who get in a car and drive to monitor a hundred different sites from Alaska down to Baja California to look at biodiversity.” Steven Beckwith, UC vice president for research, could not agree more: “They spark ideas, make discoveries, enrich the arts, and work to solve some of society’s most pressing problems.” UC President Mark Yudof bolstered the point: “They go in and they actually do the research. It wouldn’t happen without them.” — Dick Cortén n n n
Photos Courtesy the John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation
Grad students show legislators how UC really works
Economist Emmanuel Saez and Dawn Song of EECS were each pleasantly surprised with MacArthur Foundation fellowships, popularly called “genius grants.” Saez researches the connection between income and tax policy. Song, who teaches in the department where she earned her Ph.D., is a pioneering computer security specialist.
Two More “Geniuses” for Berkeley Thanks to two young faculty members — and, of course, the MacArthur Foundation — the already-sizeable total of active Berkeley campus MacArthur “genius” Fellows grew to 32 at the end of September. Dawn Song, 35, an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences, and Emmanuel Saez, who is the E. Morris Professor of Economics and just turned 38 in November, each will receive $500,000 in unrestricted funds over the next five years from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Song’s recognition comes for her innovative work on protecting computer systems from malicious software, or malware. The MacArthur Foundation cited her approach of identifying security breaches by examining underlying patterns of computer system behavior that can be applied across whole classes of security vulnerability, rather than focusing on specific errors in programming logic. “The call was out of the blue and such a pleasant surprise,” said Song, about learning the news. She is particularly looking forward to the potential impact of the award on her ability to pursue unconventional research. “To me, life is about creating something truly beautiful, and in order to do that, it often involves taking a path that is less traveled,” she said. “The MacArthur Fellowship will allow me to take that path to explore new territory that other people have not walked.”
One of Song’s project topics is analogous to biological defenses against infection. Much like our human immune system is constantly on the lookout for invaders, the BitBlaze program developed by Song’s lab scans and analyzes binaries of vulnerable software and malicious code, and automatically identifies the root cause of attacks to generate defenses. Her lab is now working on the next generation of the program, making it more scalable and powerful than its predecessor and is exploring how to extend this technology to other areas, such as networked medical devices and systems. Song earned her Ph.D. in computer science at Berkeley in 2001. (Her bachelor’s degree is from Tsinghua University in China, and her master’s is from Carnegie Mellon University.) Emmanuel Saez was praised by the MacArthur Foundation for his quantitative analyses, behavioral experiments, and theoretical insights which enhance “our understanding of the relationship between income and tax policy and reinvigorating the field of public economics.” Saez said the fellowship offers “great encouragement to devote more time to help explain my work to the broader public, especially when the results can have an impact on current policy debates, such as the taxation of top incomes.” — Dick Cortén n n n
The Graduate | Spring 2011
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