The Graduate 2010 by UC Berkeley Graduate Division

Graduate THE

S P RIN G 2 0 1 0

University of California, Berkeley

A Magazine for the Graduate Community

IN THIS ISS UE n Little

Old ‘Ardi’: Berkeley’s Role in the ‘Breakthrough of the Year’

n Carol

Greider: Proof that Graduate Work Can Result in a Nobel Prize

n Cal-trained n Norman

Trio Turns Algae into Fuel and Money

Kanter’s Journey as an Artist

The Graduate Division, University of California, Berkeley

Berkeley Graduate Profile Berkeley’s stellar reputation in graduate education is a topic we often bring up in conversations with the University’s alumni and friends. Now, a new resource will become available to anyone with an interest in Berkeley’s graduate students and programs – the Berkeley Graduate Profile. Previewed below, the profile will be available on Graduate Division’s website (www.grad.berkeley.edu). It will offer a complete picture of our doctoral and master’s student population as well as information on enrollments in each broad discipline and graduate student funding. In addition, the profile will present some of the most important indicators of the exceptional quality of Berkeley’s graduate programs. Below are a few data points from the Berkeley Graduate Profile: • The fall 2009 incoming graduate class of 2,893 students was selected from among 36,645 applicants; • 58% of Berkeley’s graduate students are enrolled in doctoral programs offered in all but one of the 14 schools and colleges on campus; 42% are here to earn professional degrees;

• The largest doctoral enrollments are in the Colleges of Letters & Science, Engineering, Chemistry, and Natural Resources; the largest professional schools are Business, Law and Public Health; • Berkeley has been the top-choice school for winners of the National Science Foundation’s Graduate Research Fellowships during the past decade.

Enrollment (Fall 2009)

Applications

Doctoral Overall

Master’s

5,959 (58%) 4,354 (42%)

Incoming class

966

1,927

Women

Total

Fall 2001

Fall 2009

45%

10,313

26,016

36,645

Underrepresented Minorities

2,893

11% Graduate majors (Fall 2009 Enrollment)

Originating location for the Fall 2009 incoming graduate class

101 graduate majors (master’s and doctoral); 93 of these grant doctoral degrees School/College Letters & Science (all divisions) Social Sciences

47%

33% Other U.S. states 20%

81.5

3,042.5

1,035.5

48.5

1,084 803

Biological Sciences

570

573

569.5

582.5

1,362

287.5

1,649.5

Chemistry

489

499

Natural Resources

313.5

10.5

324

All professional schools

785.5

3,949

4,734.5

262

140

402

178.5

324

502.5

95.5

275

370.5

Public Health Environmental Design

(cumulative 2000 - 2009)

2,961

Education

National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowships

Total

786

Engineering

International (from 69 countries)

Master’s

Humanities Physical Sciences

California

Doctoral

Business Administration

University of California, Berkeley

938

Law

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

924

Stanford University

1,432

1,513

49.5

996.5

Social Welfare

182

230

729

Optometry

263

298

Harvard University

569

Information

University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

261

Public Policy

150.5

166.5

Princeton University

241

Journalism

108

University of Washington

237

Interdisciplinary programs

15.5

63.5

Cornell University

222

Energy & Resources Group

15.5

59.5

California Institute of Technology

210

Individualized major

10 University of California, San Francisco

205

TOTAL

4 5,959

1,046

4 4,354

10,313

Graduate THE

University of California, Berkeley

Volume XXII, Number 1 Executive Editor Kasia Allen Editor & Senior Writer Dick Cortén Art Director & Project Manager Andrea Sohn Contributing Writers Lisa Harrington Abby Cohn Allison Davis Sharon Page-Medrich Photography Peg Skorpinski, Dick Cortén n

The Graduate magazine is published by the Graduate Division at UC Berkeley

Joseph J. Duggan Associate Dean/Admissions & Degrees

features 6

From the Berkeley School to the New York School Norman Kanter’s journey as an artist By Lisa Harrington Dial “D” for Diagnosis Berkeley engineers invent a cell-phone microscope By Ian Yarett, Courtesy of Newsweek Solving the Human Mystery Nobody knows for sure where we came from, but thanks to a 4.4-million-year-old little lady, Berkeley has more clues than most By Dick Cortén

12 Berkeley Trio Turns Algae into Fuel and Money

aas entrepreneurs win a contest and grow a business H By Allison Davis

13 Communicating with the World

6 With deep roots in “the Berkeley School” of abstract expressionism, Norman Kanter is now very New York

E ngineer/executive/legislator Ken Lee Ph.D. ’75 always looks ahead and figures out the best way to get there By Dick Cortén

Photo courtesy of Aurora Biofuels

Andrew J. Szeri Dean

S P R I N G 2 010

Carlos A. Fernandez-Pello Associate Dean/Student Support Susan J. Muller Associate Dean/Student Life

Kasia Allen Assistant Dean/External Relations

From their tanks to yours: densely concentrated algae at Aurora Biofuels may soon produce reasonably priced “green” fuel for your car

Diane Hill Assistant Dean/Academic Affairs

cell-phone microscope

Moira Pérez Chief Administrative Officer

Judi Sui Assistant Dean/Research & Planning

Please send correspondence to: The Graduate 327 Sproul Hall #5900 University of California Berkeley, CA 94720-5900

departments 2

From the Desk of the Graduate Dean

In the News

Current and archived copies of this publication are available to view or to download in PDF format on the Graduate Division website:

www.grad.berkeley.edu

9 In the trenches: Berkeley faculty, alumni, and students dug up buried treasure in the Ethiopian desert — Ardipithecus ramidus, a new species, over a million years older than “Lucy”

14 Fellowships 19 Alumni & Friends The Graduate | Spring 2010

Dick Cortén

From the Desk of the Graduate Dean

Rising to the Challenge

his year, I’ve witnessed a remarkable development. As public education throughout California adjusts to reduced state funding and diminished resources, the shining character of UC Berkeley’s graduate education and research has become more, not less, impressive. This is not so surprising to those — including most readers of these pages — who know from experience the extraordinary passion, talent, and creativity that Cal graduate students bring to their studies and that Cal professors and staff bring to their work. As times get tough, Berkeley’s “will-do” spirit becomes more resolute. Is UC facing serious challenges? Undeniably. Is the University rising to the challenge of sustaining and enhancing the quality of our graduate programs? Plenty of evidence points to a resounding “Yes!” I’ll mention a few indicators here; you’ll find more within the following pages. Our graduate programs continue to enroll the nation’s top students, as shown by the numbers of competing offers they receive from elite universities and by the numbers of high-status external fellowships they win. Last fall, the German Academic Exchange Service awarded more of its coveted graduate studies fellowships to Berkeley than to any other institution in the U.S. or Canada. Berkeley was again among those with the most students receiving Fulbright Fellowships, with about one in five of our applicants winning this award, an amazing tribute. Last year was a banner year for landing new research funds, with new grants totaling $650 million. By strategically leveraging resources, Graduate Division helped secure a $3.2 million

The Graduate | Spring 2010

NSF grant for a cutting-edge biomimicry center as well as a $5 million Institute of Education Sciences grant for interdisciplinary research in math and science teaching and learning. Graduate student researchers receive financial support as well as invaluable professional training from such grants. At least as exciting is last year’s dramatic increase in philanthropy to support our students. Private donors committed over $21 million, building our funds for graduate student fellowships to more than $100 million, almost a third of our goal as part of the Campaign for Berkeley. Philanthropy has also enabled such initiatives as the Sarlo Distinguished Graduate Student Mentoring Awards, which recognize faculty who are exceptional mentors. The testimonials for awardees are moving. For example, graduate students described Rhetoric professor Marianne Constable as a “beacon of inspiration” with “a staggering degree of dedication.” Of History professor Susanna Barrows, a graduate student wrote: “Her gifts keep on giving” throughout a lifetime. No wonder the latest US News & World Report “Guide to America’s Best Graduate Schools” ranks Berkeley’s Humanities and Social Sciences overwhelmingly in the top 10 nationally — along with Engineering, Law, Business, and Education. Indeed, Cal’s faculty and graduate students continue to be lauded as among the world’s best. Along with former Berkeley professor Elizabeth Blackburn, former graduate student Carol Greider was among the three winners of the Nobel Prize in Physiology/Medicine in 2009. Two other graduate alumni, Berni Alder and JoAnne Stubbe, were named this year by

President Obama as recipients of the National Medal of Science, the highest honor bestowed on scientists by the U.S. government. You’ll find more on each of them in this issue. The fact that Berkeley can now boast 19 graduate alumni Nobel Prize winners is extraordinary, but at base is the unparalleled dynamic interplay among students and scholars on our campus — the heart, body, and soul of our teaching, research, and public service missions. This intellectual ferment was noted by another National Medal of Science recipient, Physics professor Marvin Cohen, who said: “One way to describe my research life is that I’m surrounded by graduate students and post-docs in their 20s. I age every year, but my group doesn’t. When one member leaves, he or she is replaced by a new bright individual with new questions, a new point of view, and a new attitude. Watching them turn from inexperienced beginners to colleagues is one of the great joys of my life. Their questions, motivation, and views are an inspiration to me.” This attitude of inspiration is shared at every level at Berkeley. From the Chancellor to the deans of our colleges and schools, from department chairs to graduate student affairs staff, everyone is focusing our resources to best effect, developing new sources of support, and nurturing an academic culture that gives rise to the most fertile graduate education anywhere, bar none.

— Andrew J. Szeri, Dean of the Graduate Division

in the news ©The Nobel Foundation 2009. Photo by Frida Westholm

Carol Greider at the her Nobel Prize ceremony. On Christmas Day in 1984, Carol Greider, in her first year as a molecular biology doctoral student at Berkeley, returned home from her campus lab and danced, for a long time, to the Bruce Springsteen album “Born in the USA.” She had hit paydirt on an intensive project she began earlier that year. After months of 12-hour days, holidays included, she had found biochemical evidence that a theorized enzyme did, in fact, exist. She knew she had helped solve a critical scientific puzzle, and that it would open many doors. What she could not know for sure, back then as a 25-year-old grad student, was that this discovery would win her — and her mentor, Elizabeth Blackburn, now at UCSF — a Nobel Prize. She learned that momentous fact nearly a quarter of a century later, around five a.m. on October 5, 2009. An early riser, she was already up sorting laundry at her home in suburban

courtesy of Carol Greider

Graduate work at Cal pays off with a Nobel Prize in physiology/medicine Baltimore. Greider is, these days, a professor at nearby Johns Hopkins University Medical School. Her graduate adviser, Liz Blackburn, who had posed the problem for Greider’s experiments, analyzed Greider’s results, and agreed with her conclusion. Together, they named the new enzyme telomerase. Greider based her Ph.D. dissertation on that discovery, and the world began to learn how important it was. Michael Botchan, a Berkeley professor of molecular and cell biology, was on her prelim committee: “I remember when she came in with evidence of the telomerase enzyme, and I remember my jaw dropped. It was a wonderful experience, because you don’t often get to examine a student on work you know is paradigm-shifting.” Greider and Blackburn shared the medical prize with Jack Szostak, a biologist at Harvard Medical School and a collaborator on the early work on telomerase. Their combined work represents the discovery of a fundamental mechanism in the cell. They solved the mystery of how chromosomes, which carry the complexity of DNA, manage to protect themselves from degrading when cells divide in reproduction. That chromosomes had caps, like shoelace tips, at their ends was already known, but much remained unknown. Blackburn and Greider’s enzyme telomerase turned out to be the key. The enzyme adds DNA to those chromosome tips, replacing genetic material that has eroded away. This both reduces the likelihood of mutations and extends the life of the chromosomes.

courtesy of the US Embassy in Stockholm

Work stemming from the Nobel-winning trio has had an explosive impact on medical science, opening new avenues toward understanding diseases like cancer and anemia, knowledge that will help develop alleviative drugs and cures. Defects in telomerase have been shown to cause inherited diseases of the skin, lungs, and bone marrow, and telomeres appear to play a significant role in the aging process itself. These discoveries have also unlocked new avenues into the study of stem cells and reproductive cloning.

Elizabeth Blackburn chats with, among others, economist Oliver Williamson (yellow tie) the Berkeley faculty’s newest Nobel laureate.

The three researchers received copious honors prior to the Nobel coronation, among them in 2006, the Lasker Prize for basic medical research (often called “America’s Nobel”). When Greider was in the market for a graduate program, after earning her B.A. at UC Santa Barbara, Berkeley was in her final two choices, narrowed not for the usual reasons, but because those were the ones that would have her. She had

Carol Greider working in Elizabeth Blackburn’s lab in Stanley Hall while she was a grad student at Cal in 1985. excellent research experience, letters of recommendation, and grades, but had done poorly on the Graduate Record Examination — the vital GRE. Only CalTech and Berkeley even offered her an interview. (She hadn’t known it growing up, but she is dyslexic, and that affected her scores on standardized tests.) She interviewed with ten or so professors in Pasadena, then came to Berkeley for a similar round. One of her stops here was Liz Blackburn’s lab. “I had a great time in my conversation with Liz,” Greider says. “She was just very excited about what she was doing. I was having such a great time talking to her that the time went by so fast, and I really wanted to know more. That was the sort of thing that clinched for me that what I wanted to do was go to Berkeley and to work in Liz’s lab.” Blackburn had just become tenured, had research money, and felt she was free to choose what to work on. Looking back, the two of them were perhaps “young and naive,” as Greider says. Blackburn re-spins it as “young and hopeful,” and adds that she had the confidence to direct the lab, and their energies, into something new. “‘New’ translates as ‘might not be feasible’.” Both saw the enzyme-search project as daring and exciting. Blackburn says, in retrospect, that “to look for something new is not something that wise people — prudent people — would normally do.” Writing in Nature Medicine on the occasion of winning the Lasker Prize in 2006, Greider and her colleagues said, “the quiet beginnings of telomerase research emphasize the importance of basic, curiosity-driven research. At the time that it is conducted, such research has no apparent applications. Our understanding of the way the world works is fragmentary and incomplete, which means that progress does not occur in a simple, direct, and linear manner. It is important to connect the unconnected, to make leaps and to take risks, and to have fun talking and playing with ideas that might seem outlandish.” — Dick Cortén n n n

The Graduate | Spring 2010

in the news PHotos by Ryan K. Morris

Above, JoAnne Stubbe Ph.D. ’71 with President Barack Obama at the White House. Below, Berni Alder B. S. ’47, M. S. ’48 shakes hands with Barack Obama.

Two scientists, both with Berkeley graduate degrees, are now “national icons” The microphones did not pick up Barack Obama’s private words to MIT biochemist JoAnne Stubbe just before he draped the ribbon with her National Medal of Science around her neck, but his public ones were of gratitude on behalf of the American people. Minutes before, he had expressed similar sentiments about retired physicist Berni Alder. Together, the two comprised one quarter of the annual crop of Medal of Science winners, all of whom received their honors — the highest bestowed by the United States government on scientists, engineers, and inventors — at a White House ceremony on October 7, 2009. What Stubbe and Alder have in common, aside from their new bling, is that both earned graduate degrees at Berkeley, she a Ph.D. in organic chemistry in 1971, he an M.S. in chemical engineering in 1948, following his 1947 B.S. here in the same subject. Alder divided much of his career between two other stars in the UC galaxy, the Davis campus, where he helped found the Department of Applied Sciences (encompassing physical sciences and engineering), and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Though now in his mid-80s and retired from those or-

ganizations, Alder still works three afternoons a week at Livermore and two afternoons a week at Berkeley. Alder is widely regarded as the founder of molecular dynamics, a type of computer simulation used for studying the motions and interactions of atoms over time, now used across a broad range of sciences, from fundamental physics to molecular biology. At the time of his pioneering work, his computer methods marked a radical change in how scientists thought about such problems. He made it possible to simulate the ways molecules, including those of fluids and solids, behave — all of which, as Alder’s medal citation said, “contributed to major achievements in the science of condensed matter.” Where it all went, Alder has said, “certainly exceeded any expectation I had as to how far we could go and how big the computers would get. In the early days, we could do 100 particles in one hour on the Univac. Now we can do a trillion particles in one hour.” Stubbe, who is due back in Berkeley in May to be the keynote speaker at the College of Chemistry’s commencement, did a postdoc year at Berkeley (1971-72) after earning her Ph.D. She taught thereafter at Williams College, Yale’s medical school, and the University of Wisconsin at Madison before joining the MIT faculty in 1987.

Stubbe and Alder and their fellow Medal of Science recipients are all, in the words of President Obama, “national icons, embodying the very best of American ingenuity and inspiring a new generation of thinkers and innovators.” — Dick Cortén n n n

The Graduate | Spring 2010

For the last three years, there’s been a new way to honor faculty mentors at Berkeley. Called the Sarlo Distinguished Graduate Student Mentoring Award, it honors faculty for all the ways they help graduate students — not only in research, not only in teaching, but across the board. It’s made possible by the Sarlo Foundation of the Jewish Community Federation of San Francisco, the Peninsula, Marin and Sonoma Counties. The Foundation was created by George Sarlo, a venture capitalist who believes deeply in education, which helped him succeed in business and in life. The Graduate Division was pleased to learn recently that the Sarlo Foundation has renewed funding for these sought-after mentoring awards for another three years. Those mentored by the winners leave no doubt about their appreciation. One of the two 2009 Sarlo Award recipients was Amani Nuru-Jeter, an assistant professor in public health. Of the numerous students who supported her nomination, a former doctoral student wrote, “A session with Dr. Nuru-Jeter was one of the defining moments of my graduate career, for I was finally pushed far beyond my comfort zones with gentle guidance and clear expectations.” The other recipient, rhetoric professor Marianne Constable, was praised by, among many others, a former student who is now a professor as well as a dean at another UC, who said, near his conclusion: “Professor Constable still inspires me. I keep a comfy chair in my office for my students. I schedule extra office hours for anyone who asks. I read all student papers very closely. And I try to say constructive things, even though many of their first drafts suck. And when I run into a student at a local cafe, and he or she seems awkward or shy, I’ll buy coffee, and maybe a cookie, too, because one must try to go beyond one’s teacher in some small way. I keep in touch with many of my former students, something that has become a source of great pleasure. I think Marianne Constable would be pleased to know all this — how my own life has been shaped by her fine example.” — Dick Cortén n n n

Peg Skorpinski

Over the last four decades, her groundbreaking research has helped scientists understand the ways in which enzymes catalyze, or cause chemical reactions. Focused on the enzymes involved in the biosynthesis of DNA, the molecule of heredity, her work has led to the design and synthesis of drugs that may help fight viruses, parasites, and cancers. She and another MIT professor are now finding ways to use bacterial enzymes to produce biodegradable thermoplastics, a possible alternative to the traditional oil-based plastics that occupy so much of the planet’s landfill.

Two superb mentors get their due at Berkeley

Great mentors, as attested by their former students: Marianne Constable (left) and Amani Nuru-Jeter, winners of the 2009 Sarlo Distinguished Graduate Student Mentoring Awards.

How did a 1945 opera about events in 1830 lead to a lecture in 1976 that eventually sparked the creation of a new fellowship helping 21st-century grad students? As World War II came to a close, the first production of Peter Grimes was staged in London. It came to be recognized as the operatic masterwork of its composer, Benjamin Britten, who described the tale of a Suffolk fisherman accused of killing his apprentice as “the struggle of the individual against the masses.” Britten died in 1976. At a meeting that year of the American Musicological Society and in a scholarly article the following year, Berkeley music professor Philip Brett explored the interface between Britten’s sexual identity and his music — and ripped the veneer off the “don’t ask, don’t tell” of its time. Britten’s homosexuality was widely known but simply not mentioned in public or in academic contexts until Brett candidly examined its influence. What Brett did in that lecture kick-started the entire field of musical scholarship about, and by, people who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender, says Davitt Moroney Ph.D. Music ’80 one of Brett’s former graduate students. Brett, who was gay, died in 2002 after a long career at Berkeley and two other UC campuses. His influence is still strong, according to Moroney, who is gay and is a highly distinguished musicologist and Berkeley faculty member in his own right. Brett’s initial

Kathleen Karn

A new fellowship honors a pioneering Cal music professor lecture and paper took bravery, Moroney says, and his actions “gave many of us the courage to come out in the 1970s, when it was not easy.” Brett remains a role model for students who might otherwise remain in the closet lest their careers suffer. Brett’s specialty was Elizabethan music, but in studying Britten he examined the oppression the composer suffered when being gay in England was illegal and conviction meant a long prison sentence. After Brett died of cancer in 2002, Moroney decided to help launch a fund in memory of his mentor, colleague, and friend, in order to support LGBT research on this campus. Joining him in spearheading the effort were fellow members of the Chancellor’s Advisory Committee on the LGBT Community at Cal. Now, more than three decades after Britten’s death and Brett’s milestone lecture and paper, and seven years from Brett’s own death, there are hundreds of scholars across the country actively doing LGBT-related research. And thanks to Moroney and many others, the Berkeley campus has its first fellowship endowment specifically designed to support LGBT-related research by grad students studying in any field. The Brett fund was initially announced on the website of Berkeley’s main LGBT staff and faculty network, LavenderCal, and in under two months it had surpassed $10,000 in gifts, which meant it could be matched

The late musician and musicologist Philip Brett, namesake of a new way to help graduate students. dollar-for-dollar by the Chancellor’s Challenge for Student Support. That was in 2009. Since then, contributions have been arriving steadily from staff, faculty, undergraduates, and graduate students, and their partners, both LGBT and not, and the fund has more than quadrupled. More information about the fund is available at lavendercal.berkeley.edu; donations may be made at givetocal.berkeley.edu (search for “Brett”). — Dick Cortén n n n

Bringing the U.S. and China together for a greener future China and the United States — the world’s top emitters of greenhouse gases — should be at the forefront of clean energy solutions for an ailing planet. That’s the bold vision of the U.S.-China Green Tech Summit, a gathering that drew more than 400 green technology executives, venture capitalists, academics and others to Beijing last fall. The event sought to jumpstart partnerships in China and the U.S. on an array of energy efficient and renewable energy projects. Combating climate change, generating clean energy

jobs and fostering energy independence are among the summit’s goals. Cal alumnus Mart Bailey B.A. Chinese Studies 1991 founded the summit in 2008. The Graduate Division was among this year’s organizers, and green tech experts from UC Berkeley and the Bay Area were a major presence at the November 16-17 event.

Du Tingting of Peking University

UC Berkeley professor and acclaimed energy and resources scientist Dan Kammen chaired a discussion about “smart grids” that vastly improve the delivery of electricity. Blake Simmons, a scientist from the Emeryville-based Joint BioEnergy Institute, described work on a new generation of biofuels.

Pictured above are leaders, co-chairs and student volunteers of the 2009 US China Green Tech Summit in Beijing.

Other talks explored utility-scale solar power installations, low-carbon building projects including the 200-acre West Village under construction at UC Davis, clean coal technology and its viability, and electric

vehicles and battery technology. “The event takes an action-oriented approach,” says Bailey, a China expert who serves on the board of the campus’s Berkeley China Initiative. “We’re playing for planet Earth,” he says. “It’s absolutely imperative that we accelerate the deployment of energy efficient and renewable energy technologies in both countries.” The student-led Berkeley Energy & Resources Collaborative (BERC) served as a summit partner. Thanks to a grant from BMW Group DesignworksUSA, a Berkeley Law student active in BERC was able to attend. Green technology partnerships between the U.S. and China are already underway. At the summit, Chinabased Suntech Power announced plans to locate its first U.S. solar panel manufacturing plant in Arizona. Meanwhile, First Solar, a U.S. firm, recently signed an agreement to build a massive photovoltaic power plant in the Mongolian desert. “The energy around the event was kind of electric,” says Bailey. A third summit is planned for Shanghai later this year. — Abby Cohn n n n

The Graduate | Spring 2010

From the Berkeley school to the New York school

Norman Kanter’s Journey as an Artist By Lisa Harrington A.

A. Shenandoah, 1986, Oil on Canvas, 72” x 60” B. (Right) Emperor, 1968, Oil on Canvas, 72” x 60”

ew York painter Norman Kanter B. A. ‘54, M. A. ‘55 has been enjoying his views of lower Manhattan since renovations took place on his loft in Tribeca, where he’s lived and worked for more than 40 years. The project, says Kanter, led to some surprising revelations. “ I had to move all my work during the construction,” he explains, “and in the process I discovered some of my older pieces stored behind newer ones that are really quite good.” So pleased was he with the newly painted walls and floors and abundance of natural light, Kanter opened his home for a show of his work last November. His abstract paintings have been shown in galleries in New York, Provincetown, San Francisco, and Paros, Greece, among other places. In his early days in New York, he was one of the original founders of the Area Gallery, one of the famed Tenth Street Co-ops that featured experimental art during the 1950s and 1960s. At that

The Graduate | Spring 2010

time, Tenth Street gallery shows were happenings, part of the city’s social scene, where avant-garde artists, writers, poets, dancers, and musicians of The New York School would gather and draw inspiration from each other. “I’ve lived through some interesting periods of the city’s history, had a lot of fun here, gone to lots of parties, and had a really great life as an artist and teacher,” says Kanter. In recent years, he’s watched his Tribeca neighborhood transform from the abandoned warehouses with lofts that once attracted struggling young artists like himself into one of the most expensive addresses in the city today. A native of Charleston, West Virginia, Kanter’s explorations in art initially took him to the Institute of Design in Chicago, “but the program there was too rational for me, too Bauhaus,” he says. As a matter of fact, a former teacher from the influential Bauhaus school in Germany designed the curriculum. Kanter left Chicago to enroll in

art school at UCLA. “I met some wonderful people there,” he recalls, “but UCLA’s program was too mental for me. I wanted a different ambiance.” He had heard about the art program at UC Berkeley, where a core of abstract expressionists among the faculty had been dubbed “the Berkeley School” and helped give birth to modern art in the West. “At that time, the leading artists were teaching there,” notes Kanter.“ The Berkeley School had Hans Hofmann and Karl Kasten and people from The New York School. So I wrote to Erle Loran, head of the Berkeley art department, and he replied with a nice note, encouraging me to apply.” At Berkeley, Kanter studied abstract painting with Karl Kasten, a renowned artist, now a professor emeritus, who had studied with Hans Hofmann. Kasten was a strict teacher and a beloved mentor to many students. He also introduced the first classes in printmaking at Berkeley.

After earning his B.A., Kanter decided to continue at Berkeley for the master’s degree. As part of his acceptance into the graduate program, he received the prestigious Ann Bremer Award. “I was bowled over,” he says.

Today, he teaches color, drawing, and design part-time at the New York City Technical College, just across the Brooklyn Bridge, where he advises his students to learn to live not only by selling their art but also

excellent painters who were all in Paris in the post-war years, a time which was full of hope.” In 2008, Norman Kanter was one of a select group of alumni invited to take part in the “Karl Kasten C. (Left) Blue Resonance, 2006, Pastel on Rag Paper, 30” x 24”

D. Yellow Cloud, 1994 Watercolor on Arches Paper 14” x 19” with Overglaze Washes

“The award came with a check for $1,800, and at that time it was a lot of money and helped so much.” He later won a Fulbright Fellowship to study in Paris, France. There, he purchased a motorcycle so he could travel all over post-war Europe for the next year and a half. “I visited Amsterdam, Venice, and all the great museums,” recalls Kanter. “It was a wonderful time. I’ve had some great luck in my life, and I’m very grateful to Berkeley.” After he graduated, he decided to explore the art scene in New York. “I thought everything was happening on the East Coast, where Hans Hofmann, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, and others were.” From time to time, though, he returned to the Bay Area to teach drawing at Berkeley and other area schools and to exhibit his work. “I guess I consider myself bicoastal since I’ve gone back and forth so much.”

by applying their talent in graphic design and color design to other kinds of projects. “I designed covers for books for many years,” says Kanter. Most of his days are spent on his own art, which continues to evolve. “I don’t work in oils as much any more, though I may go back to them,” says Kanter. “They just take an incredibly long time to dry, especially the larger pieces. Recently, I’ve been doing giclée prints. Some of my newer pieces are floor to ceiling.” Kanter also curates art shows throughout the city and in 2004 invited his former professor, Karl Kasten, to show his work in an event entitled “Mirage & Metaphor” at the Studio 18 Gallery in New York. In addition to Kanter and Kasten, the show featured Ed Clark, Joe Barnes, and Haywood Bill Rivers. Art historian Peter Selz described the exhibit as “recent abstract paintings by five

E. Works on Paper: Haines Falls, NY, 1986 Watercolor on Rag Paper 15” x 19” Detail, Water, Cliff and Grass

Retrospective: The Berkeley School 1930-1950, Students 1950-1985,” a show that was held in the Worth Ryder Gallery on campus. Kasten had insisted that his retrospective include works by his former students. Kanter contributed one of his newer pieces, an intriguing pastel and graphite on rag paper called “Blue Resonance.” Kanter was delighted to be able to attend the tribute to Kasten, and they still keep in touch. Over the past year, Kanter has been thinking about the future and what he calls “the language of art.” He says, “I think that a new paradigm is needed in our time, to overcome the barriers that definitions sometimes erect. We need to find a common language for discovery — for creative work in art, engineering, and other fields. Where we’re going and where we want to be. The language of art has exciting possibilities.” n

The Graduate | Spring 2010

PHOTO © T. WHITE 2009/REPRINTED WITH PERMISSION FROM AAAS

he most famous fossil in modern history was given her nickname — “Lucy”— after the in-the-skywith-diamonds Beatles song that played over and over on a tape recorder, during a drink-enhanced all-night celebration at a campsite in the barren wilds of Ethiopia. The year was 1974.

At three and a half feet tall, Lucy was the oldest little lady in the world, a hominid, or two-legged primate apelike human relative, who had lived about 3.2 million years ago. Her remains, or the 40 percent that were found on that historic occasion, told the world details of a new stop along the path to modern humans. She walked upright, yet her brain was small, like an ape’s. She was a new species, Australopithecus afarensis, and perhaps the mother of us all. The press loved her.

“Breakthrough of the Year” — dubbed “Ardi,” this ancient female became world-famous last fall. Her debut on the cover of Science magazine showed her articulated partial skeleton, which now resides in the National Museum of Ethiopia. Top: The dig — in Ethiopia at the Aramis, where the skeleton of the hominid Ardipithecus ramidus was found. It’s desert now, but 4.4 million years ago, when Ardi lived, this was a woodland habitat.

The Graduate | Spring 2010

TWO DECADES later, in a badland moonscape just 46 miles away from where Lucy had lain, Yohannes Haile-Selassie, an Ethiopian-born Berkeley graduate student spotted a piece of bone from the palm of a hominid hand. That find led Photo © 1995 Tim D. White, Brill Atlanta to over a hundred more pieces of the disarticulated, scattered skeleton of one individual creature, a female, and eventually parts of at least 36 other individuals from the ancient floodplain. Determining what they truly were, in the cautious way of science, took 17 years of assembly, analysis, and interpretation. The results were announced in October of 2009, as the cover story in the Everest of journals, Science, in 11 papers by 47 authors from 10 countries. The cover girl was the “type specimen” (or principal reference fossil), the 45-percent-complete female skeleton from the site known as Aramis in Ethiopia’s Middle Awash area. She was 4.4 million years old — more than a million years older than Lucy, and therefore held the new record as the oldest fairly complete

Right, much mulling took place to determine Ardi’s place in the family tree. Here, from the left, paleoanthropologists Gen Suwa, Berhane Asfaw, and Tim White examine her remains in July of 1995 in Ethiopia’s National Museum. Below, page 8: Yohannes Haile-Selassie M.A. ’95, Ph.D. ‘01 (in Cal cap), and Berhane Asfaw Ph.D. ’88 at Aramis with the fossilized skeleton of Ardi, each bone in a protective jacket to shield it during the jarring, roadless drive to civilization. Below, hands across time — Ardi’s hand bones (center) differed significantly from modern human (left) and modern chimpanzee (right).

hominid specimen ever discovered. She was taller — about four feet — and weighed in the neighborhood of 110 pounds. She, too, had a nickname — “Ardi” — a very straightforward, unromantic shortening of her full appellation, Ardipithecus ramidus. She, and her fragmentary disinterred companions, represented a new species, possibly ancestral to Lucy. (And, because Lucy was still a possible forebear to modern man, conceivably part of a direct, connect-the-dots line to you and me.)

Solving the Human Mystery

AT THE END OF 2009, looking back on the year as publications like to do in December, Science named the discovery of Ardi the “Breakthrough of the Year.” And Time magazine ranked the find number one on its list of the year’s Top 10 Scientific Discoveries. Ardi has not yet become a household word as Lucy did, perhaps in part because of her less mediagenic nickname. But word of her and her kind was quickly reported, and commented on, around the world.

Alan Walker, a paleontologist from Pennsylvania State University and not part of the research, remarked that “This find is far more important than Lucy. It shows that the last common ancestor with chimps didn’t look like a chimp, or a human, or some funny thing in between.” (Indeed, though her brain was one-fifth the size of what’s normally in a Homo sapiens skull, Ardi had a small face and diminutive, diamond-shaped, blunt canine teeth, unlike chimps, and her pelvis, feet, and hands indicate that, like the later Lucy, she was bipedal, an upright stepper, not a knuckle-walker, although still somewhat adapted to tree-climbing.) Some observers wondered why the findings took so long to become public. Part of the explanation lay in sheer quantity: two of the 11 papers, for instance, analyzed more than 150,000 plant and animal fossils in order to reconstruct the environment near the site (and revealed 20 species new to science, among them bats, shrews, and various carnivores, hares, and rodents). And there was the nature of the remains themselves. Found because they erode out of sediments they were buried in, the fossils have survived so many years of rain and wind that little is left. Team member Leslea Hlusko, a Berkeley associate professor of integrative biology, says, “I am awed by the fact that the team was able to recover bones that were so fragile; just breathing on them would cause disintegration.” They managed that by hardening both the bones and the surrounding sediment, then excavating a wide margin around the bone so soil and bone

The Graduate | Spring 2010

For all its vastness, the Ardi project, and its own evolution, are intimately tied to Berkeley. Of those 47 authors of the debut papers, 19 trace their roots to this campus. Many Berkeley students, both graduate and undergrad, were involved in the research, in the field and in labs. Project co-director Tim White, an integrative biology professor here, did all of the preparation work for the Ardi skeleton, Hlusko says, and he’s “the best in the world at this.” White, a Cal faculty member since 1977, is a major player in Berkeley’s huge contributions to knowledge about human evolution. Before joining this faculty, he worked with two members of the most famous family in paleoanthropology, Richard Leakey and his mother Keeping it together — unearthed delicately after millions of years, this Mary Leakey, in Kenya and Tanzania. Once here at Ardipithecus tibia is treated with Berkeley, he collaborated with Donald Johanson — preservative to harden and protect it. who discovered the Lucy skeleton — on determining that she and her kind in fact fit into our evolutionary heritage as a new and separate species. (Johanson, who had been a leading anthropologist at Case Western Reserve University, moved to Berkeley in 1981 and remained here for 17 years.) In addition to his noted skills at preparing and analyzing specimens, White is globally renowned as a hawk-eyed fossil-finder. He’s also gifted at spotting, and nurturing, talented students in his field, and some of his living human “finds” played key roles in the huge project around Ardi and her kin, Yohannes Haile-Selassie among them. Like Tim White, Yohannes Haile-Selassie has the “golden touch” for paleoanthropological fieldwork (“Just like playing a piano or pitching a baseball,” says White, “some people really have that talent and some people don’t.” Haile-Selassie’s got it.). In 1997, he discovered fragmentary but toothily convincing fossils from an even older relative of Ardi, Ardipithecus kadabba, which has been dated between 5.6 and 5.8 million years ago, making it the earliest hominid species unearthed so far. He is presently curator and head of the physical anthropology department at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History — the position Donald Johanson held in 1974, when he found Lucy. Another tipping-point person was Gen Suwa Ph.D. ’90, currently of the University of Tokyo. A former grad student of White’s, Suwa was surveying the Aramis site in 1992 when he discovered, among the pebbles, a primitive tooth, the researchers’ tantalizing first glimpse of an Ardipithecus

The Graduate | Spring 2010

stayed intact, and wrapped plaster bandages (as used to set broken arms) around each chunk. Then, in a lab, the sediment was removed, grain by grain, from the fossil bone. “It takes a lot of patience,” says Hlusko, “and is incredibly time-consuming.”

Right, aerial view of the area adjacent to Aramis, where Ardi was found, in Ethiopia’s Middle Awash region.

remnant. Two years later, Haile-Selassie found the hand-bone of the Ardi skeleton. In a Tokyo lab, Suwa scanned numerous bones from Ardi that had been damaged over the millennia, using X-ray microtomography, and digitally reassembled the fragments. White, meanwhile, used plaster casts and physically performed a similar process. When they compared their reconstructions, they found they had independently reached essentially the same conclusions about how the parts fit together. Another co-director of the project is Berhane Asfaw Ph.D. ‘88 who also was a protégée of Tim White’s. The first Ethiopian to receive a doctorate from an American university, Asfaw, who has several major fossil finds to his credit, has been part of the project since 1981, and is a former director of the National Museum of Ethiopia. “When” is always a vital question with fossils, and Paul Renne ’82 Ph.D. ’87 the founding director of the Berkeley Geochronology Center, helped answer that for the Ardi remains, with argon-argon dating and paleomagnetic dating. THE “TARGET ORGANISM” of anthropology has always been the human being, and that’s true of its subset, paleoanthropology, as well. But the landscape has changed. In the early days, the “stones and bones” stereotype was somewhat accurate. But now the Study of Man flows freely across the intersection of the biological sciences, the physical sciences, and the social sciences. Tim White said in a 2003 interview, “The popular concept is that somebody rides out on a camel, looks off the camel, and says, ‘There’s a skull. Let’s take it back and write a book!’ Maybe it happened like that a long time ago, but not anymore. These are very large projects.” Team member Leslea Hlusko says the Ardi package of research is “a wonderful example of the inter- and multi-disciplinary nature of modern paleontology” and that “no one individual could ever hope to be able to master all of these research areas.” She advises a budding paleontologist or paleoanthropologist to see the field as “one in which you build collaborations at multiple levels,” with scientific teammates, host governments, and so on. You also need, she says, to build a broad knowledge base, including “a strong understanding of geology, anatomy, evolutionary theory, and genetics, to list just a few.” Proving the romance of fieldwork is not totally dead, Hlusko adds, “You will also want to know how to drive a stick-shift, change a tire, shower with just one liter of water — when you can get it — and, of course, identify poisonous snakes.” n

But these methods are far from ideal, says Bernhard Weigl, group leader of diagnostics development teams at PATH, a Seattle-based global health organization. In field conditions, basic microscopy yields false negatives about half the time, partly due to poorly trained technicians, and strip tests have a bad rap because their quality is variable — some types are very effective, others are nearly useless.

The original student team from 2006 working on the cellscope prototype, led by grad student David Breslauer (left).

Dial “D” For Diagnosis Berkeley engineers invent a cell-phone microscope By Ian Yarett David Breslauer

That’s a good thing, because welloutfitted labs are often hard to come by in the developing world. The conditions are usually hot, and electricity may be spotty at best. Put simply, the best medical technologies require clean, air-conditioned labs stocked with bulky machines and endless shelves of reagents — not what a public-health worker is likely to find in places like sub-Saharan Africa and the jungles of Southeast Asia. In such locations, diagnoses used to be based solely on the observations of sparse medical personnel. Then basic microscopes became more common, making diagnosis more of a science. And in the past 15 years or so, strip tests, which work much like pregnancy tests but diagnose various infectious diseases, have become an important tool in the Third World.

Peg Skorpinski

hat the world needs now — besides love, of course — is a new technology for diagnosing infectious disease that’s inexpensive and portable yet highly effective. The World Health Organization estimates that there were about 247 million cases of malaria in 2006 and more than nine million new cases of tuberculosis in 2007, with African countries bearing most of the burden in both cases. Fortunately, a group of engineers at UC Berkeley may have come up with the very thing, a device they call the CellScope, a simple attachment that clips onto the back of an ordinary camera phone and turns it into a portable and easy-touse microscope capable of visualizing single-celled pathogens like malaria parasites or tuberculosis bacteria — no laboratory required.

Fluorescent images of TB bacteria taken by a cell phone microscope. The red-outlined bacteria in Figure A are enlarged in Figure B. In Figure C, image analysis software automatically counted how many bacteria were present in the sample.

The CellScope’s engineers and the public-health groups that will help test it are optimistic that the device could be a solution. It all began in a Berkeley bioengineering class taught by Daniel Fletcher. To make things interesting, Fletcher presented his students with a challenge: if you were hiking in a remote village where an unknown infectious disease was spreading, what could you build with only a camera cell phone and a backpack of lenses that might help identify the disease? In response, his students developed a prototype CellScope, and the research seemed promising enough that some of the students continued working on

it with Fletcher after the course ended (the research was recently published in the journal PLoS ONE). According to Fletcher, CellScope users will be able to take diagnostic images of blood or sputum samples and then either send them off for further analysis using the phone’s wireless connectivity, or analyze them independently using image-analysis software that could be installed on the cell phone. In addition to being more portable, the CellScope may prove to be more valuable for diagnosis than basic compound microscopes. That’s because the device is capable of fluorescence microscopy, which produces images that are much easier for a layperson to decipher. It’s like picking out bright stars from a dark sky, says David Breslauer, a bioengineering graduate student at Berkeley and member of the CellScope team. n From Newsweek, August 12, 2009 © 2009 Newsweek, Inc. All rights reserved. Used by permission and protected by the Copyright Laws of the United States. The printing, copying, redistribution, or retransmission of the Material without express written permission is prohibited.

The Graduate | Spring 2010

Alumni Profiles

t least once or twice a year, you can happen upon David Charron’s “Case Studies in Entrepreneurship” course in the Haas School of Business. In this class, students are confronted with a case study of the early days of a young startup company called Aurora Biofuels, and asked to tackle a problem its founders, Matt Caspari, Bert Vick and Guido Radaelli, were confronted with from the outset. The problem — how the company could replicate a green fuel production process —

a company, but we quickly realized, based on the project we were pursuing, we would need engineering expertise,” said Vick. This led them to the final member of their team, Guido Radaelli, a fellow MBA candidate with an extensive history in the biotech industry. Guido joined the team as their engineering expert and they began founding a business based on a groundbreaking technology —turning algae into biodiesel.

Charron, the team made connections with venture capitalists and raised five million dollars. Now, Aurora Biofuels is on the forefront of the clean-tech industry. The company is rapidly growing and is working to produce biofuel

Berkeley Trio turns Algae into Fuel and Money offers students both a learning example and precise insight into just how three Berkeley students could turn an extremely impressive class project into a company on the forefront of a new market. It’s a good example because it worked. Naturally, some of the success came from the mix of people involved. The personal side of the story unfolded like this: Matt Caspari met Bert Vick in a class at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. Vick was pursing a Ph.D. in Molecular Biology and occasionally took classes at Haas. Caspari was working towards an MBA with a certificate in Entrepreneurship. In the class, the two had the chance to work on a problem together. They quickly found that with Caspari’s business aspirations and Bert’s hard-science background and interest in business, the two made a solid pair. Caspari and Vick decided to enter the Berkeley Business Plan Competition together, an annual contest where individuals create business plans to showcase in front of venture capital firms in order to win funding and potential future investors. The two began searching the campus for an idea that would inspire their business plan. “We did research for six months,” said Caspari. “When I realized I wanted to go into alternative energy, we became more proactive in that search.” “We started looking for different ideas to start

The Graduate | Spring 2010

Photos courtesy of Aurora Biofuels

By Allison Davis

Top left: Matt Caspari; Bottom Left: Guido Radaelli; Right: Bertrand Vick

“I was interested in starting a company; that’s what I went to Berkeley to do. Seeing that other people who started companies were successful, seeing that it is possible to raise five million dollars if you are passionate about it and have the right team, it’s inspiring. Being at Berkeley allowed me to see that,” says Caspari.

he trio won first place and the $25,000 prize in both the Berkeley Business Plan Competition and the Global Intel/UC Berkeley Technology Entrepreneurship Challenge. They soon moved out of their humble lab in Radaelli’s rented house near campus and into office space in the Lester Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation, an incubator for promising businesses. With the help of the center’s executive director, David

in large enough quantities to commercialize the product, hoping to deliver biofuels to the market at prices comparable to petroleum fuels by 2012. Vick, who is now the chief scientific officer of the company, realizes Berkeley gave him not only the resources necessary to follow the idea but also the inspiration — the Haas School of Business is a leader in innovative business models and fosters the entrepreneurial spirt within its students. “In a place like Berkeley you are surrounded by pretty amazing people and resources,” says Vick. Some of Vick’s “amazing people” were, and still are, major players in the young company. Professor Kris Nyogi is now a member of the scientific advisory board. Nyogi spends weeks over the course of a year at Aurora labs collaborating with team members. Professor Robert Tjian, a major figure in the field of biomedical sciences, has also been very supportive of the business.

ach time David Charron’s case studies class is taught, Matt Caspari returns to his old stomping grounds to lead the class during the discussion of his case study. “It elevates Berkeley graduates into a position where they have to perform in front of their peers,” explains Charron. “This makes Aurora better, but it also encourages other students to be better at being entrepreneurs and to be more inspired by the example that Matt sets.” n

Dick Cortén

r. Yong-Kyung Lee, better known in the western world as Ken Lee, is a person of many facets. One of Berkeley’s most illustrious alumni from Korea, he’s been a professor, a research scientist in the private sector in the U.S., CEO of a giant telecom corporation in Korea, and he’s now, as a member of South Korea’s National Assembly, a political leader.

Yong-Kyung Lee Ph.D. ’75 in Faculty Glade, January 2010. A longtime engineer and corporate executive, his latest role is legislator. program. The government began privatizing the utility soon after. By 2002, the year Lee was chosen as its chief executive, KT had emerged as what has been called a “fully private telecommunications behemoth.”

Lee is gentle and informal in manner, but his

Communicating with the World Ken Lee always looks ahead and figures out the best way to get there By Dick Cortén

career reveals a bottom-line realism coupled with adventurous foresight. His scientific interests have always been at the leading edge, and his corporate decisions have included tough ones that have affected the destinies of thousands. He has a traditional side as well, a clue to which is his four-decade marriage, which was arranged by his parents and the bride’s. As a new grad student in electrical engineering here in the late ‘60s, Lee flew home to Seoul during the short winter break between terms. There, at the airport, he met his intended — for the first time. “We shook hands” he says. “The next day we had an engagement dinner, and two days later we got married.” Their union is now in its 40th year. Lee’s “double-e” dissertation required experiments, which in turn required devices, and at Berkeley at the time, devices were do-it-yourself. “Berkeley was different from schools like Caltech and Stanford,” says Lee, where they had lab technicians for that. As a consequence, Lee remembers spending “most midnights” and sometimes all night in Cory Hall’s microelectronics lab, constructing equipment. In retrospect, Lee thinks it took him more time to finish his Ph.D. at Berkeley than it might have elsewhere, “but it produced very long-lasting knowledge and confidence.” It also didn’t hurt that this campus had “a whole array of the very

famous professors in physics and engineering” who had been among the army of scientists whose work was vital during World War II and the Korean War. “I really benefited from sitting in their lectures, meeting and knowing them in person,” Lee says. (In those days, UC Berkeley only had about 70 students from Korea. Today, the number of Korean students enrolled at UC Berkeley is close to nine times that.) The newlywed Lees lived first in an apartment on Delaware Street, then moved into married student housing in the former military barracks of Albany Village.“The rent was about $80 a month,” Lee recalls. (It now costs nearly 20 times that, in today’s dollars.) To pay the rent and other expenses in grad school, Lee worked as a research assistant for his Ph.D. adviser, Professor Shyh Wang. “Without that,” he says, “I could not have made it through.” Under Wang, Lee worked in optical electronics — think of lasers — which Lee says was “a very hot field, the technology of the future at the time. And it still is!” After 25 years in the U.S. as a research scientist, and concerned about his parents as they got up in years, Lee went home to South Korea in 1991. He was hired by Korea Telecom (KT), which was then a state-owned monopoly, to join and later head its research and development

The transition was not without pain. To guarantee the company’s survival in the 21st century Lee restructured the former heavily bureaucratic organization, cutting tens of thousands of jobs and reforming its governance to make it among the most transparent in Asia. The lumbering behemoth had become, by comparison, lithe and agile. The agility came from Lee’s forward-looking, change-oriented approach. As a scientist whose career took him through satellite telecommunications, the World Wide Web, and the progression from fixed-line to broadband to wireless, he appreciated both the potential and the limits of technology. He foresaw the advent of home networking and guided KT into providing high-speed services for its subscribers, into partnerships that built condos fully geared to the Internet, and toward launching its own satellite. Along the way as KT’s head, he put in place policies of ethical capitalism and corporate-driven public and social welfare projects aimed at bridging the digital divide and social inequality. The scientist-executive Lee has been characterized as “one of the architects of the South Korean miracle” of broadband internet revolution in recent decades. In his latest incarnation as one of the 299 members of South Korea’s strong (if occasionally rowdy) unicameral legislative body, Lee has the opportunity to create social policy directly and help guide his country forward. n

The Graduate | Spring 2010

Bravo! 2009-10 Fellowship Recipients University-wide Recruitment and Dissertation Fellowships Berkeley Fellowship for Graduate Study

Yosuke Adachi, Geography Kristina Anderson, History of Art Emily Bartlett, Chemistry Timur Bazhirov, Physics Annelise Beck, Chemistry Sima Belmar, Performance Studies Anand Bhaskar, Computer Science Joshua Blumenstock, Information Management and Systems Jacques Bothma, Biophysics Timothy Brackbill, Mechanical Engineering Andrew Brighten, Jurisprudence and Social Policy Warner Brown, Geography Krista Brune, Hispanic Languages and Literatures Marshall Burke, Agricultural and Resource Economics Dylan Byron, Logic and the Methodology of Science Ryan Calder, Sociology Benjamin Cannon, English Ricardo Cardoso, City and Regional Planning Kun Chen, Anthropology Kelly Clancy, Biophysics Alasdair Cohen, Environmental Science, Policy, and Management Joshua Craze, Anthropology Lara Cushing, Energy and Resources Anindya De, Computer Science Sibyl Diver, Environmental Science, Policy, and Management Paul Dobryden, German Herbert Rizal Docena, Sociology Michael Edge, Psychology Erika Erickson, Plant Biology Seth Estrin, Classical Archaeology Ann Marie Faust, Molecular and Cell Biology

Andrew Friedman, Geography Erin Gallagher, Chemical Engineering Jared Garvey, Mechanical Engineering Amie Gordon, Psychology Zoe Griffith, History Steven Hall, Environmental Science, Policy, and Management Shaun Halper, History David Hoffman, Chemistry David Holstius, Environmental Health Sciences Mary Agnes Hoopes, Jurisprudence and Social Policy Zahra Kadkani-Schmitt, Architecture Katherine Kadue, Comparative Literature Brenno Kenji Kaneyasu Maranhao, Hispanic Languages and Literatures Shih-Yang Kao, Geography Anthony Kelman, Mechanical Engineering Dimiter Kenarov, English Kiran Keshavamurthy, South and Southeast Asian Studies Chloe Kitzinger, Slavic Languages and Literatures Neha Kumar, Information Management and Systems Richard Lee, English Jian Li, Economics Mengshi Lu, Industrial Engineering and Operations Research Jennifer Malkowski, Rhetoric Daniel Marcus, History of Art Maria Martinez Gutierrez, Health Services, and Policy Analysis Ivy McDaniel, Molecular and Cell Biology Ramsey McGlazer, Comparative Literature Ryan Melnyk, Microbiology Toby Mitchell, Civil and Environmental Engineering

Rielle Navitski, Rhetoric Joseph Neeman, Statistics Sarah Newman, Astrophysics Emily Ng, Medical Anthropology Win Pin Ng, Bioengineering Khoa Nguyen, Mathematics Ianna Owen, African American Studies Monica Park, Classics Erin Pitt, Ancient History and Mediterranean Archaeology Jennifer Pranolo, Rhetoric Eric Prendergast, Linguistics Marco Purpura, Italian Studies Daniel Reinholz, Science and Mathematics Education Benjamin Ross, Applied Science and Technology Sriram Sankararaman, Computer Science John Sapienza, Anthropology Laura Schewel, Energy and Resources Joshua Schraiber, Integrative Biology Shaul Setter, Comparative Literature Angeline Spain, Education Piyush Srivastava, Computer Science Margaret Tillman, History Nu-Anh Tran, History Rachel Trocchio, English Rachel Wamsley, Comparative Literature Yang Wang, Physics Zohar Weiman-Kelman, Comparative Literature Christopher Wilkens, Computer Science Stephen Yee, Plant Biology

Chancellor’s Fellowship for Graduate Study

Kehinde Ajayi, Economics Suzanne Ali, Chemistry Jean Alupay, Integrative Biology

Saeed Alzghari, Chemistry Karen Andrade, Environmental Science, Policy, and Management Lydia Ashton, Agricultural and Resource Economics Claudia Avalos, Chemistry Michael Barnes, Civil and Environmental Engineering Dominick Bartelme, Economics James Battle, Medical Anthropology Felicia Becerra, Scandinavian Languages and Literatures Fareed Ben-Youssef, Rhetoric Christine Beyzaei, Civil and Environmental Engineering Helaine Blumenthal, History Christopher Bravo, Ancient History and Mediterranean Archaeology Vanessa Brutsche, French Charlotte Carlstrom, Microbiology Mariana Carrera, Economics Carmen Castillo, English Lilia Chaidez, Agricultural and Resource Economics Joseph Chavarria-Smith, Molecular and Cell Biology Adam Chavin, Mathematics Tessa Childers-Day, Statistics Laurence Coderre, Chinese Language Jadine Collingwood, History of Art Anthony Conway, Chemical Engineering Sharif Corinaldi, Physics David Covarrubias, Molecular and Cell Biology Adam Cranmer, Mechanical Engineering Alexis Crow, Biophysics Anna Cruz, Near Eastern Studies Manuel Cuellar, Hispanic Languages and Literatures Maria Cueto, Mathematics Benjamin Cullen, English Adrienne Damiani, German Yael Degany, Mathematics Nancy Diaz, Mechanical Engineering Bradley Dotson, Plant Biology Alejandra Dubcovsky, History Joseph Duong, History Terra Edwards, Anthropology

Cindy Huang Long after a visit to the Pakistan-China border in 1999, Cindy Huang yearned to know more about Central Asia and its extraordinary people. While a Berkeley doctoral candidate in anthropology, Cindy got that opportunity. She spent 2007 in the Xinjiang region of northwestern China, living with the Uyghurs, a Muslim group with a rich tradition along the legendary Silk Road, and studying their unique culture. “A lot of people don’t know who the Uyghurs are,” she says. Cindy’s research, supported by Berkeley fellowships, investigates how Uyghur women perceive themselves and have been shaped by momentous changes over their lifetimes. Fellowship funding “really gave me a feeling of intellectual freedom,” says Cindy, who graduated cum laude from Yale and holds a master’s from Princeton. Cindy describes Islam and China as “probably the two greatest forces shaping our future” and believes there’s much to be learned from the Uyghurs. Cindy, who grew up in suburban Chicago, completed her Ph.D. in December and hopes to have her dissertation published. She recently joined the State Depart— Abby Cohn ment as a policy adviser for the Global Hunger and Food Security Initiative.

The Graduate | Spring 2010

Abby Cohn

[ Fellowships ]

Joshua Eng, Psychology Allison Engstrom, Materials Science and Engineering Carla Espana, Psychology Dennis Evangelista, Integrative Biology Alan Farahani, Ancient History and Mediterranean Archaeology Gregory Fayard, Sociology Adrienne Felt, Computer Science Christopher Ferguson, African American Studies Elizabeth Ferrer, Integrative Biology Angela Fillingim, Sociology Taryn Flock, Mathematics Layla Forrest-White, Comparative Literature Melisa Galvan, History Alberto Garcia, History John Garcia, Rhetoric Marcos Garcia, English Pablo Gaston, Sociology Brandon Gaytan, Molecular Toxicology Frederick Ghansah, Economics Matthew Gichohi, Political Science Melissa Goldstein, Industrial Engineering, and Operations Research Michael Gonzales, History Monica Guerra, City and Regional Planning Kristina Hargraves, Endocrinology Alvin Henry, Education Juan Herrera, Ethnic Studies Tuan Hoang, Nuclear Engineering Katrina Honigs, Mathematics Lily Huang, Chemistry Javier Huerta, English Charles Hull, Astrophysics Tyrone Johnson, Education Aubree Kendall, Ethnic Studies Mary Anne Kidwell, Molecular and Cell Biology Amy Kim, History of Art Anthony Kim, Education Jessica Kisunzu, Chemistry Thomas Kleist, Plant Biology Emily Kumpel, Civil and Environmental Engineering Diane Phuong Lam, Science and Mathematics Education Kathleen Lask, Applied Science and Technology Priscilla Layne, German Loan Le, Political Science Serena Le, English Amy Lee, English Pamela Lee, Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences Ming Li, Mathematics Munira Lokhandwala, Rhetoric Liliana Loofbourow, English Miles Lopes, Statistics Flor Lopez, Hispanic Languages and Literatures Gabriel Lopez, Bioengineering Ricardo Lopez, Romance Languages and Literatures Nicole Louie, Education Alexander Luce, Materials Science and Engineering

Theresa MacPhail, Medical Anthropology Tia Madkins, Education Victoria Martin, Physics Johanna Mathieu, Mechanical Engineering Tyler Matthews, Materials Science and Engineering Kimberly McNair, African American Studies Robert Medina, Hispanic Languages and Literatures Natalie Mendoza, History John Metcalfe, Epidemiology Ty Michelle, English Damien Mondragon, Mathematics Juan Carlos Montoy, Economics David Moody, Mechanical Engineering Thomas Moran, Civil and Environmental Engineering Annelise Morris, Anthropology Ruben Negrete, Civil and Environmental Engineering Diana Negrin, Geography John Nelson Mondragon, Economics Charlene Ng, Integrative Biology Brandon Nicholson, Education Cortney Norris, Classics Glenda Oskar, Economics Andres Osorio, Mechanical Engineering Jessica Osuna, Environmental Science, Policy, and Management Ana Ovcharova, Physics June Park, Education Erika Parra, Mechanical Engineering Tianna Paschel, Sociology Ryan Phillips, Political Science Miguel Pillado, Hispanic Languages and Literatures Samia Rahimtoola, English Sara Ramirez, Ethnic Studies Zachary Ramirez, History Ivan Ramos, Performance Studies Christopher Reyes, Chemistry Margaret Rhee, Ethnic Studies Omar Ricks, Performance Studies Diana Rodriguez Ortiz, Chemical Engineering Daniel Rojas, Sociology Javier Rosa, Computer Science Kihana Ross, Education Maritza Ruiz, Mechanical Engineering Hannah Salim, Environmental Science, Policy, and Management Alisa Sanchez, Rhetoric Miguel Sanchez, Molecular and Cell Biology Matthew Schumaker, Music Serena Scott, Bioengineering Faiza Sefta, Nuclear Engineering Mark Sena, Bioengineering Christyna Serrano, Education Sasha Shekhar, Biophysics Rebekah Shirley, Energy and Resources Anne Shiu, Mathematics Hunter Shunatona, Chemistry Froylan Sifuentes, Energy and Resources Flavio Silva de la Mora, Anthropology Jeremiah Sims, Education Shadrick Small, Sociology

Elizabeth Smith, Chemistry Maya Smith, Romance Languages and Literatures Pablo Solis, Mathematics Daniel Sparks, Mathematics Alan Stewart, Civil and Environmental Engineering Aracely Tamayo, Epidemiology Wilfred Torres, Integrative Biology Nesty Torres Chicon, Physics Hoang Tran, Education Jessica Vechakul, Mechanical Engineering Alberto Velazquez, Geography Derek Vigil Currey, Physics Anh-Thu Vo, Integrative Biology Mekoce Walker, Political Science Julie Ward, Hispanic Languages and Literatures Althea Wasow, Rhetoric Aaron Wilkinson, History Sarah Wilson, Molecular and Cell Biology Jenna Wong, Civil and Environmental Engineering Alexandria Wright, Rhetoric Connie Wun, Education Kristina Yoshida, Environmental Science, Policy, and Management Mia You, English Adena Young, Education

Eugene Cota Robles Fellowship for Graduate Study

Adam Ahmed, English Jennifer Allen, History Clara Berridge, Social Welfare Francisco Brito, Comparative Literature Charisse Burden-Stelly, African American Studies Roslyn Burns, Linguistics Carlos Bustamante, Sociology Stephanie Cardoos, Psychology Javier Cikota, History Christian Crisostomo, Near Eastern Studies Armando Franco, Economics Maxwell Gee, Philosophy Clea Goldblatt, Comparative Literature Luke Haqq, Jurisprudence and Social Policy Danfeng Koon, Education Marie Le, Education Jaime Libowitz, Italian Studies Yang Lor, Sociology Veronica Luna, Education Bryan Mason, African American Studies Paul Nadal, Rhetoric Peter Nelson, Anthropology Joseph Orbock, History Seong Jae Paeng, Hispanic Languages and Literatures Rene Pena-Govea, Hispanic Languages and Literatures Kailani Polzak, History of Art Rebecca Poon, Education Robert Reyes, English James Telesford, Psychology Kris Trujillo, Rhetoric Anisah Waite, Education Gabriella Wyatt, English

Abby Cohn

Amie Gordon

What makes some romances sizzle and others go down in flames? That’s a question that fascinates Amie Gordon, a psychology doctoral student who specializes in the well-being of relationships. “If you want to understand what makes society work and brings fulfillment to lives, understanding romantic relationships is vital,” she says. Thanks to fellowship support, Amie can devote her full attention to her passion: conducting research studies that unravel the inner workings of intimate human interactions. “There’s such a variety, I can never get bored,” says Amie, a UCLA alumna who came to Berkeley in 2007. Currently, she’s examining the role of appreciation — both being appreciative of one’s partner and, in turn, being appreciated — in healthy pairings. Observing that popular magazines often dispense unfounded advice about love, Amie is committed to bringing scientific rigor to her subject. She hopes to pursue an academic career and, through writing, deliver sound and useful information to the general public. “I’m really lucky,” says Amie, who is from Sonoma County. “I can’t think of anything else I would feel as fulfilled doing.”

— Abby Cohn

Graduate Opportunity Program Master’s Fellowship Anna Abolian, Optometry Ileana Acevedo, Architecture Margarita Acosta, Education Lorelei Alvarez, Social Welfare Rachelle Annechino, Information Management and Systems Lilia Bello, Education Lara Brekke-Brownell, Education Corinna Brewer, Art Percy Castellanos, Social Welfare

The Graduate | Spring 2010

15 15

Miranda Worthen Abby Cohn

Miranda Worthen hopes to improve life for girls in sub-Saharan Africa who went to war as early as age 8. A doctoral student in epidemiology, Miranda is on the front lines of a research project helping these former “child soldiers” become empowered and reintegrate into their communities. The girls’ plight routinely begins with forced recruitment by armed groups and rape, and persists when they return to civilian life as young mothers and outcasts. “These are girls who came of age literally living in the bush,” Miranda says. The Berkeley Fellowship and other grants give Miranda the freedom to pursue her cutting-edge work exploring how war impacts vulnerable populations. For Miranda, a Harvard alumna, fellowship support played a decisive role in her choice of Ph.D. programs. Now in her third year at Berkeley, Miranda says the ability to focus on school and research — and not an outside job — “has made a huge difference.” And today, many oncemarginalized young women are starting to thrive.

— Abby Cohn

Jessica Jones, Civil and Environmental Engineering Kimberly Lucas, City and Regional Planning Paul Maitland-McKinley, Public Health Najim Mohammady, Health and Medical Sciences Katherine Naegele, Forestry Candace Neal, Law Chandrika Newman-Zager, Public Health Albert Nguyen, Optometry Vivian Pacheco, Public Policy Paul-David Perry, Public Policy Miguel Pinedo Banuelos, Public Health Rosa Ramirez, Journalism Aldon Rodriguez, Optometry Emilio Rodriguez, Law Elizabeth Sanseau, Health and Medical Sciences Estella Sim, Optometry David Suguitan, Education Daniel Talancon, Mechanical Engineering Teresa Tapia, City and Regional Planning Rashad Thomas, Public Policy Cheryl Toledo, Public Health Cecilia Tong, Optometry Christopher Torres, Landscape Architecture Alexa Vaughn, Journalism Rafael Velazquez Cardenas, Education Brianna Winn, Education

Mentored Research Award for Graduate Study

Hector Burga, City and Regional Planning Yenhoa Ching, Education Nilofar Gardezi, English Erick Gong, Agricultural and Resource Economics Sera Hernandez, Education Angela Little, Physics Mark Minch, Rhetoric Brent Nakamura, Jurisprudence and Social Policy Reginold Royston, African American Studies Melanie Tanielian, History Jimmy Tran, Environmental Science, Policy, and Management Bharat Venkat, Anthropology Cynthia Vinzant, Mathematics

University Predoctoral Humanities Fellowship for Graduate Study Christa Chavez, Energy and Resources Michaela Chavez, Optometry Melissa Chinchilla, City and Regional Planning Latisha Chisholm-Duper, Social Welfare Dominique Elie, Architecture Alissa Figueroa, Journalism Nailah Gaston, Education Jenny Gilbert, Education Tammi Bichson Ha, Optometry Carah Herring, Journalism Claire Hines, Health and Medical Sciences Jerome Hubbard, Journalism

Yael Almog, Comparative Literature Kurt Beals, German Erik Born, German Eugene Chislenko, Philosophy Charles Franklin Creasy, English Matthew Goodheart, Music Matthew Hoberg, Philosophy Miki Kaneda, Music Sean Kerr, South and Southeast Asian Studies Caitlin Marshall, Performance Studies Derin McLeod, Classics Tiffany Ng, Music Megan O’Connor, English Shiying Pang, Buddhist Studies Hannah Rivera, Classics

The Graduate | Spring 2010

Karin Shankar, Performance Studies Ragini Srinivasan, Rhetoric Marianne Tarcov, Japanese Language Luke Terlaak Poot, English Amber Zambelli, Near Eastern Studies

Regents’ Intern Fellowship for Graduate Study

Nicholas Baer, Rhetoric Teofilo Ballve, Geography Victoria Bergstrom, French Reiko Boyd, Social Welfare Emily Buzzell, Demography Jessica Cleary-Kemp, Linguistics Bryan Cockrell, Anthropology Erin Collins, Geography Michael D’Arcy, Medical Anthropology Megan Downey, African American Studies Lisa Eberle, Ancient History and Mediterranean Archaeology Chi Ha, History Nina Hagel, Political Science Michelle Hamel, Demography Adam Hill, Jurisprudence and Social Policy Verena Hoefig, Scandinavian Languages and Literatures Emiliano Huet-Vaughn, Economics Tala Khanmalek, Ethnic Studies Emmanuel Letouze, Demography Kelsey Mayo, Jurisprudence and Social Policy Jason Morton, History Allan Mugishagwe, Music Elizabeth Pearson, Sociology Shaina Potts, Geography James Redfield, Anthropology Marina Romani, Italian Studies John Stehlin, Geography Jillian Swift, Anthropology Rochelle Terman, Political Science

Asrat Tesfayesus, Economics Jacob Wegmann, City and Regional Planning Joseph Williams, Psychology

Chancellor’s Dissertation Fellowship

Polina Dimova, Comparative Literature Emine Fisek, Performance Studies David Goldstein, Classics Marc Goodwin, Anthropology Thalia Kunimoto, History of Art Julia McAnallen, Slavic Languages and Literatures Juan Ordonez, Medical Anthropology Noer Rachman, Environmental Science, Policy, and Management Sabrina Rahman, German Malini Ranganathan, Energy and Resources Scott Schlossberg, South and Southeast Asian Studies Jason Strange, Geography

UC Dissertation Fellowship

George Ciccariello Maher, Political Science Maria Cristina Cielo, Sociology Mary Cousins, Civil and Environmental Engineering Samuel Diaz-Munoz, Integrative Biology Catalina Garzon, Environmental Science, Policy, and Management Genevieve Gonzales, Education Erin Haynes, Linguistics Nicole Hynson, Environmental Science, Policy, and Management Bao Lo, Ethnic Studies Dilan Mahendran, Information Management and Systems Kasuen Mauldin, Molecular and Biochemical Nutrition Tsim Schneider, Anthropology

Privately Funded and Foundation Fellowships Achievement Rewards for College Scientists (ARCS)

Karl Erhard, Plant Biology Erika Houtz, Civil and Environmental Engineering Alejandro Levander, Materials Science and Engineering Mark Lipke, Chemistry Brian McDonald, Civil and Environmental Engineering Laura Nielsen, Earth and Planetary Science Naomi Ondrasek, Integrative Biology William Regan, Physics Mason Smith, Computer Science Hoday Stearns, Mechanical Engineering Alberto Stolfi, Molecular and Cell Biology Kevin Woods, Environmental Science, Policy, and Management Elizabeth Zimmermann, Materials Science and Engineering

Ausfahl Family Fellowship Kimberly McNair, African American Studies

Phoebe Hearst Bannister Endowment

Faiz Ahmed, History Patrick Beauchesne, Anthropology Eric Blind, Anthropology Ana Casareto, Anthropology Chih Chiang, Anthropology Robby Cuthrell, Anthropology Jorge Gonzalez, Ethnic Studies Fuifuilupe Niumeitolu, Ethnic Studies Martha Stroud, Medical Anthropology Marlee Tichenor, Medical Anthropology

James A. Buchanan Scholarship

Erika Erickson, Plant Biology Jennifer Hofmeister, Integrative Biology Ryan Melnyk, Microbiology Luca Pozzi, Biostatistics

[ Fellowships ]

Eberechukwu Sonoiki, Infectious Diseases and Immunity Frances Wu, Health Services and Policy Analysis

Thelma E. Buchanan Scholarship

Chayut Thanapirom, Physics

Sylvan C. and Pam Coleman Memorial Fellowship

Mary Stimmler, Business Administration Neil Thompson, Business Administration Aydin Uysal, Business Administration

Frederick and Edith Ehrman Fellowship Gil Young Cho, Physics Brian Henning, Physics Xiaoping Hong, Physics Pauli Kehayias, Physics Itamar Kimchi, Physics Grant Larsen, Physics Juwon Lee, Physics Hanhan Li, Physics Xiaochuan Lu, Physics Jacob Lynn, Physics Christopher Macklin, Physics Victoria Martin, Physics Jonathan Ouellet, Physics Joshua Renner, Physics Nathaniel Roth, Physics Cory Schillaci, Physics Sheng-Yu Shih, Physics

Sidney Hellman Ehrman Fellowship Sean Curran, Music

Art and Mary Fong Graduate Fellowship in the Health Sciences

Mary Anne Kidwell, Molecular and Cell Biology

Gateway Fellowship for Graduate Study

Paresh Agarwal, Chemistry Md Ashraf, Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences Ivan Balbuzanov, Economics Ka Hei Kolen Cheung, Physics Bathsheba Demuth, History Momen-Bellah El-Husseiny, Architecture Hatav Khademi, Public Health Fadekemi Oba, Chemistry

Japanese Women Alumnae Scholarship of UC Berkeley

Asako Miyakawa, Neuroscience Terri-lynn Tanaka, Near Eastern Religions

Jewish Community Federation Fellowship

Jennifer Fazio, Education Sapna Thottathil, Geography Jacob Wegmann, City and Regional Planning

Irving & Helen Betz Foundation Tehila Sasson, History Rosalinde & Arthur Gilbert Foundation Yael Almog, Comparative Literature Tom Recht, Linguistics Jewish Community Endowment Fund Yael Almog, Comparative Literature Tom Recht, Linguistics Albert & Janet Schultz Foundation Roi Livne, Sociology

William T. & Helen S. Halstead Scholarship

The George & Nancy Leitmann Graduate Student Support Fund

Joseph Leconte Goldsmith and Amy Seller Goldsmith Public Service Award

Terence Crofts, Microbiology Erica Dirks, Microbiology Benjamin Lee, Bioengineering Sophie Wong, Bioengineering

Sigmund Martin Heller Traveling Fellowship Yenhoa Ching, Education Michael Craig, Japanese Quoc Ngo, History

International House Fellowship for Graduate Study Vahdettin Tas, Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences Fransheska Rivera Vega, Microbiology

Nellie, Emmett and Ida Louise Jackson Fellowship Kehinde Ajayi, Economics

Christine Holl, Mechanical Engineering

Tse-Wei Liu Memorial Fellowship

Md Ashraf, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Ivan Balbuzanov, Economics

Milton I. and Florence Mack Neurology Research Fellowship Benjamin Gaub, Neuroscience Lucas Pinto, Neuroscience

G. Fitzgarrald Martin Fellowship

Virginia Emery, Environmental Science, Policy, and Management Trina Mackie, Environmental Health Sciences Hannah Salim, Environmental Science, Policy, and Management

Edward M. Nagel Scholarship

Zahra Kadkani-Schmitt, Architecture

Janet New Fellowship Min Kim, Plant Biology Anthony Kim, Education

Janet T. New Graduate Fellowship in Economics Hwa Lee, Economics

Ning Fellowship for Chinese Students

Xiaodan Sun, Civil and Environmental Engineering

Nonresident Tuition Fellowship Teofilo Ballve, Geography

Arthur Ferreira Pinto Foundation Fellowship

Isaac Hacamo, Business Administration Pedro Pinto, Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning Ana Sofia Rufino Ferreira, Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences

Nelson Polsby Memorial Fellowship Daniel Laurison, Sociology

Rose Hills Foundation Fellowship

Michael Barnes, Civil & Environmental Engineering Pamela Lee, Electrical Engineering & Computer Science Gabriel Lopez, Bioengineering

Frank Schwabacher Graduate Scholarship La-Toya Franklyn, Law Abony Holmes, Law

An environmental and health crisis ravaging the Democratic Republic of the Congo has long been overlooked, says Dan Fahey. Despite years of bloody conflict, the region “wasn’t on the radar of the international community,” says Dan, a Ph.D. candidate in Berkeley’s Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management. Today, Dan is shedding light on Congo’s story. With support from several Berkeley fellowships, he has traveled extensively in Congo and neighboring countries to explore the role of natural resources — notably gold — in the war that devastated Congo’s Ituri district from 1999 to 2007. That assistance proved invaluable to Dan’s fieldwork in a country previously considered too dangerous to study. “It’s just emerging from conflict,” says Dan, who has been interviewed by the BBC and recently assisted a “60 Minutes” production crew.

Photo Courtesy of Dan Fahey

Dan Fahey

A former Navy officer who became a conscientious objector during the Gulf War, Dan is also an expert on depleted uranium munitions and their health effects on veterans. He started his graduate studies at Berkeley in 2004. “It’s been a wonderful place for me,” he says. — Abby Cohn

The Graduate | Spring 2010

Rachel Preminger Abby Cohn

Meet the Dean in London

Elena Nagaytseva, Law Aliou Nimaga, Law Sudeep Simkhada, Law

From left: Daniel Mouen-Makoua Allan Sharlin Memorial Award (M.S. ‘85, M. Eng. ‘86), Jeffery Penelope Ismay, History Nicholas Wilson, Sociology Kile (M.A.’93, MPH ‘94), Graduate Dean Andrew J. Szeri, Dr. and Mrs. James C.Y. Soong Callen Sor, Claire Weldin (M. Fellowship Chui-Hsin Chen, Civil & Environmental Arch.’98), Richard Halkett (MPP Engineering ‘05), and Obebe Ojeifo on Shih-Chia Hsiao, Chemistry July 1, 2008. Yu-Ting Huang, Environmental Science, Policy, and Management

Patricia St. Lawrence Memorial Fellowship

Ivy McDaniel, Molecular and Cell Biology Jessica Rodrigues, Plant Biology

Rachel Preminger fell in love with classics during a required humanities course as a first-year student at Reed College. “The lessons you learn are so portable,” she says. “It’s not about memorizing facts but learning how to think.” A Phi Beta Kappa recipient, Rachel faced an enviable dilemma upon graduation — weighing the competing offers from an array of topdrawer doctoral programs. “Berkeley kind of offered the best of all worlds,” she says. The campus’s renowned and supportive faculty, “fabulous” students, a pedagogical focus — and fellowship assistance — all figured into Rachel’s decision to come here in 2007. For Rachel, who grew up in Boise, Idaho, the Bay Area’s cost of living was (and remains) a reality check, particularly since she doesn’t want to add to her undergraduate debt. Receiving the Berkeley Fellowship was “an amazing gift,” she says. Rachel likens classics research to a “Petri dish” for culturing exciting ideas. As a graduate student instructor, she enjoys sharing her enthusiasm with Berkeley undergraduates. Eventually, Rachel wants to become a classics professor. — Abby Cohn

Chang-Lin Tien Graduate Fellowship in Environmental Sciences

Christopher Ellison, Microbiology Lars Plate, Molecular and Cell Biology Chodon Sass, Plant Biology David Soergel, Biophysics Eric Steen, Bioengineering Michael Wasserman, Environmental Science, Policy, and Management Kelly Wrighton, Microbiology

Yoshiye and Yaye Togasaki Fellowship Corey Abramson, Sociology

Eugene E. Trefethen Fellowship Abigail Ridgway, Business Administration and Public Health

UC Chinese Alumni Association Fellowships Robert Foo Memorial Fellowship Jennifer Chan, Education Jackson Kee Hu Memorial Fellowship Yeung Melissa Au, Optometry

Steven Bellan, Environmental Science, Policy, and Management

Ching Wah Lee Memorial Fellowship William Ma, History of Art Bertwing C. Mah Memorial Fellowship Kuo-An Ma, Asian Studies Poon Foundation Fellowship Jenny Leung, Asian Studies Patrick and Judy Young Fellowship Patty Liu, Molecular and Biochemical Nutrition

Yoshiko Uchida Endowed Scholarship Yuanxi Huang, Journalism Jonathan Shelley, English Irene Yoon, English

Una’s Fellowship in History Alexandra Courtois de Vicose, History of Art

Ephraim Weiss Scholarship Theodora Nah, Chemistry Christopher Reyes, Chemistry

Eric Stern A Sound Investment

Eric Stern’s job takes him globetrotting. But when he isn’t away, the Cal alumnus has a standing dinner date. You’ll find him around the family table, savoring a meal and catching up with his wife, Rachel Kaganoff Stern, and their school-aged sons, Henri and Jonah. “We have a deal,” explains Stern, a Los Angelesbased senior vice president for the Capital Group investment management firm. “I work long hours but if I’m in town, I’m home every night at 6 o’clock and we have a family dinner. It’s a really great time for us.” Motivated by his love of family and super-sized enthusiasm for his wife’s culinary skills — Rachel, a Princeton alumna, is a talented home chef and food blogger — Stern makes good on his 6 pm commitment. “My boys are learning to be very good sous-chefs,” he notes. The Sterns lead full and busy lives. Cognizant of their fortunate paths, they are public-spirited supporters of their communities and its valuable institutions. Though nearly 400 miles and more than two decades removed from UC Berkeley, Eric Stern has a powerful allegiance to his alma mater. He wants to ensure its continued excellence as a top public research and teaching university. To that end, the Sterns have created the Eric H. and Rachel K. Stern Health Sciences Graduate Student Award, an endowment providing fellowship funding for students in health and biomedical sciences at Berkeley.

The Graduate | Spring 2010

“I feel so strongly that Cal is a resource to the state of California, the country and the world,” says Stern, a Phi Beta Kappa recipient who earned his B.S. in business administration in 1987. “It’s a fabulous institution.” Stern, a fourth-generation Californian and triathletein-training, grew up in Burlingame. Both his parents attended UC Berkeley; their first date was at the venerable local pub Larry Blakes. “I loved my time at Cal,” Stern says. “I wouldn’t trade it for the world.” He credits Berkeley with teaching him independence and self-sufficiency. A gifted student with a knack for finance, Stern plunged into the campus’s political and social life. He was an ASUC senator and served as treasurer of Sigma Alpha Mu fraternity. After graduation, Stern worked for two years and then headed to Stanford for an M.B.A. In 1991, he landed a job at the Capital Group — and has been there ever since. “I’m really happy with what I do,” says Stern, a portfolio manager for large institutional clients. The Sterns have been married since 1994. Rachel Stern, a former political scientist at the Rand Corp., is active in volunteer and political causes and has her own food blog, www.insidethekaganoffkitchen.com. Her close ties to Princeton inspired Eric Stern to re-engage with Berkeley. Aware of the particular challenges facing the public university, “I realized what a need there was for Cal alums to step up.”

[ Graduate Givin g ]

2009 Donors to the Graduate Division $100,000 and above

Anonymous Jim M. Fahey Prabha Sinha John A. Swearingen

Google Inc. Joseph T. Gregory Patricia W. Jekel Jewish Community Endowment Fund Dolores Zohrab Liebmann Fund Edward M. Nagel Foundation Sarlo Foundation Albert and Janet Schultz Supporting Foundation of the Jewish Community Endowment Fund Sperry Fund Eric and Rachel Stern Tanner Foundation

$10,000 to $49,999

$1,000 to $9,999

ARCS Foundation, Inc. Northern California Chapter Fannie and John Hertz Foundation Jewish Community Endowment Newhouse Fund Rose Hills Foundation

$50,000 to $99,999

The Anglo-California Foundation American Council of Learned Societies Karyn Krause Amore Irving and Helen Betz Foundation Capital Group Companies, Inc. Art and Mary Fong

Carl and Faye Gregory George E. Haggerty Lois H. Hartley-Cannady Horizons Foundation Japanese American Women Alumnae of UC Berkeley Robert A. Kagan Zhexi Luo and Xudong Sharon Feng Nancy Lusk and Michael Smith Davitt Moroney and Christian Boyer Anthony A. Newcomb Martha L. Olney and Esther Hargis Stephen E. Palmer John H. Roberts Judi Sui and Bruce Bernhard Andrew J. Szeri Lee M. Talbot UC Chinese Alumni Foundation Diana C. Wu and Marc Dragun Roman V. Yorick

Paul J. Alpers Robert M. Anderson Robert J. Carr William and Dorothy Clemens BMW Group/DesignworksUSA Inc. Russell S. Gould

$999 and below

Jen Griffith

The Sterns wanted to make a gift with personal meaning — and high impact for UC Berkeley and beyond. As a research analyst earlier in his career, Stern was intrigued by the potential of the human genome project. He was likewise excited by the breakthrough work emanating from the Berkeley Health Sciences Initiative. The couple considers graduate students vital to “the lifeblood of the campus” through their involvement in cutting-edge research and the ever-important mission of undergraduate education. With their fellowship, the Sterns concluded they could help Berkeley continue to attract “the best and the brightest” while making a significant contribution to a world-class — and beloved — institution. For the Sterns, it’s been an investment worth making. — Abby Cohn

Michael and Jean Alexander Walter and Mildred Alvarez J. D. Archibald Gregory C. Barco Joshua E. Barnes Gibor B. Basri and Jessica Broitman Annalisa Berta Daniel and Chava Boyarin Dennis and Jean Bramble Carroll W. Brentano Byron Bronston Judith P. Butler Glenn R. Butterton Daniel Carrillo Li-Kuan Chen Peng Cheng James Clark and Catherine Forster Rafael J. Colonna Stephanie Corkhill-Smith and Alan Corkhill Anand Y. Dalvi Christy Dana Whitney M. Davis Brian M. Dennis Adrian D. Diaz Joseph J. Duggan Robert G. Dundas Melinda B. Erickson Manuel Erviti F. G. and Lisa B. Eyck David and Lesley Fastovsky Robert and Kelley Feranec Carlos Fernandez-Pello Elizabeth M. Flora Megan E. Fox Sharon K. Goetz and Dan Fabulich Mark and Paula Goodwin Alison Gopnik John T. and Margaret Gosling Paul E. Groth Karin E. Hansen Elizabeth R. Havice and James Duff Richard and Valerie Herr Richard and Kristin Hilton

Kay E. Holekamp Marguerite A. Judson Fran Tannenbaum Kaye and Brian Kaye Keith T. Kernan Eric M. Klinenberg and Caitlin Zaloom Douglas C. Kohn Thomas A. Koster Ann D. Kozlovsky and William Kozlovsky Deanna L. Kwong and Hoan Michael Huynh Jason M. Kwong Tin T. Lam Gee Gee Lang Linda A. Lees Judith V. Lelchook-Lohman Andrea G. Lepcio Joan H. Levin Jason and Linda Lillegraven Everett H. Lindsay Emily L. Lindsey Richard J. Loewenstein Donald L. Lofgren Michael Lucey Ernest Lundelius Bruce and Margaret MacFadden Michael Mansfield and Randy Sweringen Steven L. Mendoza Susan J. Muller Ju Namkung Christopher Nealon Alexandra Newman and Joel Miller Bruno A. Olshausen Sheila M. O’Rourke Robert L. Owen Sharon Page-Medrich and Elliott Medrich David T. Palmer Nadesan and Linda K. Permaul Henry A. Pisciotta Michele Rabkin Benjamin M. Ranish Thomas and Patricia Rich Jerold Rothstein Richard Russo Laura E. Schattschneider Andrew Schechter Judith G. Scotchmoor Hope C. Selinger Sam Sheffield Anne C. Simpson William L. Slessinger Robert J. Socha Randolph and Frances Starn Ramesh B. Surapaneni Dennise C. Templeton Susumu Tomiya Mark I. Vail Hugh M. Wagner Marvalee and David Wake Neil M. Wigley Lynne M. Wiley Diana I. Williams and Shanghua Teng

Pamela L. Wong and Douglas Wong Claire H. Woo David and Georgia Wright

The Graduate | Spring 2010

[ Alumni & Friends ]

Meet the Graduate Dean in California! Over the past three years since the Meet the Dean event series began, Graduate Dean Andrew Szeri has enjoyed lively conversations with some 400 Cal enthusiasts (primarily graduate alumni) on three continents. In the fall of 2009, the series came home to California with a fantastically convivial and informative evening at Autodesk Gallery in San Francisco.

uate Dean

April 21, 20 10 Los Angeles , CA

“From memory to microbes to invisibility... What’s hot in rese arch at Berkeley? ” u n i v e r s i t y

Alumni & Fri ends Dinne r and Lectu Andrew J. Sz re eri, Gradua te Dean o f

see the inside of a lego dinosaur or see how the new Bay Bridge is being constructed via day-by-day interactive computer mapping, the gallery is open to the public every Wednesday afternoon from noon to 5 pm.

PHOTOS BY PEG SKORPINSKI

On September 10, 2009, more than 100 guests explored Autodesk’s state-of-the-art interactive gallery in the Landmark building at One Market Street while sipping wines donated by Rubissow Family Wines founded by Berkeley graduate alumnus, George Rubissow. If you missed the Graduate Division event at the Autodesk Gallery but have always wanted to

Meet the Grad

c a l i f o r n i a ,

b e r k e l e y

Dean Szeri’s presentation on what’s hot in research at Berkeley highlights the recent work of renowned faculty from a wide array of disciplines. Prior to the San Francisco event, the dean has visited with Cal alumni and friends in Shanghai, Beijing, Chicago, Washington D.C., London, Paris, Philadelphia, Seoul, and New York. In New York in May 2009, he had the pleasure of being introduced by the Campaign for Berkeley CoChair, Coleman Fung, of OpenLink Financial Inc. Seventy guests listened intently to Mr. Fung’s passionate talk about his love for all that is uniquely Berkeley. Dean Szeri looks forward to making the acquaintance of Southern California alumni and friends at the next Meet the Graduate Dean event in Los Angeles on April 21, 2010.

Above: Graduate alumni & friends enjoy Autodesk Gallery exhibits and conversations at the Meet the Graduate Dean event in San Francisco.

The Graduate | Spring 2010

You may enjoy a full visual tour of all the events via the slideshow at http://grad.berkeley.edu/ gradsupport/eventhighlights.shtml. n

Thanks to

Berkeley...

The Campaign for Berkeley has raised more than $100 million of the total goal of $340 million for new graduate student support. Don’t miss the opportunity to make a difference by participating in Cal’s most ambitious campaign ever. A gift of any amount makes an impact… To make a donation today, please send your check made out to the UC Berkeley Foundation with a fund name and number (as those shown to the right) indicated on the subject line to: Graduate Division Development 424 Sproul Hall MC 5900 Berkeley, CA 94720-5900

More giving opportunities are listed at: www.grad.berkeley.edu/gradsupport

For more information on how you can support graduate education at Berkeley, please contact: Karyn Krause Amore Assistant Director of Development 510.643.5043 karynkrause@berkeley.edu

• Berkeley Graduate Fellowship Fund (W5579) supports students of high academic achievement in all disciplines across campus. • Nonresident Tuition Fellowship Fund (W6250) helps students from outside California and the United States realize their dreams of attaining a graduate degree from Berkeley. • Graduate Conference Travel Fund (FU0978) pays for deserving graduate students to attend research conferences. • Graduate Summer Research Fund (FU0980) pays for students to conduct summer research on campus or in the field.

…and our current matching programs can help your gift reach even further. • New Alumni Challenge 3:1 match for alumni who received a degree between 2005 and 2010. • Chancellor’s Challenge for Student Support 1:1 match for all members of the campus community who make gifts to endowments for student support. • Graduate Fellowships Matching Program payout match on gifts of $50,000 or more from any donor who creates a new graduate fellowship endowment.

For more information about giving opportunities and to see if your gift qualifies for one of the matching programs, please visit:

www.grad.berkeley.edu/gradsupport

Graduate

Nonprofit Organization

THE

U. S. POSTAGE PAID University of California

U n i v e r s i t y o f C a l i f ornia, Berkeley

Graduate Division 325 Sproul Hall #5900 Berkeley, CA 94720-5900

Lectures

GRADUATE COUNCIL LECTURES U ni v ersit y

o f

C ali f ornia ,

B er k ele y

Great Minds at Your Fingertips For more than a century, UC Berkeley’s Graduate Council has hosted free public lectures by prominent scholars, scientists, and public intellectuals — from renowned French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss to Pulitzer Prize-winning correspondent Linda Greenhouse and Nobelists Linus Pauling and Steven Chu. Now the public can revisit a growing number of those events, thanks to an ambitious digitization project and a new and improved website: www.grad.berkeley.edu/lectures. The Graduate Council’s renovated site offers video webcasts and downloadable audio podcasts of talks offered through its seven endowed lectureships, dating back to the early 20th century. Those who missed the recent lectures — Leon Lederman on science education, Steven Usselman on technology and democracy, Caroline Walker Bynum on “material miracles” in Medieval Europe — can download MP3s of those talks and listen to them at your convenience.

of them linked to an interview with the speaker, conducted by Harry Kreisler as part of his “Conversations with History” interview series. The public can also access digitized versions of a sampling of older audio files, originally recorded on 10-inch tape reels and archived at the Berkeley Language Center in the Dwinelle Hall basement. — Cathy Cockrell, UC Berkeley News Center

Pictured here are some of the speakers whose lectures are now available online at the Graduate Council Lectures website. The lecturers shown are: (top row) Ralph Nader, Linda Greenhouse, Robert Oppenheimer, Alfred Kroeber, Steven Chu, Andrew Brimmer, A. Wallace Tashima, Linus Pauling, Richard Dawkins, and Noam Chomsky; (second row) Stephen Hawking, John Dewey, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Neil Shubin, Martha Nussbaum, Claude Levi-Strauss, Aldous Huxley, Elizabeth Warren, Michel Foucault, and Amartya Sen; (at the bottom) Amory Lovins, Alan Simpson, Edwin Hubble, Kenneth Stampp, and George Lakoff.

One can also travel back in time via recordings “from the vault.” These include lecture videos recorded digitally, beginning in 2001 — many The Tanner Lectures on Human Values is another lecture series managed by the Graduate Division for The University of California, Berkeley. For more information see grad.berkeley.edu/tanner.

watch • listen • download

grad.berkeley.edu/lectures