Honors & awards archive
SubscribeArchitecture student wins prestigious new sustainability fellowship 
May 21, 2013: By updating and expanding California’s utility-allowance calculator, Berkeley grad student Antony Kim hopes to make sustainable architecture more available to low-cost housing developers. He and his faculty mentor, Galen Cranz, are winners of the first-ever Schmidt-MacArthur Fellowship, which encourages the design of sustainable products and processes.
Sociologist a KQED Asian Pacific American ‘local hero’
May 21, 2013: Each May KQED radio honors a number of ‘local heroes” of Asian Pacific American heritage. Among its 2013 honorees is UC Berkeley sociologist Evelyn Nakano Glenn, cited for groundbreaking scholarship on the intersectionality of race, gender, citizenship and labor.
Dorothea Lange winner hopes to inspire change with her photos 
May 15, 2013: In South Africa, UC Berkeley graduate student Molly Oleson photographed farming women seeking better conditions; In India, she captured the lives of girls in Bihar, who are traditionally left uneducated; in Brazil’s Amazon, Oleson will document indigenous communities’ struggle to protect their land and culture from destruction by a new dam. For her work, Oleson won the 2013 Dorothea Lange Fellowship.
Law school’s Altholz wins 2013 Yamashita Prize
May 14, 2013: This year’s Foundation for Change: Thomas I. Yamashita Prize has been awarded to Roxanna Altholz, an assistant clinical professor of law and associate director of the International Human Rights Law Clinic at Berkeley Law. Altholz successfully represented 127 family members of 28 individuals who were forcibly “disappeared” between 1983 and 1985 by Guatemalan security forces.
Eric Holder, Jerry Brown, Steve Wozniak among graduation speakers
May 9, 2013: U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder and California Gov. Jerry Brown are among the political leaders, innovators and pundits set to address newly minted UC Berkeley graduates at ceremonies starting this weekend (May 11-12).
An 18-year-old wunderkind named top graduating senior
May 9, 2013: Ritankar Das, 18, double major in bioengineering and chemical biology, is the youngest University Medalist in more than a century. He will be graduating from UC Berkeley in only three years with more than 200 credits and a GPA of 3.99.
Howard Hughes Medical Institute names three new campus investigators
May 9, 2013: Three young faculty members – Nicole King, Michael Rape & Russell Vance – have won the most sought-after appointment for a researcher at any American university: as a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator. The institute will pay their salaries in the Department of Molecular & Cell Biology and provide research funding, freeing them from constant application for federal research grants.
Chancellors see Berkeley’s future through students’ eyes
May 3, 2013: Dirks, who takes over as Berkeley’s chancellor on June 1, and Robert Birgeneau, who has held that position for nine years, took a lunch meeting in a Durant Hall conference room with the winners of the campus’s Fiat Lux Remix contest.
For law student, an intensely personal path to Sax Prize
May 2, 2013: For Micah West ’13, winner of the 2013 Sax Prize for clinical excellence, the path to advocacy has been intensely personal. When West was 19, his father pled guilty to two felonies and received a one-year sentence to a halfway house. “I could no more walk away from my father than I could any of the millions incarcerated in this country,” West said in accepting the award, honoring his tireless work at Berkeley Law’s Death Penalty Clinic and his efforts to launch the new Youth Defender Clinic.
Two faculty named Guggenheim Fellows for 2013
May 1, 2013: Two UC Berkeley faculty — improvising pianist and composer Myra Melford and English literature scholar Joanna Picciotto — have been named Guggenheim fellows for 2013, an award conferred for both achievement and promise.
Three faculty members named to National Academy of Sciences
April 30, 2013: Structural biologist James Berger, immunologist Daniel Portnoy and mathematician James Sethian have been elected members of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), one of the highest honors given to a scientist or engineer in the United States.
White House honors student working to stop human trafficking
April 29, 2013: Graduate student Minh Dang has been named a White House Champion of Change. She is among a group of Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander women cited for extraordinary commitment to their communities and the nation.
Fourteen staffers, six teams win Chancellor’s Outstanding Staff Awards
April 25, 2013: Fourteen staffers and members of six teams will be honored Monday (April 29) as the UC Berkeley campus recognizes the 2013 recipients of the Chancellor’s Outstanding Staff Awards. Chancellor Robert Birgeneau will hand out awards and shake the honorees’ hands. The 2 p.m. event will be streamed live online.
Ten Berkeley faculty named to American Academy of Arts and Sciences
April 24, 2013: Ten Berkeley professors have been named members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a prestigious 233-year-old honorary society of national leaders from academia, business, public affairs and the humanities.
Bakar Fellows Program: Packing power
April 24, 2013: Tanja Cuk (pronounced “chook”), an assistant professor of chemistry, is testing how to optimize new devices for both power delivery and energy storage. Her focus is an alternative to conventional batteries called a “supercapacitor.”
Fourth-generation Berkeley student lands prize for water work
April 19, 2013: The Blum Center’s Rebecca Peters, whose classroom work and field research focus on issues of water security, management and equity, is one of 62 “exceptional college juniors” nationwide selected as 2013 Harry S. Truman scholars.
Jay Keasling wins George Washington Carver award for biotech innovation
April 18, 2013: Jay Keasling, a professor of biochemical engineering, associate laboratory director at Berkeley Lab, CEO of the Joint BioEnergy Institute and director of the Synthetic Biology Engineering Research Center, is the recipient of the 2013 George Washington Carver Award for innovation in industrial biotechnology. The award is presented annually by the Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO).
Bakar Fellows Program: Creating a new trail to solve an old problem
April 18, 2013: With the support of a Bakar Fellowship, researcher Neil Tsutsui is testing the pest-control effectiveness of a synthetic version of a natural ant pheromone he discovered. The fellowship, which supports innovative research by early career UC Berkeley faculty, is accepting applications for the 2012-14 year now.
Chancellor honored for aid to Dream Act students
April 16, 2013: “I myself am a beneficiary of a community that supported my education,” Chancellor Birgeneau told an appreciative audience at Oakland’s Scottish Rite Center, where he accepted the Centro Legal de La Raza’s “Visionary Leadership Award.”
From high school dropout to U.S. Gates Cambridge scholar
April 16, 2013: Justin Park dropped out of high school, but he never lost his love of literature and learning. After 20 years as a bartender, bike messenger and military man, Park returned to school at UC Berkeley, graduated — and now has been selected as a Gates Cambridge Scholar, a top world honor.
Free software award for wrestling a Python
April 11, 2013: Physicist and applied mathematician Fernando Pérez has received the Free Software Foundation’s 2012 Award for the Advancement of Free Software for his open-source application iPython, which makes it easier for scientists to use the powerful Python programming language to crunch Big Data.
Campus’s ‘socially responsible licensing’ receives Patents for Humanity award
April 11, 2013: The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office honored UC Berkeley’s technology transfer office for its socially responsible licensing to provide low-cost treatments and technologies to people in developing countries, highlighted by the successful licensing of a discovery leading to a newly launched yeast-derived malaria drug. Other projects are nutritionally fortified sorghum & disease-resistant crops.
Hot tech-startup idea? Apply to Venture Lab contest
April 10, 2013: Campus students and post docs who seek to launch and grow a tech startup are invited to apply for funding, workspace and guidance from the Venture Lab competition. The contest deadline is April 17.
Bakar Fellows Program: Probing the cell’s ‘everywhere’ molecule
April 10, 2013: “Ubiquitin” is the apt term for a molecule that plays a vital role in every cell in our body. Associate Professor Michael Rape, winner of a 2012 Bakar Fellowship, is now on the trail of a potential drug to interrupt excessive ubiquitin production and prevent uncontrolled cell division, a hallmark of cancer.
Excellence in Management nominations due April 12
April 10, 2013: The Excellence in Management award,now in its 25th year, allows career employees to honor exemplary campus managers and supervisors. This year’s theme, “Agents of Positive Change,” recognizes outstanding efforts to help employees navigate changes in the workplace. Nominations are due Friday, April 12.
Contest winners shine new light on Fiat Lux
April 9, 2013: The Fiat Lux Remix contest invited students, faculty and staff members to revisit images of UC campuses commissioned in the mid-1960s by then-President Clark Kerr and taken by legendary photographer Ansel Adams – and published in the book Fiat Lux – and give them their own spin.
One librarian. Eight words. One big win in New Yorker cartoon caption contest
April 8, 2013: The prize doesn’t come with a parking place. But UC Berkeley University Librarian Tom Leonard is still tickled to win The New Yorker’s weekly cartoon caption contest.
Centro Legal de la Raza to honor Birgeneau
March 26, 2013: Centro Legal de la Raza, a Bay Area organization that supports the rights of immigrant, low-income and Latino communities, has named Robert Birgeneau as recipient of a “visionary-leadership award,” for his efforts on behalf of undocumented students. The chancellor will be honored April 12 at the center’s 44th-anniversary gala.
Bakar Fellows explore brain-machine interface
March 26, 2013: Neuroengineer Jose Carmena and bioengineer Michel Maharbiz are working to develop a brain-machine interface, an emerging technology for retraining the brain to operate a prosthetic device such as an artificial limb. They are supported by the campus’s Bakar Fellows Program, which helps early-career faculty pursue innovative research with commercial promise. The program is currently accepting applications for 2013/14.
Berkeley English grad named Gates Scholar
March 20, 2013: After a stint in the Navy, Justin Park encountered an Old English poem that piqued a fascination with medieval literature. Park pursued that interest while earning his B.A. at Berkeley and now has been named a Gates Scholar. He plans to study Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic lit at Cambridge.
