ForefrontC O L L E G E O F E N G I N E E R I N G U N IVE RS IT Y OF C A LI FO R N IA, B E RKE LEY winter 2005

Jan Rabaey’s Wireless Disappearing Act

■ CITRIS headquarters under way

■ $42.6 million for malaria drug

■ Alumnus heads Seabees in Iraq

c o n t e n t s

Forefront takes you into the labs, class-rooms, and lives of professors, students, and alumni for an intimate look at the innovativeresearch, teaching, and campus life that definethe College of Engineering at the University ofCalifornia, Berkeley.

Published by College of EngineeringOffice of Marketing & Communications1925 Walnut St. #1704University of CaliforniaBerkeley, CA 94720-1704Phone: 510.643.6898, 510.643.6857Fax: 510.643.8882www.coe.berkeley.edu/forefront

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On the coverThe next generation of smart homescould have tiny wireless devices hidden in the couch or tucked into the fridge.Just a few millimeters square (shownhere about 1,000 times its actual size),this is Berkeley electrical engineer JanRabaey’s PicoRadio. Operating on just100 microwatts of power, PicoRadios areoutfitted with myriad sensors to detectlight, motion, and temperature.Read the story on page 12.

cover photo by Bart Nagel

ForefrontC O L L E G E O F E N G I N E E R I N G U N IVE RS IT Y OF C A LI FO R N IA, B E RKE LEY winter 2005

dean’s message:The new research university

his fall we heard a number of industry luminaries, including Microsoftchair Bill Gates, HP’s Carly Fiorina, and Intel CEO Craig Barrett, echoing asimilar warning:The U.S. will lose its place as world leader in technologicalinnovation unless we ramp up funding and take a more serious approach todomestically based advanced research and development, the force that drivesour long-term scientific and economic success.

The nation’s top research universities and associated national laboratories—with their culture of collaboration and out-of-the-box thinking—have becomeincreasingly involved in the advanced R&D “ecosystem.” Their large-scaleresearch facilities and stores of talented faculty and students make it possiblefor research to rise above boundaries between disciplines, between basic andapplied science and engineering, and between academics and industry. Ourbasic research is use-inspired but freed from commercial pressures like fast-tracking to market and maximizing shareholder value.

The future of our domestic economy is becoming increasingly dependent onuniversity-based advanced R&D. Corporate R&D investment—not just intechnology but in a range of sectors—has declined steadily for the last threeyears. Federal research funding has made up some of the drop-off, but spendingincreases there have emphasized defense and homeland security. Now, 58percent of companies with the highest R&D expenditures are based in Europeand Japan, with only 42 percent in North America, and many of those dependentirely on universities for their long-range R&D.

Exceptions to this trend include some of our own corporate partners in theSilicon Valley, like Intel and Microsoft, who are among the top 15 investors inR&D worldwide, according to MIT’s Technology Review. Sun Microsystems ismaking headlines, even drawing criticism from industry analysts, for its heavyexpenditures in R&D. But far from frivolous, these forward-thinking corpo-rate investors are collaborating with Berkeley to help support faculty research,fund student scholarships, and host major initiatives like CITRIS, whichwould be impossible to undertake in a commercial environment and muchless rewarding for our students without the connection to the corporate world.

Research universities are providing what I like to call a regional “demilita-rized zone” for advanced research.This rich resource and its increasinglycritical role in our economic future must be acknowledged, nurtured, andfunded, not only to empower our long-term technological preeminence, butalso to plant our students—the technology leaders of the future—firmly inthe context of a real world. I welcome your thoughts at dean.forefront@coe.berkeley.edu.

— A. RICHARD NEWTONDean, College of EngineeringRoy W. Carlson Professor of Engineering

TBill Gates in conversationwith Dean Newton last fallat Zellerbach Hall

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12 HEADING INTO THE GOLDEN AGE OF WIRELESS 2.0Newly minted PicoRadios sport ambient intelligence and disappear into the environmentBy David Pescovitz

16 COMPUTATIONAL ARTIST EXTRAORDINAIRE

A conversation with BioE’s Kimmen SjölanderBy Gordy Slack

20 TEMPLE OF ZEUS RISES AGAIN

Column reconstruction reveals an obsession with engineering perfection that dates back to 4th century B.C. GreeceBy Jenn Shreve

2 LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

3 NEWS FROM THE NORTHSIDEBerkeley chancellor named to stem cell oversight committeCITRIS headquarters: new building to foster innovation$42.6 million Gates Foundation grant to produce malaria drugNEES showcases pioneering approach to earthquake engineeringBerkeley’s nanoscale research efforts get a boost from NSFBerkeley top ranked in world for engineering and IT

24 THE GIFT OF GIVINGJack Martin: Berkeley, not baseball, has been very good to himBarbara Newell catches up with engineering graduate fellows

25 ALUMNI UPDATEClass notesGearhead turned filmmaker tells story of SpeedweekEECS alum teaching computers to speak K’iche’A computer scientist with a bird’s-eye viewAlumnus Maurer heads Seabees in Iraq conflictCEE alumnus hits home run on third career choice

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Social entrepreneurismThank you for sharing the visionary newclass you are pioneering at Berkeley [fall2004]. I am truly proud that my old schoolis able to define this vision and has alreadygotten results.

I received this issue of Forefront when Iam thinking seriously about a career shiftto “social entrepreneurism.” I have beenin the telecommunications field for over25 years and believe passionately thatappropriate technology has much to offerdeveloping countries.There are techno-logies we have today—in particular, yourarticle discussed wireless—that have theability to offer vastly improved commu-nication services at a modest cost, servicesthat give many communities much bettercontrol over their lives. Congratulationsfor your progress in this area; it is in thetrue Berkeley spirit.

—AVNISH AGGARWAL

Fremont (M.S.’76 EECS)

Rethinking engineeringI read the account of ICT4B [fall 2004]. . . .It is clear that bettering communicationsis effective in the development of poorcountries. So also are access to safe drink-ing water, road construction, health careinfrastructure, accessible primary educa-tion, development of local manufacturingand services for local markets, and theempowerment of women.

A challenging study is that of the properinteraction of folks such as ourselves andthe local population of these countries.For neither those who believe that weneed to provide the leadership in technicaldevelopment, nor those who believe thatall these countries need is financial helphave a sound hold on reality.

Since 1987, I and Berkeley architectureprofessor Charlie Huizenga have carriedout an experiment called Agua Para LaVida (www.aplv.org) in remote parts ofrural Nicaragua, to develop drinkingwater systems.We have found that, evenin a field as old fashioned as water deliv-ery, the required engineering needed tobe rethought afresh, occasionally invented,and imaginatively adapted to local condi-tions.We have also learned about thetransmission of sound technical materialto youngsters who had minimal previousschooling.

—GILLES CORCOS

Professor Emeritus, Mechanical EngineeringUC Berkeley

Global nonsenseI could not disagree more with the ideasexpressed in some of the letters in yourlast issue [fall 2004]. . . . Obviously, allengineers have to be able to read andwrite in order to understand their “tech-nical” material. However, engineers arenot trained to be Peace Corps volunteers.

After graduating from Cal, I happily satat a drafting board (not a computer asthey do today) and was delighted when I received more complicated assignments.Many of my fellow employees wouldcompliment me and often questioned,“How the heck did you figure that out?!”My answer:Thanks to the outstandingeducation I received at Cal.

The requirement that all graduatesmust pass an examination on U.S. historyis good and proper, but to burden all stu-dents with a global course of study isinappropriate and nonsense.

—CHARLES FRANKLIN DE WOLF

Emeryville (B.S.’49 ME)

California’s most valuable assetThe five years I spent at Berkeley, from1961 to 1966, were the most valuable inmy life. . . .The number of Nobel laureatesexceeded 15, and Berkeley was rated num-ber one, surpassing Harvard in most fields.It made me feel happy and fortunate thatI could attend such a beautiful campusfilled with outstanding scholars, while myown country was still in a politically andeconomically underdeveloped condition.

With deep sorrow I read that the gov-ernor of California seems not to see thetrue value of the higher educational sys-tem. I know his dilemma in facing hugefinancial deficits, but the last thing thestate should be doing is ruining its mostvaluable asset, the UC system, particularlyBerkeley. There are thousands of alumnilike myself residing in foreign countrieswho would silently play the role of gooddiplomats for California because they feelvery proud of their time there receivingan excellent higher education.We will begreatly disappointed if Berkeley’s ratingslides down to average.

—CHOUNG MOOK LEE

(M.S.’63, Ph.D.’66 Naval Arch)Professor of Mechanical Engineering

Pohang University of Science and Technology, Korea

Beyond the ivory towerYour last issue’s articles [fall 2004] capturethe enthusiasm and commitment ofBerkeley as a public institution to addresssome longstanding societal problemsthrough technology. More importantly,the articles do a great job of educatingthe general public about cutting-edgeresearch and how it can make potentialand significant societal contributions aswell as change perceptions of Ph.D.s andthe ivory tower.

A friend of mine who read the storiesonline wrote back,“What you are doingseems very complex, but what impressesme is how practical your work is. I alwaysthought Ph.D.s were very abstract.To seeit at work—and in a region that desper-ately needs it—is enlightening.”

—MATTHEW KAM

ICT4B researcher, Department of EECS,UC Berkeley

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letters to the editor

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Berkeley Chancellor Robert Birgeneau has been named to a statecommittee charged with overseeing the implementation ofCalifornia’s new $3 billion stem cell research effort.

“I’m pleased and honored by this appointment,” Birgeneau said,following the press announcement by Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante inHearst Memorial Mining Building.“This is an important responsi-bility, and there is much work to be done.”

California’s stem cell research effort is the result of Proposition71, a $3 billion bond measure approved by 59 percent of the votersin last November’s election.The measure establishes the CaliforniaInstitute for Regenerative Medicine to coordinate stem cell research,which has applications in treating a wide range of human diseases,including cancers, neurological diseases such as Parkinson’s andamyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS or Lou Gehrig’s disease), spinalcord injuries, and diabetes.

The bond measure was put forward in the wake of the Bushadministration’s decision to limit federal funding for any researchinvolving destruction of human embryos, the source of some stemcells. Proposition 71 backers argued that existing stem cell coloniesused for research are unreliable, are contaminated by the mousecells used as a growth medium, and cannot be propagated.

The 29-member Independent Citizens Oversight Committee willmanage the institute and appoint another committee responsiblefor parceling out research grants beginning in March. In additionto Birgeneau, other appointees include several deans of top medicalschools in the state, including David Kessler of UCSF, ClairePomeroy of UC Davis, and Philip Pizzo of Stanford.

At the press event, Berkeley officials gave Bustamante and reportersa tour of the Hearst Mining lab where BioE and MSE professorKevin Healy is developing a new synthetic medium for growingstem cells.The medium is hydrogel, a sticky substance similar tocontact lens material, which would provide a safer and cleaner envi-ronment for growing stem cells than the current medium, whichuses mouse cells and is vulnerable to contamination.

Healy currently uses a Bush administration–approved stem cell linestored at UCSF to do his research. He is a faculty affiliate with theCalifornia Institute for Quantitative Biomedical Research (QB3),one of the four California Institutes for Science and Innovationsponsoring multidisciplinary research in the sciences, engineering,and mathematics. ■

BY NOEL GALLAGHER, UC BERKELEY MEDIA RELATIONS

Berkeley chancellor named to stem cell oversight committee

News from the NorthsideWhat’s New at Berkeley Engineering

At a press event announcing the appoint-ment of Berkeley chancellor RobertBirgeneau (above) to a state committeeoverseeing stem cell research, MSE andbioengineering professor Kevin Healy(left) demonstrates for Lt. Gov. CruzBustamante (right in both photos) thenew hydrogel medium his lab is creatingfor generating stem cells.st

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she hopes will help conserveour energy supply.“A centerthat’s in the interest of society;there’s an opportunity to doresearch here that really matters.”

Dado Banatao, Silicon Valleyentrepreneur and major CITRISbenefactor, also spoke.“Thelifelong and distance learningaspects of the institute werewhat really brought CITRIS tothe attention of my wife Mariaand me,” he said.“We believestrongly in bringing the strengthand values of a Berkeley engi-neering education to studentswho would not otherwise havesuch an opportunity.”

The 145,000 square-footbuilding, scheduled for comple-tion in 2007, will include a nano-fabrication laboratory, distancelearning center, flexible educa-tional and research facilities,and will link to the partneringUC campuses.Visit the CITRISWeb site at www.citris-uc.orgfor more details. ■

U.S. Super-computing Leadin Jeopardy,Panel ReportsThe U.S. will be unable to retainits lead in supercomputingtechnology unless the federalgovernment increases fundingfor advanced research in high-performance computing andensures the viability of super-computer vendors, said a reportissued last November by an 18-member panel of computerexperts.

“For the past decade, insuffi-cient government funding, littlelong-term planning, and inade-quate coordination have reducedopportunities to make the mostof this technology to improvenational security and promotescientific discovery,” said BerkeleyEECS professor Susan Graham,

in the news

With ceremonial tosses of dirton a sunny October afternoon,College and University leaderskicked off construction of thenew headquarters building forCITRIS, the Center for Infor-mation Technology Research in the Interest of Society.

About 300 faculty, students,and alumni, as well as campus,community, and state leadersattended the groundbreakingceremonies to celebrate thecomplex that will provide stu-dents and faculty with state-of-the-art facilities for pioneeringinterdisciplinary education andresearch.

Launched in 2001, CITRIS isone of four California Institutesfor Science and Innovation,formed as a public–privatepartnership. Drawing fromstrengths in engineering, thesciences, business, public policy,economics, and the humanities,CITRIS has grown rapidly toembrace dozens of faculty–student teams across the fourUC partner campuses, includ-ing Berkeley, Davis, Merced,and Santa Cruz.

The new CITRIS buildingwill be the hub of this wide-ranging network—a lively nexusfor development of innovative,high-impact technology targetedto solve some of the most chal-lenging problems in energy,health, security, the environment,and beyond.

“The goal of CITRIS is tomaximize the impact of oureducation and research,” saidEngineering dean RichardNewton in an upbeat presenta-tion emphasizing the CITRIShallmarks of collaboration,corporate partnerships, and“use-inspired” research to serve society and improve people’slives. Key contributors, he said,are the corporate and privatedonors who have funded thebuilding and the students work-ing on CITRIS projects today,who will be the leaders oftomorrow.

“The words of the CITRISacronym really spoke to me,”said Elizabeth Reilly (’07 ME),a graduate student working inCITRIS on “energy-harvesting”wireless sensor networks that

CITRIS Headquarters: New building to foster innovation

Participants at the CITRIS groundbreaking were (from left) Chancellor RobertBirgeneau, major CITRIS donor Dado Banatao, UC president Robert Dynes, SpecialAdvisor to Governor Schwarzenegger on Jobs and Economic Growth David Crane, MEgraduate student Elizabeth Reilly, and CITRIS director Ruzena Bajcsy.

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The Bill & Melinda GatesFoundation has made a $42.6million five-year grant toOneWorld Health, a SanFrancisco pharmaceutical insti-tute, to support nonprofitresearch and development of anaffordable and accessible curefor malaria, which is responsiblefor 1.5 million deaths each year.

UC Berkeley researchers willpartner with OneWorld Health,founded in 2000 as the first U.S.nonprofit pharmaceutical com-pany, and Amyris Biotech-nologies, an east bay biotechcompany, to engineer a syntheticequivalent of the compoundartemisinin, currently the mosteffective treatment for malaria.The goal is to reduce manufac-turing costs and create a stableand scalable supply of affordableantimalarials for the developingworld.

The breakthrough technologybehind the process—part of apioneering field called syntheticbiology—has been in develop-ment over the last 10 years byBerkeley chemical engineeringand bioengineering professorJay Keasling and his researchteam. Keasling is also director

$42.6 million Gates Foundationgrant to produce malaria drug

of synthetic biology at LawrenceBerkeley National Lab and aresearcher at the CaliforniaInstitute for QuantitativeBiomedical Research (QB3).

“This project will use someof the latest advances in molec-ular biology to engineer amicrobial chemical factory andreduce the cost of a much-needed drug tenfold,” Keaslingsaid.“This is a dream project:interesting science, high tech-nology, rapid transition fromthe bench to the bedside, andmost important, critical need.”The nonprofit nature of thepartnership, he added, could bea model for attacking neglecteddiseases in the developing world.

Each year, between 300 and500 million people, most ofthem poor, are infected withmalaria, and at least 1.5 milliondie, primarily children in Africaand Asia.The disease has becomeincreasingly resistant to front-linemedications, but artemisinincombination drugs provide anearly 100 percent effectivetreatment.At $2.40 per adultcourse, however, these therapiesare beyond the reach of millionsof the world’s poorest people.

To reduce that cost to wellunder a dollar, Berkeley hasissued a royalty-free license toboth OneWorld Health andAmyris to develop technologyfor the malaria treatments. Inexchange,Amyris will producethe drugs at cost, and OneWorld

Health will perform regulatorywork required to allow the low-cost, microbially based productto be substituted for plant-basedproduct by manufacturers ofcombination drugs containingartemisinin. ■

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Engineers take leading role in student government Student body president Misha Leybovich, an engineering physicssenior, officially kicked off the 2004-05 school year by welcomingnew students to campus last fall.The annual Welcome Week convo-cation, held at Memorial Glade, was attended by hundreds of the8,218 new freshmen, transfer, and graduate students attending UCBerkeley this year.

Leybovich is one of four engineers, a record number, serving onthe Associated Students of the University of California (ASUC).Highly visible in his role as president, he has been sighted shakinghands with Bill Gates, schmoozing with Steve Wozniak, and intro-ducing Dean Richard Newton at the CITRIS groundbreaking.Alsoserving as ASUC senators are engineering undeclared junior ChrisAbad, ME sophomore Igor Tregub, and MSE sophomore Peter Chung.

Welcome Week was one of the final duties hosted by outgoingChancellor Robert Berdahl, who retired last September after sevenyears at Berkeley. ■

Outgoing Chancellor RobertBerdahl looks on as engi-neering senior and ASUCpresident Misha Leybovichencouraged new students toregard their time at Berkeleyas both an “opportunity andchallenge” to try new things.

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who cochaired the independentpanel. EECS professor JamesDemmel also served.

The world’s most powerfulcomputers, supercomputers canquickly perform complex calcu-lations for applications such asmodeling climate change, simula-ting natural disasters, monitoringnuclear stockpiles, and mappinggenes.The U.S. currently has 53percent of the world’s fastestsupercomputers, but federalfunding has dropped in the last10 years, and both China andJapan are making inroads insupercomputer technology.

The report,“Getting up tospeed:The future of supercom-puting,” recommends increasingfederal spending from $42 mil-lion to $140 million annually;developing an integrated plan forsecuring leadership in hardware,software, and related technolo-gies; and research collaborationbetween agencies here and overseas.

See the National AcademiesPress Web site at www.nap.eduto order the full report. ■

EECS professor Susan Graham co-chaired the supercomputing panel,sponsored by the National ResearchCouncil of the National Academies.

Microsoft chairman and chief software architect Bill Gatesspoke with engineering dean Richard Newton from ZellerbachHall stage last October for an audience of 1,500 engineeringstudents. “The university system is the number one thing thathas allowed the U.S. to be at the center of innovation,” Gatessaid, adding that the U.S. must beef up funding in both industryand universities and take more risks in research and develop-ment if it is to remain at the forefront of technology. To see avideo of the event, go to www.coe.berkeley.edu/multimedia/billgates/.

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At Berkeley’s new Center ofIntegrated NanomechanicalSystems (COINS), scientists andengineers are working togetherto create new nanoscale materials,such as microscopic componentsfor use in ultra low-power com-puting devices and syntheticadhesives based on the tiny bio-logical structures that enablegeckos to climb walls.

With $11.9 million in fundingover the next five years fromthe National Science Foundation(NSF), COINS is one of six newresearch centers for nanoscaleresearch that will involve a multi-disciplinary faculty of researchersfrom Berkeley, Caltech, Stanford,and UC Merced, as well as col-laborators in industry and thenational laboratories.

“The new centers supportresearch that addresses societalneeds,” says Alex Zettl, professorof physics and COINS principalinvestigator.“Our specific goalhere at Berkeley is to developlow-power, manufacturable, andmultifunctional systems for infor-mation, medical, and securitytechnologies.”

A major thrust of the centersis to bridge disciplines and pro-

vide a coherent approach tonanotechnology research andeducation.At Berkeley, 22 faculty from engineering andchemistry, molecular and cellbiology, physics, and economicswill collaborate, focusing onapplications in chemical andbiological sensing and high-density, low-power, low-costcomputation. CITRIS (theCenter for Information Techno-logy Research in the Interest ofSociety), Berkeley Nanosciencesand Nanoengineering Institute,Lawrence Hall of Science, theMolecular Foundry, and a mul-titude of other programs will be involved, in an effort to bringBerkeley’s many nanoscale re-search efforts under one umbrella.

“From the engineering pointof view, the focus of the workwill be to exploit the uniqueproperties of these new nano-materials,” says Roger Howe,EECS professor, COINSresearcher, and member of theCOINS executive committee.New faculty and postdoctoralfellows are being recruited,Howe explained, and an out-reach component will target the general public, students, and

Berkeley’s nanoscale researchefforts get a boost from NSF

COINS Executive Committee members include coprincipal investigators (fromleft) Roya Maboudian of chemical engineering, Roger Howe of EECS andmechanical engineering, and COINS director Alex Zettl of physics.

legislators to educate themabout potential applications ofnanoscience—the study andsynthesis of tiny materials thatare mere nanometers (one bil-lionth of a meter) in size.

Other engineering facultyinvolved include Paul Alivisatosof chemistry and MSE; JeffreyBokor, Ronald Fearing, andTsu-Jae King of EECS; LukeLee of BioE; Liwei Lin,ArunavaMajumdar, and Lydia Sohn ofME; and Ramamoorthy Rameshof MSE and physics.Tom Kalil,special assistant to the chancellorfor science and technology, hada leading role in developingBerkeley’s COINS proposal.

The NSF funded five othercenters at Northeastern, OhioState, University of Pennsylvania,Stanford, and University ofWisconsin, Madison, each ofwhich focuses on a specificaspect of nanoscale research.The six new centers complementeight existing centers, bringingNSF 2004 funding for nanoscaleresearch to $250 million. ■

NEES showcases pioneering approachto earthquake engineeringBerkeley researchers have a unique role in a bold new center fundedby the National Science Foundation (NSF)—the George E. BrownJr. Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (NEES)—thatwill revolutionize earthquake engineering research, improve seismicdesign and performance, and may extend its reach beyond nationalborders and seismic applications.

“Berkeley’s key contribution to NEES is the geographical distrib-uted hybrid simulation testing method,” says NEES principal inves-tigator Jack Moehle.“It will allow us to shift our research emphasisfrom conventional physical testing to integrated experimentation andcomputation, hybrid model development, and simulation,” Moehlesays. He is CEE professor and director of Berkeley’s Pacific EarthquakeEngineering Research Center.

Officially known as nees@berkeley, the Berkeley facility celebratedits grand opening at Richmond Field Station in November. Underconstruction for four years, the center was built in an existing labwith $5 million worth of state-of-the-art upgrades.The preexistingstrong floor and other structural components were equipped with a reconfigurable reaction wall, new hydraulics, new control room,and new instrumentation, including a 128-channel high-speed dataacquisition system and an array of 50 specialized digital cameras formeasuring structural deformation.

“For the first time we can make hybrid models consisting of bothphysical and numerical components,” says CEE professor BozidarStojadinovic, one of three principal investigators who teamed withMoehle to build the NEES facility.“This makes it possible to testphysically the complicated parts of structures, while the simple onesare modeled in the computer, saving money and facilitating moretests.” Other principal investigators are Stephen Mahin and KhalidMosalam for construction, and Nicholas Sitar for operations man-agement, all on Berkeley’s CEE faculty.

NEES will function as a shared-use collaboratory for coordinatedresearch, with special emphasis on six priority areas most likely toyield major breakthroughs in earthquake engineering.These includeefforts to retrofit existing structures, mitigate soil-related failures,develop performance-based design standards and loss predictionmodels, and protect lifeline infrastructures.

The NEES labs will permit controlled simulation of complexproblems in earthquake engineering, with Berkeley providing thehybrid testing infrastructure for the 15 sites nationwide. Such testingcan be conducted at several labs simultaneously through Internetnetworking and teleobservation, facilitating sharing of resources andinterdisciplinary collaboration.

“Conventional structural design protects against collapse, and wenow do that quite well,” says Stojadinovic.“What has been hurtingus most is the economic damage after an earthquake.”To minimizesuch losses, NEES researchers will develop performance-based seismicdesign standards to guide building for much finer grades of per-formance. Structures of the future might be designed, for example,specifically to house expensive equipment or to fully recover functionwithin 24 hours of a disaster. ■

The massive Universal Testing Machine subjected a concrete column specimento 2 million pounds of load in an earthquake simulation at the NEES opening.Inspecting the damage are (from left) Berkeley’s Bozidar Stojadinovic and JackMoehle, and Mark Coles of the NSF.

In the NEES control room, engineerDon Clyde demonstrates how the latestinformation technology helps solvethe space limitations of earthquakesimulation on large and complexstructures like a suspension bridge.One lab alone cannot adequately testsuch a structure, but several labs net-worked together can.

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JAMES O’BRIEN , assistantprofessor of computer sciencein EECS, has been named toTechnology Review magazine’s2004 TR100, a list of 100 topyoung innovators under age 35whose work is having a pro-found impact on technologyworldwide. O’Brien’s work incomputer animation—whichgenerates realistic motions likesmoke, fire, splashing water, andshattering glass using physicallybased simulation and motion-capture techniques—can be usedto train surgeons, soldiers, andfirefighters and to generate spe-cial effects for film and television.O’Brien, who also won a SloanResearch Fellowship last year, isfaculty advisor for the BerkeleyComputer Animation andModeling Group.

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Defensive tackle TomSverchek tangled withStanford quarterback T.C.Ostrander as the Bearscrushed the Cardinals 41-6 in the 107th Big Game. TheBears’ “phenomenal” 10-1season ended in a No. 4 rank-ing in the sportswriters’ andcoaches’ polls, in the top sixfor both offensive and defen-sive scoring, and with a mar-gin of victory averaging 24points. At press time, theBears were heading for theHoliday Bowl after the BCSpoll eclipsed their chances of a Rose Bowl appearance.

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“Energy is the single biggesttechnological issue that will hauntus for the next 50 years,” saysBerkeley mechanical engineer-ing professor Arun Majumdar.“The environmental impact ofcontinuing to use fossil fuelsmeans that we have to look forother ways of producing energy.”

To extend the search, UCBerkeley has entered an historiccollaboration with Taiwan’slargest research organization,the Industrial TechnologyResearch Institute (ITRI).TheBerkeley-ITRI Research Centerwill spur development of pow-erful energy technologies basedon the University’s nanoscaleinnovations—from flexible solarcells fabricated onto plastic to a“bio battery” powered by theglucose in your body.

The collaboration providesITRI with “immediate accessto UC Berkeley’s basic researchand the Silicon Valley ecosys-tem,” according to Majumdar,director of the center.“It willhelp Berkeley continue tobring in the best people fromaround the world.”

The Berkeley-ITRI ResearchCenter is affiliated with theCenter for InformationTechnology Research in theInterest of Society (CITRIS).ITRI will provide $500,000annually for five years to supportITRI fellows, graduate students,and postdoctoral researchers.Berkeley will also host ITRIresearchers on campus.

Already, Majumdar adds, aBerkeley-ITRI collaboration isunder way to develop a novelnanotech-enabled battery thatconverts salt water into electric-ity. ITRI researcher Ming-Chang Lu contributed expertisein the fabrication of nanofluidicarrays, the tiny “plumbing” sys-tem embedded in the device.

“All of the fundamentalprocesses of energy conversionoccur at the nanometer scale,”Majumdar says.“So if you canmanipulate things down atthose scales, you might be ableto increase the performance ofexisting devices and even createnew methods of converting andstoring energy.” ■

by david pescovitz

in the news

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Berkeley research institute tocollaborate with Taiwan industry

Professor Arun Majumdar (left), director of the new Berkeley-ITRI ResearchCenter, celebrates the signing of the collaborative agreement with PresidentJohnsee Lee of ITRI, Taiwan’s largest research organization.

Innovations features brief updates on the pioneering research done by BerkeleyEngineering faculty and students. See more at www.coe.berkeley.edu/newsroom.

Sproul installationfeatures state-of-the-art webcamA robotic camera mounted atop UCBerkeley’s student union for six weekslast fall exhibited the latest webcam tech-nology and simultaneously got peoplethinking about privacy in public places,all in conjunction with campus eventscelebrating the 40th anniversary of theFree Speech Movement.

The brainchild of Professor KenGoldberg and a multidisciplinary studentteam, Project “Demonstrate” was testedby more than 4,000 users who, throughthe camera’s Web site, could get a liveview of Sproul Plaza, remotely zoom infor close-ups, and snap still photos forposting on the archives. Up to 20 Webusers at a time could share the camera,which would then calculate a group view.

“The system uses algorithms we devel-oped for efficiently computing the optimalcamera frame given many simultaneoususer requests,” says Goldberg, professor ofIEOR and EECS.The project was exhib-ited at the Whitney Museum’s ArtportWeb site and has generated dialogue oncampus and beyond.Visit the Web site athttp://demonstrate.berkeley.edu fora simulation of the live site and photoarchives. ■

Secondhand smokefinds a room of its own

Berkeley researchers are conducting studiesin a new type of smoking room—wheremachines do the smoking—to investigatethe dynamics of environmental tobaccosmoke (ETS). CEE professor Bill Nazaroffand Lawrence Berkeley National Lab(LBNL) researcher Brett Singer (M.S.’94,Ph.D.’98 CEE) utilize a furnished roomthat more accurately simulates a homeenvironment than the stainless steelchambers often used in ETS studies.

The researchers study the various com-ponents of ETS, like benzene, formalde-hyde, and other known carcinogens andcontaminants.They carry out detailedsampling and analysis to understand factorslike sorption onto room surfaces, ventila-tion, and how indoor pollutant levelscompare to those in outdoor environments.The goal is to develop guidelines that canhelp minimize health risks for nonsmokerswhose housemates won’t kick the habit.

“The irony is that the amounts of several of these pollutants breathed byindividuals exposed to ETS far outweighthe total amount breathed by the rest ofus from polluted urban air,” Nazaroffsays.The research is being conducted incollaboration with LBNL’s EnvironmentalEnergy Technologies Division. ■

Setting limits on thespeed of lightIn an age where everything seems to begetting speedier, Berkeley researchers areslowing down that proverbial measure ofspeed—the speed of light—in an effortto improve network communications.

EECS professor Connie Chang-Hasnain,former EECS postdoc Pei-Cheng Ku, andothers have shown for the first time thatthe group velocity of light, the speed atwhich a laser pulse travels along a lightwave, can be slowed to about six miles persecond (mps) in semiconductors.That’s31,000 times slower than the normal speedof light through a vacuum (186,000 mps).

“This achievement marks a majormilestone on the road to ever faster optical networks and higher performancecommunications,” says Chang-Hasnain,who is also director of Berkeley’s Centerfor Optoelectronic Nanostructured Semi-conductor Technologies.The technologycould facilitate 3-D graphics transmission,high-resolution video conferencing asgood as face-to-face encounters, andquantum memory chips that could boostthe power of supercomputers, includingthose used for complex climate modeling. ■

In addition to furnishings, carpet, and draperies,the smoking room at LBNL features a single-portpuffer smoking system and sorbent tubes to collect air samples for analysis.

View a simulation of slow light entering andexiting semiconductor quantum wells at http://photonics.eecs.berkeley.edu/slowlight/slowlight_field_big_fast.avi.

Kara Nelson Brian Wirth

The webcam was positioned to get a sweeping live view of the historicplaza from the steps of Sproul Hall to Sather Gate and Telegraph Avenue.A simulation can be viewed at http://demonstrate.berkeley.edu.

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PHOTO COURTESY OF KEN GOLDGERG

i n n o v a t i o n sCutting-edge research from Berkeley Engineering

Young Berkeley Engineeringresearchers win PECASE awardBerkeley Professors Kara Nelson, Kimmen Sjölander, and BrianWirth were among five Berkeley researchers and 57 nationwide toreceive the nation’s highest honor for scientists in early stages oftheir careers, the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists andEngineers (PECASE), presented last fall.

CEE assistant professor Nelson is researching how sunlight andoxygen treat contaminated water via UV light and photo-oxidation,which can lead to cell damage in waterborne pathogens. Her workmay facilitate improved methods for treating drinking water andwastewater as well as better water quality standards, particularly indeveloping countries.

BioE assistant professor Sjölander (not pictured above) workswith experimental biologists investigating the evolution of proteins,the workhorses of all life. (See story page 16.) She is developingalgorithms to determine how proteins evolve novel functions andstructures, including how proteins confer disease resistance in plantsand animals.

NE assistant professor Wirth uses computational modeling to studymechanisms that cause defects in metals—primarily those resultingfrom irradiation by neutrons and ions—for the purpose of moni-toring safety in nuclear facilities. ■

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in the news in the news

CE graduate student Hirokazu Hiraiwa (B.S.’04 CE) beat out 15 competitors ina contest to compose a new fight song for the Cal Marching Band, its first newsong since 1978. Hiraiwa won $2,000 and got to conduct the band’s perform-ance of “California Triumph” at the opening football game of the season.Although he never wrote a song before, Hiraiwa played trombone in the bandas an undergraduate. Go to www.calband.berkeley.edu/calband/media/triumph.html to hear “California Triumph.”

One student presenting hisbusiness plan for an entrepre-neurial venture was met with a classroom full of raised hands,a barrage of questions, and achallenge from the instructor:“Does everyone agree that thisbusiness can generate $60 millionof revenue in its first two years?”

The setting was IEOR 190,the College’s new class in engi-neering entrepreneurship andthe foundation for Berkeley’s newCenter for Entrepreneurshipand Technology (CET). Similarprograms exist at Georgia Tech,University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, MIT, and Stanford,

and the demand is growingamong engineers who are increas-ingly working in managementroles in U.S. companies.

“Students are thirsty for thiskind of knowledge,” says JonBurgstone, IEOR professor andCET faculty chairman.“Expos-ing them to the mindset of anentrepreneur will make thembetter prepared and more com-petitive.”A private investor,Burgstone was formerly co-founder and CEO of Supplier-Market, an online marketplacefor locating new trading partnersthat was acquired by Ariba in2000 for $1.1 billion.

The CET will allow theCollege to attract both studentsand professionals interested inbetter academic preparation forentrepreneurship, Burgstone says.He has assembled an academicboard of engineering facultyand a high-powered advisoryboard that includes MichaelMarks (Flextronics), Jim Davidson(Silverlake Partners), AllenMorgan (Mayfield), and TomByers (Stanford).The CET willcoordinate closely with Berkeley’sManagement of Technologyprogram run by Drew Isaacsand Haas Business School’s LesterCenter for Entrepreneurshipand Innovation run by JerryEngel, both Haas professors.

“The curriculum will takeadvantage of much that is alreadyavailable in this area, buttressedby the appropriate use of some

Center confers new status on engineering entrepreneurship

Professor Jon Burgstone’s IEOR 190, the College’s new class in engi-neering entrepreneurship, was in such high demand when it wasfirst offered spring semester 2004 that more than 100 studentsshowed up for the 45 available slots. RONALD YEUNG (B.S.’68,

M.S.’70, Ph.D.’73, NA)received the prestigious 2004Davidson medal from theSociety of Naval Architects andMarine Engineers (SNAME)for his “outstanding scientificaccomplishment in shipresearch.”

Yeung, distinguished professorand former chairman (1989–96)of naval architecture and offshoreengineering, is recognized world-wide as a leader in ship hydro-dynamics.An early pioneer inthe field, he is the author of awidely quoted 1982 surveypaper,“Numerical methods infree-surface flows,” that remainsa classic today. He took a facultyposition at MIT in 1974, thenreturned to Berkeley in 1982,and was advanced to the rankof distinguished professor in1994. In 1997, he spearheadedthe formation of the Interdisci-plinary Graduate Group ofOcean Engineering at Berkeley.

Every Monday and Wednesdayevening, computer science Ph.D.student Sean Rhea joins a car-load of Berkeley students for thedrive along I-580 from Berkeleyand across the Richmond Bridgeto San Quentin.The studentsare volunteer instructors, teach-ing assistants, and tutors in theSan Quentin College Program,the only onsite degree-grantingprogram in the California Stateprison system.

“I wanted to do somethinggood for the world and see thatI am actually making a differ-ence,” says Rhea, who tutorsmath.“In contrast to other formsof activism, teaching the inmatesprovides a very real and imme-diate reward,” he adds.

The program was initiated in1996, when Patten University,a small Christian college inOakland, opened an associate ofarts extension at the prison.Thecurriculum offers more than 20transferrable courses in thehumanities, math, and the phys-ical and social sciences.About200 inmates are enrolled, 42have completed AA degrees, andsome parolees have transferredinto community colleges anduniversities.

According to program direc-tor and Cal alumna Jody Lewen

(Ph.D.’02 Rhetoric), the classesprovide an opportunity forpeople of very different social,economic, and cultural back-grounds to interact.

“These highly educated grad-uate students are coming in toteach the prisoners,” Lewen says,“but what often happens is thatthe teachers learn more than thestudents, especially about thecriminal justice system. It’s a‘world-rocking’ experience fora lot of them.”

Vinod Prabhakaran, anothercomputer science Ph.D. studentat Berkeley, also taught math forthe program, working with theinmates in the basement of SanQuentin’s former hospitalbuilding.

“I heard about the prisoncollege program from anotherstudent volunteer,” saysPrabhakaran.“I felt like it was aconcrete way of helping. I alsolike teaching, and teaching basicmath to grown-ups is a veryinteresting challenge.”

Volunteers are vital to theprogram’s success, according toLewen, who last year foundedthe Prison University Project, anonprofit organization devotedto supporting the San Quentinprogram and expanding similarprison programs throughout the

state.All depend heavily on vol-unteer teachers and tutors fromUC Berkeley and other areacolleges, since funding does notallow for the hiring of teachingstaff.

“We look for people who arenot only excellent teachers,” saysLewen,“but who are also pro-fessional, mature, and responsi-ble—people who can functionin this kind of environment.”Each volunteer must go throughseveral hours of training beforebeing cleared by the prison towork with the inmates. Mostdevote five or more hours eachweek to their teaching respon-sibilities at the prison.

“It’s a rewarding experience,but it’s not all roses,” says Rhea.“Some of the students have alegitimately hard time learning,others are recovering alcohol ordrug users, and many are dis-tracted by concerns about theirfamilies outside the prison.”

The program has generatedsome controversy because, criticssay, it is unfair to provide a freecollege education for inmateswhen others have to pay. But,for now, the program continues,and a formal evaluation may beundertaken by the state todetermine future funding levels.

“For many of these guys,learning is an entirely newexperience,” Rhea says.“Butonce they make the transition,they seem like completely dif-ferent people.They stop lookingat the class as something theyneed to pass and start seeing itas fun.” ■

by carol menaker

Carol Menaker of San Jose is a free-lancer who writes for a number of university alumni magazines.

Tutoring gives CS students a view inside prison walls

Berkeley computer science graduatestudent Vinod Prabhakaran (left)tutors Lamarr Mainor Sr. through SanQuentin’s College Program, where 42inmates have earned AA degrees.

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UC Berkeley is the No. 1 engineering and information technologyuniversity in the world, ahead of No. 2 MIT and No. 3 Stanford,according to rankings published last month by the Times HigherEducation Supplement (THES).The higher education weekly pub-lished by The Times of London also named Berkeley No. 4 on its list of the top 100 science universities.The ranking followed THES’sannouncement that Berkeley finished second in its first-ever list ofthe top 200 universities in the world, behind only Harvard, basedon a survey of 1,300 international academic leaders.

Berkeley top ranked in world for engineering and ITBerkeley also held onto its spot as the top-ranking U.S. public uni-

versity according to U.S. News & World Report.Among all 248 U.S.universities—both public (162) and private (86)—that offer under-graduate, master’s and doctoral degrees, Berkeley was ranked 21st. Ina separate specialty listing, Berkeley’s engineering programs rankedthird among undergraduate programs at schools whose highest degreeis a doctorate, and eight of its engineering programs were rankedfifth or higher. ■

of the finest entrepreneurs inthe world who live right herein the Bay Area,” says Marks.

Long-term plans includeoffering engineering under-graduate majors a five-coursecertificate in entrepreneurship.Besides IEOR 190, currentofferings include 190B/E198,Entrepreneurial Marketing andFinance; and 171, OrganizationalLeadership.With two classesunder his belt, IEOR seniorAndrew Laffoon has nothingbut rave reviews.

“Burgstone’s class [190] gaveme the tools and knowledge Ineed to work in a startup,”Laffoon says.“The CET and theprograms it will offer are a hugeneed and a huge opportunity.”

Go to www.ieor.berkeley.edu/~cet/ for more details. ■

California Triumph

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needed by the commercial radios on UC Berkeley’s Smart Dust,small wireless sensor nodes that monitor everything from abuilding’s seismic stability to the environmental conditions in a redwood forest canopy. Even devices based on Bluetooth—a popular technology for wireless communications betweennearby devices—require a comparatively huge 70 milliwatts ofpower to provide short-range connectivity so you can wirelesslysynch your computer and cell phone address books or evenreplace the wires on a hands-free headset for your cell phone.

To hit such low power and small size with the PicoRadio,Rabaey and Otis adopted a mantra of “simplify, simplify,simplify!”They stripped the necessary radio frequency (RF)electronics down to its bare bones.The Quark node consists of two custom chips: a digital signal processor and a two-channelradio transceiver.The antenna is printed directly onto the circuit-board with the electronics that drive the microchip. In fact,Rabaey gets a kick out of linking every component in an elec-tron micrograph of the PicoRadio RF chip to its counterpartin a photo of a vintage 1949 wireless set.

“In the 1920s and ’30s, they only had a couple of vacuumtubes to play with so they used a lot of passive components,”he says.“In the same way, rather than use hundreds or thou-sands of transistors, we really minimize the number of active

components that require the most power.The underlyingassumption of the ambient intelligence concept is that thecomplexity of the system lies not in the individual nodes, but in the collection of connected nodes.”

Still, wireless communication is notoriously power hungry.That’s why cell phones are limited to a few hours of talk timebefore you have to recharge their batteries. Of course, thesmart home applications that Rabaey foresees require sensornodes with a range of only a few meters. For longer transmis-sions, the nodes pass data across the network, bucket-brigadestyle.And in an innovative approach to power conservation,the radio only “wakes up” when it has to send and receive.Given those constraints, batteries would seem like the perfectapproach to power the PicoRadios.And they are, Rabaeyexplains, until it comes time to charge them.

The diminutive size and low cost of the PicoRadio nodesmeans that they can be deployed by the thousands in everynook and cranny, from light switches to milk cartons to keychains. But the sheer number of nodes makes changing batteriesor manually recharging the devices completely impractical.That’swhy the PicoRadio was built from the bottom up to be self-sufficient.“They scavenge energy from their environment,”Rabaey says.b

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In Jan Rabaey’s vision for the future of com-puting, the most powerful PCs are the onesyou cannot see.These computers will beinvisible but alert. Small and inexpensive,they will be woven into the tapestry of ourlives—hidden in our pockets, clipped to ourprized possessions, embedded in our homeappliances.They will sense our behavior andsometimes act on our behalf.

Rabaey, Berkeley professor of electrical engineering andcomputer sciences (EECS), calls this paradigm “ambient intelli-gence.” Science fiction enthusiasts know it as the smart home.

Inside Rabaey’s imagined smart home, surround sound musicfollows him wherever he walks, shifting from speaker to speaker.The refrigerator knows when it’s running low on milk andeggs, automatically e-mailing an order to a grocery deliveryservice. A smart power meter informs the thermostat when it’s least expensive to run the air conditioner to maintain thedesired temperature, reducing energy consumption and themonthly utility bill. If Rabaey misplaces his car keys, he pushesa tiny icon painted on his wall and a flat panel display comesalive with a video image of his living room.A bull’s eye graphicappears superimposed on the sofa cushion where his key chainlies hidden.Authentication algorithms embedded in the systemensure that information flows in an unobtrusive and a-need-to-know basis, avoiding Big Brother scenarios and unautho-rized snooping.

“Today’s consumer electronics world consists of individualgadgets,” says Rabaey, who is also a researcher at the Berkeley-based Center for Information Technology Research in theInterest of Society (CITRIS), as well as director of theGigascale Systems Research Center (GSRC), a multi-universityresearch center sponsored by the semiconductor industry.“Butambient intelligence means that the gadgets form networks sothey can communicate with one another.”

And that brings Rabaey to the PicoRadio, the tiny, inexpen-sive, low-power communications technology that he and hisstudents—among them doctoral candidate Brian Otis—havedeveloped over the last five years at the Berkeley WirelessResearch Center (BWRC), where Rabaey serves as scientificcodirector.The idea is that a PicoRadio costing less than $1could be slapped on any object, from a washing machine to akey chain, enabling it to join ad hoc wireless networks andshare information with its neighbors. Outfitted with myriadsensors to detect light, temperature, and motion, the PicoRadiocreates a distributed network that understands its environmentand reacts to it.The prefix pico, meaning one-trillionth, isn’t tobe taken literally, but rather serves as a reminder of the researchgroup’s mission: creating new generations of ever smaller,cheaper, lower-powered devices.

“The big questions we ask are how much simpler can ourradios be than today’s off-the-shelf technology?” says Rabaey.“How little energy do they need? How small can they be?”

The tiny device in Rabaey’s hand holds the answers, at leastfor the moment. Just a few millimeters square, the most recentgeneration of PicoRadio chips has just returned from the chipfabrication facility. This one, called a “Quark” node in refer-ence to the subatomic building blocks of matter, draws just100 microwatts of power.That’s 10 times less than the energy

cover story

HEADING INTO THE GOLDENAGE OF WIRELESS 2.0Newly minted PicoRadios sport ambient intelligence and disappear into the environment

Rabaey and Otis (left) have recently found a way to shrink thePicoRadio’s antenna to a mere trace wire, reducing cost as wellas the radio’s diminutive mass. “Now we hope to bring thepower down, maybe even by a factor close to 10,” says Otis.

BY DAVID PESCOVITZ | PHOTOS BY BART NAGEL

The Quark PicoRadios are outfitted with small solar panels.With sufficient illumination, either from the sun or indoorlight bulbs, the solar cells trickle power into two rechargeablecoin batteries that keep the node alive when light is scant. Fordeployment in total darkness, the team hopes to outfit PicoRadioswith the ability to convert natural vibrations—the hum ofcomputer monitors, the continuous shudder of heating andcooling ducts—into electricity. In collaboration with mechanicalengineering professor Paul Wright and his group, the teambuilt devices that harness this kinetic energy. Fabricated withthe same processes used to manufacture computer chips, thevibration-based generators could eventually be integrated intothe PicoRadios.

Right now though, Rabaey, Otis, and the other students onthe team are honing the PicoRadio design to further reducepower consumption. One way to conserve juice, Otis explains,is to integrate even more of the external circuitry into the cus-tom chips—from the electronics that control the power flow tothe onboard clocks that provide the “heartbeat,” synchronizingthe execution of software instructions.To that end, they arecollaborating with the Berkeley Sensor and Actuator Centeron tiny micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS) devices thatcan be built directly on top of the Quark chips.

“The exciting part for me is doing work that contributes tomy field of RF design while also pushing forward the capabili-ties of sensor networks,” Otis says.

Meanwhile, the first PicoRadio application is already in devel-opment within CITRIS. Supported by the California EnergyCommission, Rabaey, Otis, and Wright are working withresearchers at UC Berkeley’s Center for the Built Environmentto cut utility bills by combining PicoRadios with “demand-response” energy pricing.

A demand-response cooling system involves PicoRadio sensorsthat monitor temperature in various parts of a house or apart-ment and relay data to a networked thermostat. Simultaneously,sensors coupled to electrical circuits in breaker boxes monitorthe power consumption of other appliances.As energy pricesshift hourly, those numbers are transmitted wirelessly from the

utility company to a smart meter at the residence. Sophisticatedcomputer algorithms running on the thermostat will keep thehouse cool without turning on the air conditioner at peak times.

“This kind of closed-loop control could save you 10 to 15percent on your power bill,” Otis says.The user’s only responsi-bility would be to program temperature preferences into afamiliar thermostat.The network would take care of the rest.The power behind the curtain, Rabaey says, is what ambientintelligence is all about.

“My vision is for all electronics to disappear into the envi-ronment,” Rabaey says.“This technology will help change theway we interact with the information flowing around us sothat it’s much more natural.” ■

DAVID PESCOVITZ writes Lab Notes, the College of Engineering’s online researchdigest, and contributes to Popular Science, TheFeature.com, and Business 2.0. Hiswriting on science and technology has been featured in Wired, Scientific American,IEEE Spectrum, and the New York Times.

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Renovated a decade ago by award-winning Emeryville architect David Stark Wilson of Wilson Associates,Rabaey’s Berkeley home office includes a media center, wraparound desk, a sinuous plaster partition, anda 9-foot arched window that floods the room with daylight.

“PicoRadios scavenge energy from the environment.”

Raised in a small town near the medieval Belgian city of Brugges, Rabaeydiscovered the silky sounds of American jazz when he moved to the U.S.The sophisticated pulse of Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Louis Armstrong, andBrazilian bossa nova create the ambience Rabaey works best in. “It’s sorelaxing and inspirational,” he says, “like a voice speaking.”

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On the wall above Professor Kimmen Sjölander’s deskhangs a photograph of the Beatles, taken at the releaseparty for their Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Bandalbum. They are beaming, soaring at the top of theirgame. Sjölander keeps that photo to remind herself andher students that creative play and hard work make beau-tiful music together.

Sjölander made her mark early. Even as an undergraduateat UC Santa Cruz, she was developing innovative algo-rithms under the wing of bioinformatics innovatorDavid Haussler.Today, a decade later, her digital code isall over the field of computational biology, particularly inthe area of protein phylogenomics. In September shewon a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists andEngineers (PECASE), the nation’s highest honor for sci-entists in the early stage of their careers.

In 1997, Sjölander went to work for a biotech startupthat was soon bought by Celera Genomics, where sheplayed a key role in the functional analysis of the proteinsencoded in the human genome.As principal scientist forthe Protein Informatics group at Celera, she coauthoredthe landmark publication of the human genome in thejournal Science.

For the past three years, Sjölander has been on theCollege’s bioengineering faculty heading up the Phylo-genomics Group.Her lab develops computational methodsthat uncover evolutionary relationships among proteins,allowing scientists to infer the structure and function ofnewly discovered proteins on the basis of their relationshipsto known ones. Identifying the structures and functionsof proteins—the workhorses of all life—helps biologistsuntangle the story of evolution and will be key to helpinggenetic researchers understand how proteins confer diseaseresistance in plants and animals, and perhaps in the devel-opment of new medicines.

A faculty scientist at Lawrence Berkeley NationalLaboratory, Sjölander is a member of the three-campusinitiative, the California Institute for Quantitative Bio-medical Research (QB3). She holds a joint appointmentin the Department of Plant and Microbial Biology, whereshe works with biologists on plant disease resistance.Usinga National Human Genome Research Institute grant, sheis also developing a digital catalog of human brain proteins.

a conversation with: Professor Kimmen Sjölander, Bioengineering

BY GORDY SLACK | PHOTOS BY PEG SKORPINSKI

K I M M E N S J Ö L A N D E R :

COMPUTATIONAL ARTIST EXTRAORDINAIRE

inset butterfly photo by kimmen sjölander, avid nature photographer

Q: Let’s dive right in and talk about how you launched your careerin computational biology. K.S: My bachelor’s degree and my Ph.D. at Santa Cruz wereboth in computer science. I focused on machine learning, whichcomes down to developing basic mathematical and algorithmicapproaches to extracting information from data. I had the greatluck to work with [UC Santa Cruz computer science professor]David Haussler, who was starting to apply machine learning tobiological data. Based on a research project I did as a freshman,David invited me to be part of a team applying methods fromspeech recognition to the problem of multiple-sequence align-ment of proteins.This ended up being the genesis of hiddenMarkov models for proteins, which had an enormous impacton computational biology. It took off from there.

It sounds like you walked right onto a rocket ship that was alreadysmoking on the launch pad. Totally. I had dreamed of doing research and being a scientist,and suddenly there I was.Those were amazing days, full of

creativity. First thing I did in the morning was turn on the com-puter to see what happened to my experiments the night before,and I haven’t stopped. I’m as excited and obsessive as I was backthen. On the other hand, it wasn’t easy.When I went back toschool, I had three young kids. My twins were two and myoldest was five.

What was it like for your children to grow up when you were soheavily into your studies? I chose to do my undergraduate work at Santa Cruz partlybecause it provided such a healthy framework for raising mychildren. Family student housing at Santa Cruz was very sup-portive. Being a single parent is really hard for most people, andit wasn’t easy for me, but for the most part we had a tremendoustime.There might have been times when my kids wished theyhad a mom who’d have cookies and milk on the table whenthey got home, but not many. We did a lot of hiking and explor-ing and gathering lichen in the redwoods.We still think abouthow great those times were.

You went back to school after a 15-year academic hiatus. Youexplored a lot of different worlds during that period. Tell us aboutyour life between leaving school and returning to Santa Cruz asan undergraduate in 1990? My twin sister and I started college at City College of NewYork when we were 15.After a year, I left home and got a job.I went through a bunch of different lives, something like Picasso’sdifferent periods. I studied Chinese literature and art and philos-ophy and worked as a waitress. I was sculpting and painting andwriting poetry and hanging out in the cafés in Greenwich Village.My friends were ballet dancers and painters and musicians.

In 1975 I moved to the Bay Area from Manhattan to help mysister raise her daughter and entered a spiritual phase. I got intoZen Buddhism for a while, then tried Hinduism with Indianguru Sri Chinmoy.Then I got pulled into this bunch of born-again Christians and married my first husband, with whom I hadmy three kids. By now I think I’ve been successfully immunizedagainst all religions.

“My role at Berkeley is one of fostering an environmentthat has a spirit of playfulness.

It’s all about creativity and imagination.”

and the biological processes underlying protein superfamilyevolution add a level of complexity.Also, proteins have differentforms at different times in their lifecycle, and there are post-translational modifications.They interact with partners and theyhave conformational changes.They form complexes, they engagein the complex, and then they disengage from the complex.There is a hubbub of activity in the cell.We’re just beginningto understand how proteins do these things and under whatcircumstances.When you look at these protein families at themolecular level, it changes your view of life.You can line uprelated proteins from bacteria, fungi, mammals, and plants in a multiple-sequence alignment and see we all have a commonancestor.

How did you come to have a joint appointment with the Departmentof Plant and Microbial Biology?I was here at Berkeley when I saw a program announcementfrom the National Science Foundation for plant genomeresearch.When I give talks on how protein superfamilies evolvenovel functions and structures, one of my favorite examples is alittle protein superfamily that includes toxins made by scorpionsas well as plant and insect defensins [proteins, that are part ofthe innate immune arsenal].When you look at this superfamily,you immediately see that the common ancestor of plants,insects, and scorpions—some primitive eukaryote—had somegene like these, which has evolved to play different roles in thepresent day descendents. In plants and insects, they’re part ofthe defense. In scorpions, they’re part of the offense.

When I saw this announcement, I realized I could take thecomputational methods I developed for protein superfamilyanalysis and apply them to proteins involved in plant diseaseresistance.As it turns out, many of the proteins involved in themammalian innate immune system are found in plants.And whenwe study the two systems side by side, we get some interestinginsights. I wanted to find biologists to collaborate with, so Ilooked online and found a Berkeley faculty member workingin this area, Barbara Baker, a plant and microbial biology profes-sor.We met at a local cafe and in the course of that first cap-puccino decided to work together.We’ve become great friendstoo. One thing led to another, and I was invited to join PMBas an affiliated faculty member.

We’re still in the midst of computational biology’s big bang, buthas the field said anything important yet about the big theories or patterns of evolution? One thing that has become very clear is that although evolutionis described as largely tree-like, there is a lot of horizontal genetransfer going on, particularly among bacteria. Computationalbiology has really highlighted this.

Speaking of horizontal transfers, when you are working acrossdisciplines, you rely a lot on collaborations.Absolutely. My collaborations with experimental biologists arecrucial.They help ensure that we’re developing methods that

That’s when you decided to go back to school?Yes. I wanted to get a Ph.D. in the sciences.At that point, Iwanted to have something that was entirely mine, somethingnot dependent on a man.And of course I wanted interestingand challenging work. I got that in spades!

What was it like going back to college at age 32, and why SantaCruz?Santa Cruz is a relaxed, funky little beach town and the firsttime I drove through I felt at home. I knew I wanted to studymachine learning and artificial neural networks as ways of mod-eling the brain. Santa Cruz had David Haussler, the leadingperson working in these areas.

When I started school, I wanted to study human cognition.But it became evident that while computational neurosciencewas interesting, the time for computational molecular biologyhad arrived, and that the machine learning methods we weredeveloping were powerful tools in this field. It was thrilling tobe a part of something so real and important and to be able tocontribute my own research as an undergraduate. But to tellthe truth, going into my senior year I still wasn’t 100 percentsure that I wanted to stay in computational biology.

Then David showed my work to [UCSC molecular biologist]Harry Noller.At that time there was a big controversy over thebranching order in the tree of life. I had come up with clusteringalgorithms that we applied to DNA sequences, and the phyloge-netic tree I constructed supported one side of the debate.Noller got interested and suggested I take his course on themolecular biology of the gene.

That course was like the last battle in The Chronicles of Narnia,where these English children wander through the Kingdom ofNarnia and find a little hut in a glade.They go into the hut andfind an entire world there.When I took the class with Noller Ifelt like I was opening the door to this hut, and that hut was thecell.The world of the cell just opened up to me.These mole-cules, proteins, were doing things! There is a whole dynamiclife going on within them, which is an absolute mystery.Theywere like living things, not just inert, passive objects. It was atremendously exciting time.That feeling hasn’t stopped.

So you entered grad school at Santa Cruz knowing you wanted tocombine the computer modeling tools you’d developed with thestudy of life and evolution? The methods I applied toward protein phylogenic tree con-struction can also be applied to species evolution. In fact, achapter of my Ph.D. looked at the phylogenetic relationshipbetween humans, chimps, gorillas, orangutans, and so on. Butmost of my work in phylogenetics has been identifying proteinsuperfamilies, which has a distinct set of problems.

You use phylogenetic inference to identify how protein superfami-lies evolve novel functions and structures. Why is that so tricky? Phylogenetic or evolutionary inference has been traditionallyapplied for speciation—figuring out how species are related—

will address problems important to the biologists and not justproblems that are theoretically interesting.Working with experi-mental biologists also helps hone our methods.We apply acomputational method to data that biologists are interested in and get some predictions.Then the biologists do wet-benchexperiments and give us feedback.Then we look at the datatogether and find out what parts we might not have been payingenough attention to.

Do you use these tools to corroborate and cross-check the resultsthat biologists are getting, or also to forge new territory?We sometimes find novel members of protein families that thebiologists didn’t know existed.They’ll tell us that they’re lookingfor a protein with such and such characteristics.We’ll find theproteins and they do experiments on them and say whether we’reright or wrong. Or we predict that a certain protein has a spe-cific function based on our analysis.Then they go and test that.

Where do you see your work going now? I’m now in a place where I can work on my first love scientifi-cally, trying to understand human cognition. I hope to learnsomething about what we are as sentient animals and how theprotein families that confer that functional specificity have evolved.

You’ve said that David Haussler’s creativity and playfulness, aswell as his science, were inspiring and formative for you. Everyone in my lab knows how important it is to me to becreative and playful but also to work hard.We have very highstandards of scientific excellence.You have to be rigorous or itstops being fun.

Your work has so many different facets. Is there a central ques-tion in all of this diverse activity? The central question is,“How does life evolve?” Period. It’sthe evolution of life and the understanding of life. I addressthe question in a concrete way by studying how proteinsuperfamilies evolve novel functions and structures.

Are you ever nostalgic for your bohemian years as an artist? When I was young I wanted more than anything to be a greatartist…and in a way that dream has come true. I’m not thekind of artist I thought about being then; I’m a computationalartist. But I get to exercise my creativity, to use my mind andimagination to engage the world and to explore it and toreflect it. I just love that.

Gordy Slack is an Oakland-based science writer specializing in evolution and theenvironment. His work appears in California Wild, Wired, Mother Jones, Bay Nature,and Sierra.

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“Chihuly’s work is an inspiration of what I want my science to be like,” says Sjölander,

whose other favorite artist is Picasso.Dale Chihuly ’s Pers ian Pond, f rom Chihuly Gardens & Glass

photo by terry rishel, courtesy of chihuly studio

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At the site of Ancient Nemea in the Greek province of Corinthia, wheremythology records Hercules’ first labor with the ferocious Nemean lion, lifegoes on much as it has for the last two millennia. Here, in the seismicallyactive eastern foothills of the Arcadian Mountains, the land is studded witholive trees and grape fields and is home to a small village of farmers. TheTemple of Nemean Zeus, although mostly in ruins, still dominates the valleyas it has for more than 2,300 years.

Last August, as the world’s Olympians descended upon Athens, the NewNemean Games were wrapping up 80 miles to the west. Revived in 1996 byBerkeley classics emeritus professor Stephen Miller, the games attracted morethan 700 runners from around the world.They competed B.C. style—barefootand sporting tunics.Their course was a clay track, dug out millennia ago in theshadow of the Temple of Zeus. Among the runners was Berkeley civil engi-neering professor and Greek native Nicos Makris.

“The games were a shower of information from how things were done inthe past,” says Makris, a specialist in earthquake engineering who joined theNemean Temple project in the fall of 2002, served with Miller as codirectorfor one year, then took over as director last January.

Miller, who retired in December, felt his work at Nemea would not becomplete until attention turned to the Temple of Zeus. “It’s this temple,whichhas been in ruins for centuries,which will provide links to the site’s sacred andcultural origins as well as valuable insights into ancient Greece’s innovativeengineering techniques,” says Miller.

While it is standard fare for archaeologists to preserve and analyze the mon-uments they excavate, Miller made the decision more than 20 years ago to gobeyond that at the temple, taking on the ambitious task of trying to recon-struct the temple’s columns.

“For me,” he says,“the impetus for reconstruction is preservation.Yet whenit came time to literally put the pieces back together again, I had to confessthere were problems with the temple I wasn’t prepared to handle because I’mnot an engineer,” says Miller, a classical archaeologist who began excavations inancient Nemea 30 years ago, unearthing the town’s athletic stadium, entrancetunnel (covered in ancient graffiti with the athletes’ names), track, bathhouse,and what is likely the world’s oldest locker room.“What it has meant is thatwe get an interesting discussion back and forth: archeology-engineering.There’s a spirit of cooperation that Nicos and I have that’s very productive.”

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TEMPLE OF ZEUS RISES AGAINColumn reconstruction revealsan obsession with engineeringperfection that dates back to4th century B.C. Greece

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Built in 330 B.C., the Temple of Nemean Zeus was an architectural and engineering triumph, combining elements of the ClassicDoric temples with a creative twist of Hellenistic experimentation. Its presence had always dominated the Valley of Nemea.“The templewas the religious focal point of the Nemean Games and the one monument that every member of the crowd was sure to visit,” says Miller.

BY JENN SHREVE

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What this meant was that the three remaining columns possessedincredible seismic integrity, Makris says.“This was a crucial discovery.We proved that the Greeks had state-of-the-art knowledge in engi-neering.This temple was designed to withstand earthquake motionsmuch stronger than those expected in the province of Corinthia.Thisis the most solid proof of the brilliance of the ancients’ structuraldesign.”

Unlike the monolithic columns of earlier Greek temples, this tem-ple’s architects designed columns made of mounted stone cylinders,called drums. Each of the 32 outer columns and two inner columnson the entrance porch was constructed of 13 separate limestonecylinders. Measuring an average of 1.5 meters in diameter, three-quarters of a meter in height, and weighing some 2.5 tons each—massive enough, say the experts, to keep them from being looted—these huge cylinders were stacked with astonishing precision in amultidrum column typical of the era.The joints between the drumswere carefully sealed and the porous limestone completely coatedwith a plaster made from the dust of Pentelic marble—fine whitemarble mined from quarries near Athens—giving the humble lime-stone structure the grand appearance of a marble monument.

So why then, did these ancient architects choose the awkward drumsas building blocks instead of single monoliths as the Greeks had beenso fond of using in earlier temples?

“I’d always been told that the Greeks in early days adopted columndrums for economic reasons,” says Miller.“It was cheaper.” But asthe team began replicating the precise fit of the ancient drums—26hand-worked surfaces per column—it became clear that they wereneither easier to use nor more affordable. Makris tested the stabilityof different column designs and found a more compelling reason forthe switch to the multidrum design.

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“THE GREEKS HAD A STRONG BELIEF INTHE PERFECT FITTING OF STONES.”

Fourth century B.C. visitors, who came by the tens of thousandsevery two years for the festival games—athletes, trainers, judges,lawyers, slaves, and priests—made their way through a bustling crowdof magicians, fortune-tellers, historians, poets, and peddlers to thetemple’s altar to offer sacrifices and prayers to Zeus.

They approached the 9,240-square-foot temple from the east,arriving at the temple’s facade, which was elegantly formed by six34-foot-high Doric columns.The outer colonnade of the templeconsisted of 32 columns—six along the short east and west sides,and 12 along the long north and south sides.The building had aninterior colonnade of 14 Corinthian-style columns and stone stairsat the back of the main chamber leading into a sunken crypt, wherelocal oracles dealt out predictions throughout the festival games. Itwas in front of the stairs that the imposing statue of Zeus resided.Long gone, the cult statue was most likely taken to Argos when thegames were moved there in 271 B.C., according to Miller.

The temple was meticulously oriented by its ancient architects sothat at sunrise on the late July day the festival began, the sun’s rayswere precisely angled to pierce directly through the open templedoors, bathing the statue of Zeus in bright light.

Over the years, the temple weathered wars and the erosion of time,but it was the persistently recurring temblors in this seismically activeregion—some exceeding a 7.0 magnitude—that most experts believedbrought the temple down. However, in the course of his analysis,Makris learned otherwise.“It was people who brought the columnsdown,” he says.“They used the foundation and other square stonesto build other structures, including a 5th century basilica to the south,built from the ‘borrowed’ stones.” Early Christians of that era, sayMakris and Miller, threw down the 34-foot columns surroundingthe temple to gain access to the square blocks inside.

“It was seismic safety,” he says. The Greeks had a strong belief inthe perfect fitting of stones, Makris explains.“They often createdsurfaces that would fit together within 1/32 of an inch, which istremendously difficult to do when working with a material as porousas limestone. Despite the fact that they were building with a poormaterial, they managed to create a monument with amazing acuityand craftsmanship.”

It was their obsession with perfection that gave the temple superiorstability, says Makris.“At the same time, the temple was built in sucha way that, should a strong earthquake occur, the stone blocks werenot tied together with rigid connections up the center, so there wasthe necessary mobility, and the temple could absorb the incomingenergy from the earthquake.”

This discovery, Miller realized, was supported by a key linguisticclue: The Greek word for column drum, spondylos, also means vertebra.“We’ve come to understand that the flexibility and shock-absorbing principles of the spinal column were what they were after.”

The process of rebuilding is a painfully slow one, one column peryear, Makris estimates.At a quarter of a million dollars per column,it’s also tremendously costly. Rebuilding each column requires restor-ing the stones along the foundation, the column drums, as well asthe large stone beams that once ran along the tops of the columns,many of which are badly damaged.

The Greek Ministry of Culture mandates that ancient materials bepreserved wherever possible and that building techniques of the pastbe emulated.This means that when repairing damaged stone, workerspreserve the look of the original piece by making a plaster cast of thebroken surface, then replicating it using a complicated system to createa negative impression of the ancient surface on the new replacementblock.A cement-based adhesive that combines the dust of the newstone is mixed in so that the original physical and chemical propertiesof the stone are replicated as nearly as possible, allowing moisture inthe stone to pass through the joint instead of rotting the stone awayat the joint, as would happen if an adhesive like epoxy were used.

“In a simple world we’d just pour concrete,” says Miller.“But sinceour task is to put back into place all the ancient material that hassurvived and reproduce the same techniques used in antiquity to thebest of our ability, there is a great deal that goes into this.”

A growing archive of engineering discoveries has emerged fromthe site.The team discovered that wooden pegs placed in the centerbetween two drums were used as rivets, so the ancient Greeks couldrotate one drum atop another to achieve a perfect fit. In the summerof 2003, cement was discovered below the top of the foundation.

“I always believed the Greeks used cement more frequently thanwe gave them credit for,” says Miller.“Porous limestone has lots ofholes. In putting new blocks together [in modern construction], whenwe run into a block with a lot of holes, we fill it with cement.Theancient Greeks did the same thing, something we’ve recently learned.”

By the end of summer 2002, Miller and his team had successfullyreconstructed two new columns, bringing the number of standingcolumns to a total of five. Over the next two years, Makris hopes tocomplete the work already under way on the next four columns to

Right: Aerial view of the Temple of Zeus. The col-umn drums, weighing a hefty 2.5 tons each onaverage, can be seen scattered around the temple.

left: “We share a fundamental cre-ativity with the ancient Greeks thatmarks the human spirit at its best,”says Miller, working at the NemeanArchives in Dwinelle Hall.

below: “Because its interior hadbeen robbed of so much buildingmaterial, fully reconstructing theTemple of Zeus may not be possible,”says Makris.

fill out the northeast corner of the temple. But one of the mainobstacles the team faces on the next four columns is the need toreconstruct nearly 80 blocks missing from the foundation. In com-pliance with the Ministry of Culture, new material is sourced fromthe same ridge that the temple’s original builders mined. Severalunused drums remain there to this day. Large boulders displacedfrom the construction of a nearby highway have also been cut intorough shape using a chainsaw fitted with a diamond piece, thenhand finished to create the final surfaces.

“The ancient Greeks were not building these temples out of neces-sity.They built them because they wanted to express the greatness oftheir civilization,” says Makris, who is on sabbatical in Greece.“Thisis a remarkable opportunity to preserve a valued part of my country’sheritage.There’s a lot we don’t know yet. Every step in the processhas yielded long-lost information about the ancient Greeks’ remark-able abilities as engineers and architects.” ■

Jenn Shreve is a writer who covers technology and culture. She lives in San Franciscoand is earning her M.F.A. in fiction writing at San Francisco State University.

Sarah Yang, UC Berkeley Media Relations, contributed to this story. stephen miller photo, courtesy of nemea excavations archive, uc berkeley

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MARC RAMIREZ (B.S.’04 ME) startedthis past fall as a master’s student in UCSan Diego’s mechanical engineering program.

SHADRACH ROUNDY (M.S.’00,

Ph.D.’03, ME), a lecturer at AustralianNational University, was cited in theTR100, Technology Review’s list of 100young innovators under the age of 35whose technology research is having aworldwide impact. Roundy was recog-nized for his tiny generators that convertbackground vibrations into electricity topower wireless sensor networks.

EUGENE CHOW (B.S.’95 Eng Physics),formerly of Mountain View, writes:“Tinaand I are finally leaving the Stanford farm(after nine years!) and moving to Fremont(closer to Cal!).We’ll miss the Cal bandtrumpet raids by our apartment and blast-ing the big “C” during Big Game Weekfor the naïve Stanford frosh.”

ERIC DEVRIES (B.S.’90 ME) of Union,Kentucky, is project leader for installationand startup of Toyota’s V8 engine plant inHuntsville,Alabama. He’s now starting adigital engineering project for applicationof 3-D data in Powertrain productionpreparation. edevries@lycos.com

ROELOF DRENTH (B.S.’99, M.S.’00 ME)

is a mechanical engineer for ArcturusMarine Systems of Rohnert Park, Cali-fornia.RoelofDrenth08@hotmail.com

KARA KOCKELMAN (B.S.’91, M.S.’96,

Ph.D.’98 CE) was promoted to associateprofessor of civil engineering at theUniversity of Texas at Austin and gavebirth to twins last year.

KEVIN KORNEGAY (M.S.’90, Ph.D.’92

EECS), associate professorof electrical and computerengineering at CornellUniversity, received the2004 Dr. Janice A.Lumpkin Educator of theYear Award from the

National Society of Black Engineers.Founder and director of the CornellBroadband Communications ResearchLaboratory, which conducts research onhigh-frequency integrated circuit design,Kornegay also received the CornellProvost’s 2004 Award for Distinguished

Scholarship in recognition of his work inradio frequency and wireless systemdevices. He was selected by ScienceSpectrum magazine as one of the “50Most Important Blacks in ResearchScience for 2004,” and received a 2004IBM Faculty Award of $40,000 in sup-port of his research.

MARK STEVENSON (M.S.’98 CE) ofBerkeley, previously an associate withStructural Design Engineers in SanFrancisco, is currently a project managerwith Tipping-Mar & Associates inBerkeley. mstevenson@pcmagic.net

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age 14, he worked in lumbercamps and wheat fields inOregon and Washington.At 17, a talented ball player withAmerican Legion–sponsoredexperience in both high schooland junior college, Martin washeaded for a career in baseball.

But in 1938, a chance meetingwith Cal baseball coach ClintEvans opened the door toMartin’s Berkeley education.Two days later, with a loanin hand and the promise of a job, Martin was enrolled inBerkeley’s Department of CivilEngineering. Once in school, itwas his innate perseverance andhis gift for visualizing complexengineering problems thatformed the foundation of hisextraordinary career.

“The professors and staff atBerkeley were so good to me.They helped me with loans,looked out for me when I wassick, and made sure I had a jobevery summer,” Martin says.“I’m so grateful for everythingthey did.That’s why it’s soimportant to me to give back.”

Martin’s firm has consistentlyranked among the top 20 inBuilding Design and Construction’sTop 300 list and in the top 160of Engineering News Record’s Top500 Design Firms. Martin him-self has been recognized manytimes for his generosity and sup-port in helping others, includingBerkeley Engineering, where he

has established the John A.Martin Endowment to benefitthe Department of Civil andEnvironmental Engineering. In1994, the College recognizedMartin with its DistinguishedEngineering Alumni Award. ■

by carol menaker

the gift of giving

Berkeley, not baseball, has beenvery good to him

2000s

1990s

class notesPlease keep in touch by mailing yournews and photos to us at Class Notes,College of Engineering Office of Marketingand Communications, 1925 Walnut St.#1704, Berkeley, CA 94720-1704. Or go towww.coe.berkeley.edu/classnotes andclick on Submit Your Class Note.

Barbara Newell of Piedmont had the chance to catch up with engineeringgraduate fellows at a recent fellowship reception in Wozniak Lounge.Newell endowed a fellowship fund, one of many available for engineeringgraduate students, in 2001 to honor her late husband, Professor EmeritusGordon Newell, a pioneer in transportation engineering who died in anautomobile accident. Pictured (from left) are Newell, Christos Katsaras,Ashutosh Agrawal, Mark Wan, and John-Michael Wong.

It was standing room only in Sibley Auditorium for a lecture by Nobel laureate and LawrenceBerkeley National Laboratory director Steven Chu (Ph.D.’76 Physics), one of the events cele-brating Cal Homecoming weekend. The lecture, entitled “Life as Beautifully EngineeredSystems,” was an entertaining journey on the molecular scale through several biologicalsystems—the workings of the ear, for example—to illustrate the exquisite design and func-tioning of life forms. Go to www.coe.berkeley.edu/homecoming/ to see a video of Chu’s talk.

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At age 84, structural engineer JackMartin is still looking for “fun projects”like this one, the 270,000-square-footstainless steel Walt Disney Concert Hall,which he can see from the window ofhis 31st-story apartment in downtownLos Angeles.

When Jack Martin (B.S.’43 CEE)looks out the 31st floor windowof his downtown Los Angelesapartment, he has a spectacularview of architect Frank Gehry’slatest creation, the sweeping270,000-square-foot Walt DisneyConcert Hall.While observersmight see this massive stainlesssteel structure of undulatingpanels as a thing of awe andbeauty, Martin sees it as a cre-ative solution to a complexstructural engineering problem,or what he calls “a fun project.”

The Walt Disney Concert Hallis one of hundreds of structuralengineering projects in theMartin & Associates portfoliothat began with the firm’s firstbig commission in 1954, theFremont Hotel and Casino inLas Vegas.Today, at 84, Martincontinues to exhibit the extraor-dinary creativity and imaginationthat still attracts to his firm someof the most ambitious structuralengineering projects in the world.

Martin easily reminisces abouthis life as a young boy in the1930s. In 10 years he attendedeight different schools. From

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Go to www.coe.berkeley.edu/alumni/ for the latest news and eventsof interest to Berkeley Engineering Alumni.

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WUNJEI CHENG (B.S.’83 EE) of NewYork City has invested his own fundsover the past several years in helpinghundreds of homeless get off the streetsin the greater New York area throughperson-to-person contact, remotelythrough the Internet, and through hispublications. wjcheng@yahoo.com

ISHTIAQ CHISTI (M.S.’80 ME) ofLong Beach has an electrical energy busi-ness in the U.S. and works as an interna-tional consultant in the areas of energyefficiency, distributed generation, andsolar energy. ishtiac@aol.com

JAY CLARE (B.S.’86, M.S.’89 ME) ofMoraga is vice president and departmentmanager at URS Corp. in Oakland.jay-clare@urscorp.com

PAUL LING (B.A.’83 CS) is living inPleasanton with his wife LORRAINE

STURGIS LING (B.A.’84 CS) and theirthree children, Kelly, Eric, and Sara. He isworking in the software industry, creatingmobile phone applications. pling@extendinc.com

MARK OBERGFELL (M.S.’82 CE) ofIndianapolis is managing the civil/engi-neering department for Ter Horst,Lamson & Fisk Engineers, a 38-personcivil and structural engineering firm.

GEOFFREY SCHLADOW (M.Eng.’80

CE) has been namedfounding director of theUC Davis Tahoe Environ-mental Research Center,a new center for researchand teaching. An Australiannative, Schladow has been

on the UC Davis faculty since 1993 andpreviously served as a marine researcherat Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory. He hasconducted extensive research at LakeTahoe and is an expert on the fluidmechanics of lakes and their interactionswith fine-particle transport and algaegrowth, problems that have caused LakeTahoe’s legendary clarity to decline.

in a vehicle collision, usually to determine thepre-impact velocities and positions of thoseinvolved. Now he’s trying his hand at filmmak-ing, and guess what the film’s about?

Fast cars, of course.Karne and friend Steve Davy, an award-win-

ning videographer, have made a documentaryabout Speedweek, the event sponsored eachAugust by the Southern California TimingAssociation that turns Utah’s famed BonnevilleSalt Flats into a miles-long track for everythingfrom powered barstools to souped-up dieseltrucks that can travel at speeds of 250 mph.

“Some of these people get their vehicles to go really fast,” Karne says. “They may nothave an engineering background, but theyhave lots of hands-on experience with land-speed vehicles.”

The film, Bonneville: Wide Open, premieredlast November at the California IndependentFilm Festival in Livermore, with guest appear-ances by both filmmakers and one of the driversfeatured in the film, who showed off his cleverlyengineered streamliner specially designed tonab a land speed record at Bonneville.

“We wanted the film to appeal to a generalaudience but also to gearhead types, and Ithink we achieved that.” Karne says. “But wehad to keep some of the speed secrets out.For example, if someone had a special motordetail or steering arrangement—and that wasthe stuff that really appealed to me as anengineer—the builders said it would putthem years behind if we revealed thosesecrets to their competition.”

Made on a “proverbial shoestring budget,”the film has not yet been picked up for widerdistribution. But the filmmakers are hoping to get it on the Discovery Channel or similaroutlet and, in the meantime, plan to sell DVDs through their Web site, www.bonnevillewideopen.com.

Karne’s son Matt, now a junior at Berkeley,drives a ’62 Chevy hot rod. Among his owncollection of five cars, Karne says, there’s stillan old Corvette. “But it doesn’t get out toooften these days.” ■

Gearhead turned filmmaker tells story of Speedweek

Benn Karne, on location in Utah’s starkly beau-tiful Bonneville Salt Flats, explores the quirkycharacters who participate in Speedweek everyAugust in Bonneville: Wide Open, a documen-tary he made with longtime friend Steve Davy.

Andy Lieberman (B.S.’88 EECS) has been recognized with a 2004 award fromthe San Jose Tech Museum of Innovation for his work with Enlace Quiché, asmall nongovernment organization dedicated to preserving the languageand culture of Guatemala’s native Mayan population.

Founded in 2000 by the Academy for Educational Development and USAID,with Lieberman as its president, Enlace Quiché’s goal is to incorporate tech-nology into the training of bilingual (Spanish-Mayan) teachers. In just fouryears, the organization has established 28 technology centers, produced 14interactive Mayan language CDs, launched an Internet portal, and opened a

demonstration and training center.Credit for these successes, Lieberman says, goes not to him, but to the thousands of Guatemalan

teacher and student participants who are using computers and, at the same time, keeping theirMayan heritage alive.

“A lot of people in technology think that just getting access to a computer is what the developingworld needs,” Lieberman says. “But there’s a whole other issue of making technology meaningfuland responsive to people’s needs. If you’re going to bring technology to rural Guatemala, it has tobe culturally relevant and in their language.”

Lieberman grew up in San Francisco and helped Lowell High install its first computers before hegraduated in 1983. According to his father, Andy has been gravitating toward this kind of work hiswhole life.

“My son has always been enterprising, and he’s always been interested in other people,” saysHarry Lieberman. “He once talked about getting a bus, putting computers on it, and driving aroundrural areas so kids could use the computers. Now he’s basically doing what he dreamed of.”

As an EECS student at Berkeley, Andy entertained the idea of a high-tech career, but an unsatis-fying internship with a large Boston-based semiconductor company changed all that.

“I was having a hard time finding meaning in the work,” he says. “I kept asking myself, ‘What amI really contributing to society?’ I had so many opportunities growing up; teaching and sharingwhat I have and what I know are very strong values.”

On a 1990 trip to Guatemala to learn Spanish, Lieberman fell in love, first with the country, thenwith a woman named Tomasa, who is now his wife. They live with their two children in the moun-tain town of Santa Cruz del Quiché, where he is known as “Teacher Andy.”

Go to www.enlacequiche.org.gt/getknow.htm for more about Enlace Quiché. ■

ROGER FLYNN (B.S.’64 EE) ofAlbuquerque writes,“I am retiring asEVP and COO of Public Service Companyof New Mexico to become a full-timefly fisherman, beer brewer, cabinet maker,and tourist.” zinlover@osogrande.com

EECS alum teaching computers to speak K’iche’

Andy Lieberman (above)was honored by the TechMuseum for his pioneer-ing efforts to bring com-puters and the Internetinto Guatemala’s educa-tional system. A key ele-ment is the use of K’iche’and more than 20 otherindigenous languagesthat predate the SpanishConquest.

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Benn Karne (B.S.’72 ME) loves fast cars. Beforehe was old enough to drive, he updated thebrake system of his dad’s 1930 Model A pickupfrom its original all-mechanical arrangement to“modern” hydraulics. He speaks nostalgicallyof his first car, a big old ’62 Chevy, and theCorvette he road-raced before settling downwith the responsibilities of home, family, anda real job.

“The reason I got into engineering in the firstplace was because I liked hot rods,” Karnesays. Self-employed for 15 years, he now spe-cializes in vehicle accident reconstruction,that is, determining the events that occurred

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1970sRUDOLPH BONAPARTE (M.S.’78,

Ph.D.’81 CE) is president and CEO ofGeoSyntec Consultants, a national engi-neering and environmental sciences firm.He is living in Atlanta with his wife Annaand their three children Sarah,Alex, andMaria. rbonaparte@geosyntec.com

MARK CAPRON (B.S.’76, M.S.’81 CE)

of Oxnard, California, is a professionalcivil engineer with six patents who hasserved with the U.S. Navy Civil EngineerCorps, the Naval Civil EngineeringLaboratory, and Ventura RegionalSanitation District. He is an activist onenvironmental issues such as air quality,methods of slowing global warming, andminimizing traffic congestion.TheVentura County Star recently published hiseditorial advocating a contest—based onthe DARPA Grand Challenge—to stimu-late development of smart cars that mini-mize such transportation-associated envi-ronmental problems. capox@aol.com

JAMES FRENCH (B.S.’78, M.S.’82 CE)

is principal geotechnical engineer atMACTEC Engineering and Consultingin Oakland. jbfrenchge@earthlink.net

ANTHONY MOROYAN (M.S.’77 EE)

of Los Altos Hills is chairman ofViasphere, International, Inc., whichmanages venture capital funds to helpincubate high-tech startups.

ROGER VAN BRUNT (M.S.’77 EE) isprincipal engineer at RF Micro Devicesin Scotts Valley, California. He is marriedwith one 16-year-old child and enjoysrunning, gardening, and travel. rvanbrunt@mac.com

RICHARD CHINN (B.S.’61 CE) ofHillsborough, California, is an EngineeringAlumni Society director and this year’sdesignated director for the College ofEngineering on the California AlumniAssociation Board. His wife Carrie (’65Education) is completing her 39th year in elementary education as principal ofLomita Park School.Their daughter Jamie(2000, UC Davis) is a project manager forGap Corporation. rickbchinn@engineeralum.berkeley.edu

THOMAS DAVINROY (Ph.D.’66 CE)

of Alameda is retired and traveling theworld. He writes,“I attended a meetinglast July in Helsinki, Finland, for those ofus who are deaf.”

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RICHARD GOODMAN (Ph.D.’64 MSE)

of Mendocino wasawarded an honor-ary doctorate fromGraz University ofTechnology inAustria for his sig-nificant and innova-tive contributionsto engineering

geology and rock mechanics and his bio-graphy of Austrian civil engineer KarlTerzaghi. Emeritus Professor of Geo-technical Engineering at Berkeley, heworked in both mineral technology andcivil engineering.When he retired in 1994,he was awarded the Berkeley Citation.Also active in opera as a singer, producer,pianist, and stage director, he founded theBerkeley Opera and continues to performroles there.

JACK LINDLEY (B.S.’60 CE) ofFremont retired from Alameda CountyPublic Works Agency. lindleyjack@comcast.net

STAN LUCAS (B.S.’62 ME) of LongBeach is working full time at age 65. Hewrites,“The concept of retirement istruly frightening!”

UKRIT SIRIPRUSANAN (B.S.’68,

M.S.’72 CE) of Barrigada, Guam, is presi-dent and principal engineer of Geo-engineering and Testing and MarianasDrilling of Guam and Geotesting of Saipan,serving the western Pacific for 30 years.

GEORGE ANSOLABEHERE (B.S.’52

CE) of Bakersfield retired as a construc-tion engineer for Kern County. Marriedin 1959 to Marcelle Ariey, they have fourchildren and seven grandchildren.

WILLIAM BLYTHE (M.S.’57 CE) ofPalo Alto received his Ph.D. in appliedmechanics from Stanford in 1962 andtaught at San Jose State University for 42 years, serving 12 years as chair of theDepartment of Civil Engineering. He isnow retired but consulting in vehicledynamics and collision analysis.wrbsr@sbcglobal.net

ROLAND DUQUETTE (B.S.’56 EECS) ofLa Canada, California, is now retired fromhis career as an electrical engineer, currentlyserving as a financial officer for six trusts.A member of Eta Kappa Nu and Tau BetaPi, he spent seven years in the U.S. Navy.

DAVID EBERLY (B.S.’55, M.S.’56, ME)

of San Francisco writes,“I’m retired andgoofing off with photo and computerprojects after many tedious years in theunusual occupation of tending facilitiesmaintenance and repairs in a popularlocal free lunch dining room.”eberlydk@aol.com

RONALD GERDES (B.S.’57 ME) isworking part-time at NASA AmesResearch Center’s Flight Simulation Lab as an engineering test pilot.vstolguy@aol.com

RONALD GERSTEN (B.S.’56 ME) ofCreve Coeur, Missouri, has a dental prac-tice and is writing two books, Acts ofKindness and Balance in the Universe:Theory of Gravity and Time. His grandsoncelebrated his Bar Mitzvah in Israel.

JAMES INGRAM (B.S.’59 ME) ofVacaville has been retired since 1995 butcontinues as a staff consultant to the citiesof Vacaville and Dixon. He has been alicensed civil engineer since 1965. jhivacaville@comcast.net

A.T. (TOM) LEWIS (B.S.’54 CE) ofBerkeley writes,“I just returned fromParis, France, where I had the privilege of

alumni update

Aragon has developed a cockpit displaysystem that displays invisible air currents towarn pilots of impending disturbances in theair. The system was incorporated into a high-fidelity rotorcraft simulator and tested by 16U.S. Coast Guard and Navy pilots, with dramaticresults: For hazardous landing approaches inhighly turbulent conditions, the hazard indi-cator reduced the crash rate from 19 percentto 6.3 percent.

Perhaps the most dramatic thing aboutAragon, however, is that she used to be deathlyafraid of heights, a fear she aggressively con-quered after a flight in a private plane over thebeautiful San Francisco coastline. (“I was inheaven,” she recalls.) Now she fearlessly exe-cutes air tricks like multiple snap rolls and tail-slides.

“Mastering my fear gave me a feeling ofconfidence that has carried over to other partsof my life,” Aragon says. “Let’s face it. Comparedto pointing the nose of an airplane straight at theground and flying vertically down at 200 milesan hour, everything else in life seems easy.” ■

by carol menaker

A computer scientist with a bird’s-eye viewph

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Once painfully shy, late to ride a bike, and nerv-ous about driving a car with a stick shift, Aragonis quite at home in her custom-built Sabre 320,which climbs at 4,500 feet per minute and has aroll rate of 420 degrees per second.

Shortly after completing her master’s degree,Cecilia Aragon (M.S.’87 CS) earned her pilot’slicense, became an air show pilot, and was atwo-time member of the U.S. Aerobatic Team.Now, she has returned to Berkeley after a 14-year hiatus from her studies to complete herdoctoral degree in computer science, whereher passions for flight and mathematics merge.

“It’s so exciting being back in school,” shesays. “Berkeley is really at the forefront ofthis kind of work.”

As a computer scientist in the computationalsciences division at NASA Ames Research Centerin Mountain View, Aragon’s work involves thestudy of local wind shear and other airflowhazards in the search for ways to improve airtravel safety. With more than 5,000 accident-free hours in flight, she may have a more per-sonal investment in keeping the skies friendly.

“I have these two viewpoints that not manypeople have, and I want to use them to makea difference,” Aragon says. “People involvedin aviation tend to be very specialized. I’veknown 20-year veteran aircraft designers whohave never been in the aircraft they weredesigning for.”

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Saad (above, left) was one of the students inMaurer’s (right) ICAP training course to teachyoung Iraqi men construction skills. “I don’tknow how or where he got the Cal hat, but hewore it every day,” Maurer says. “You can seewhy I took a special liking to him.”

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As attested by their motto, “We build, wefight,” construction battalions are oftendeployed for civil/military operations (CMO),helping a wartime community rebuild itsinfrastructure and spirit. This was the topobjective when NMCB-74 was redeployed inFebruary 2004 to Fallujah, one of the war’shottest hot spots.

“CMO was our major reason for going back,”Maurer says, “to help the Iraqis get theireconomy and community back together—schools, medical clinics, anything that had animmediate impact. But the insurgency was infull swing and, unfortunately, the local peopleand their families were under threat of beingkilled by the terrorists if they worked with usor collaborated in the work of Coalition Forces.”

The battalion did succeed in initiating theIraqi Construction Apprentice Program (ICAP),an 8–12-week course in basic constructionand project management that also providedIraqi men tools and incentives to start theirown construction companies. Already disen-franchised by unemployment and a crumblinginfrastructure, many Iraqi men are unable tosave the traditional dowry—in Iraq the man’sresponsibility—required to prove to a woman’sfamily that they can support a wife. Con-sequently, Maurer believes, they are easilytempted to join the insurgency as a way of life.

“Construction is a universal skill, and webelieved the training would invigorate thesemen,” Maurer says. “We were determined tohelp the Iraqis succeed in embracing theirown freedom.” ■

Maurer’s NMCB-74 unit was first deployedto Al-Jaber Airbase in Kuwait in late 2002 tobuild the largest construction project in pre-hostilities Iraq: a 22-acre parking apron andtaxiway for the Third Marine Air Wing’s F/A-18Hornet aircraft. When war was declared onMarch 21, 2003, the battalion moved to a critical role in supporting the First MarineExpeditionary Force as it moved into Iraq andsuccessfully toppled Saddam’s regime.

“The Marines had to move quickly over themiles from Kuwait to Baghdad,” Maurer says.“We were two or three days behind them,making sure their MSR [main supply route]was intact so their supplies could keep upwith them.”

Maurer’s Seabees worked in and aroundNasiriyah, building and repairing bridges andcompleting an unfinished interstate. The tourof duty earned them several awards, includingthe Presidential Unit Citation and the Societyof American Military Engineering’s PeltierAward for outstanding performance in activeduty. On May 30, 2003, they returned to homebase in Gulfport, Mississippi, to a hero’s wel-come.

Construction battalions, also known as theSeabees, originated in 1941, when World WarII created a need for skilled civil engineerswho could do standard and specialized con-struction and battle-damage repair as well asfight battles. Immortalized in John Wayne’s1944 “The Fighting Seabees,” these battalionshave been much decorated in their 60-yearhistory for both war and peacetime operations.

U.S. Navy Commander Cliff Maurer (M.S.’88CE), a career military officer with a long list ofnaval assignments and decorations to showfor his nearly 20-year career, recently returnedhome after leading Naval Mobile ConstructionBattalion 74 (NMCB-74) to Iraq in two toursof duty. The first was during the fall of SaddamHussein in the early months of 2003; the sec-ond was one grim year later, when the Iraqiinsurgency first peaked and the reality of warset in.

Maurer was reassigned last July to anadministrative post in Washington, D.C., onthe Chief Naval Operations staff for shoreinfrastructure management. A native ofAllentown, Pennsylvania, and 1984 graduateof the U.S. Naval Academy, Maurer creditsProfessor Ben Gerwick at Berkeley withteaching him how to think thoroughlythrough and execute a project, skills he sayshe needed every day he was in Iraq.

“We had lots of tense moments in Fallujah,”Maurer says, describing action in the SunniTriangle, the 100-mile swath from Baghdadnorth to Tikrit where 80 percent of Iraqi guer-rilla attacks occur.

“This conflict won’t be resolved in a fewmonths,” Maurer says. “It’ll take years, and it won’t always be pretty. But what gives mehope is the Iraqi people themselves. They’rea lot like us. Despite our cultural differences,they are good people who value educationand want to make life better for their chil-dren. They were very appreciative of the workwe did.”

Alumnus Maurer Heads Seabees in Iraq Conflict

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working on planning software for theFrench National Railways. One neverknows where civil engineering will lead!”

WILFRED LEWIS JR. (B.S.’52 EE) ofSan Marino, California, retired in 1993after more than 41 years at NorthropGrumman. He traveled with his wife of33 years, Dorothy, to Alaska, Europe, theeast coast, Sacramento, and Hawaii beforeshe passed away in December 2001.

WILLIAM SCHICK (B.S.’57, M.S.’58 ME)

of Los Altos, is happily retired after a veryrewarding career designing a broad range ofcommunications equipment and usingmany of the subjects he learned at BerkeleyEngineering. vbschick@earthlink.net

JAMES SPIRAKIS (B.S.’55 IE) is retiredand living in the Villages Golf and CountryClub in San Jose. jamesspirakis@msn.com

CHARLES FAULDERS (B.S.’48 ME) ofCamarillo, California, retired in 1990 fromNorth American Aviation, Inc. He writes,“I’m enjoying retirement and am an avidreader of newspapers and books. Duringa recent trip to Oakland to see our sonThom, we drove by Hesse Hall. It’s stillthere, by gosh! Brought back memories!”

GUY FLUCK (B.S.’49 CE) of Hemet,California, has advanced Alzheimer’s. He

worked as a design engineer on the spaceprogram at Boeing and is proud to be aBerkeley graduate.

KONG GO (B.S.’47 CE) of Albany isretired and active at Berkeley ChineseBaptist Church. He writes,“My dear wifeKit Fay Go passed on in 2002.” gokong@aol.com

RUSSELL GREEN (B.S.’47 EE) ofWalnut Creek is retired from his career as a control systems engineer.

CARL GRONDORF (B.S.’43 EE), aBerkeley native, lives in Grand Junction,Colorado, with his wife of 54 years, EdithKatherine Drake. He served with the U.S.

alumni update

Berkeley Engineering celebrates distinguished alumni

The four guests of honor included a charismaticGeorgia-born educator, one of California’sleading venture capitalists, a famous under-graduate who registered at Berkeley under afalse name, and a Korean American whofound his major by asking a friend whichcourses would be the most difficult.

This year’s top alumni—Wayne Clough,Floyd Kvamme, Steve Wozniak, and In SikRhee—were celebrated by Berkeley Engineer-ing at its 30th annual Distinguished EngineeringAlumni Awards (DEAA) banquet, attended by180 guests in the lobby of Hearst MemorialMining Building last September.

Clough (Ph.D.’69 CE), a Georgia native andnow president of Georgia Institute of Technology,is an internationally recognized leader in geo-technical engineering and one of the country’sforemost engineering educators.

Kvamme (B.S.’59 EECS) is partner emeritusin the Menlo Park–based venture capital firmKleiner, Perkins, Caufield, and Byers. One offive founding members of National Semi-conductor in 1967, he helped transform the

DEAA winners (from left) In Sik Rhee, WayneClough, Floyd Kvamme, and Steve Wozniak withDean Newton (foreground). The DEAA recognizesexemplary professional and technical leaders,academic and research careers, or public servicecontributions in engineering. Rhee received theOutstanding Young Engineer Award, establishedin 2002 to recognize a rising leader under age 40.

Army Signal Corps during World War II,where he received special training tomaintain operation of long-distance tele-phone service to headquarters. In additionto professional positions with UC Berkeley,the U.S. Postal Service, and a manufacturingfirm in Colorado, he has worked withHabitat for Humanity and served in variouscapacities for the Presbyterian Churchthroughout the U.S., most recently as pas-toral advisor to the National Committeeof Presbyterian Men.

J. PUTNAM HENCK (B.S.’40 CE) ofSky Forest, California, is now retiredfrom a general engineering and buildingcontracting career.

CHARLES “CAP” KIERULFF (B.S.’41

EE) of Los Angeles is retired from his owncompany, Kierulff Electronics. He writes,“Barbara and I have celebrated our 63-year anniversary. Over the past 25 years Ihave collected vitals on 11,000 Kierulffrelatives. In addition to EE, I enjoyedrowing on the Cal Crew from 1937 to1941 with Gregory Peck and Dave DeVarona!” capkierulff@msn.com

ROBERT KUSHNIR (B.S.’48 EE) wasassistant engineer on a B-24 at Iwo Jimaduring World War II. He retired in 1985from Colorado Springs Iron & Metal andC.S.Auto Wrecking. He had a majorstroke in 1988, quit playing tennis in1998, and underwent cardiac surgery in2002. His older son Steve and family livein Germany.

LUDY LANGER (B.S.’47 ME; B.A.’48 Bus

Ad) is back to moving cars for Hertz atthe Sacramento airport after 18 years ofretirement.

PHILIP SKARIN (B.S.’46 CE) ofSherman Oaks, California, is serving his11th year as publicity chair of theRetired Los Angeles City EmployeesAssociation. He has also retired after sixyears as a World Masters weightliftingchampion. philskar@aol.com

JOHN VIDMAR (B.S.’43 ME) of LosAngeles is retired and as busy as ever,traveling, reading, collecting, and invest-ing. JohnVidmar@aol.com

ROBERT WEYAND (B.S.’41 Metallurgy)

of Prescott,Arizona, is retired and enjoy-ing life, using his computer to keep intouch with friends.rweyand@cableone.net

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Syracuse-based transistor company into a billion-dollar microelectronics supplier.

Wozniak (B.S.’86 EECS) had already inventedApple computers when he became a student atBerkeley Engineering. To lower his profile, heenrolled as “Rocky Clark,” a moniker constructedfrom his dog’s name and his then-wife’s surname.He founded Wheels of Zeus, Inc., in 2001, tofurther investigate solutions to everyday prob-lems through education and technology.

Rhee (B.S.’93 EECS) enrolled at Berkeley in1989. Not knowing which courses to attend heasked a friend which were the hardest. “EECSis hell,” his friend replied, so Rhee promptlyenrolled in EECS. After graduating, he foundedKiva, a software startup that was acquired firstby Netscape and later by AOL. In 2002, hefounded Loudcloud, now Opsware Inc., theleading provider of data center automationsoftware.

Visit www.coe.berkeley.edu/alumni_friends/deaa/ for a video of the event. ■

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Richard Nye (B.S.’66 CEE) took the long route to his current profession. First there was the engi-neering degree; then there was the professional baseball career. Now he runs his own veterinarypractice in the Chicago suburb of Westchester.

“I thought that baseball was a fluke, and I wanted something to fall back on,” Nye says of hisengineering degree. “Besides I didn’t think I was drafted high enough to take the whole thing seriously.”

Nye was working toward his degree on an academic and athletic scholarship when, as a junior,he was drafted in the first-ever baseball draft by the Houston Astros. Drafted again in 1966 by theChicago Cubs, he finished that year pitching in the majors. After a taste of the big leagues, althoughhe returned to school to complete his bachelor’s and even considered graduate school, he soonhad an epiphany: Engineering was no longer his passion.

“Engineering didn’t inspire me, so I went off to spring training and played professional baseballfor four years. I even got an opportunity to throw fast balls to Willie Mays and the rest of theGiants,” Nye says. He played for the Cardinals and the Expos before a torn rotator cuff halted hisfive-summer career. He was 28 years old and had a young family to raise.

Unfortunately, there was no baseball nest egg to cushion the blow. Unlike the highly paid ath-letes of today, ball players in the ’60s made a minimum starting salary of about $7,000 a year. Hedecided to go back to school, this time in veterinary science because of his deep-rooted love ofanimals.

In 1986—inspired by Susan Brown, a veterinarian colleague who later became his second wife—Nye opened the Midwest Bird and Exotic Animal Hospital. The first all-exotic animal hospital in theU.S., it caters specifically to birds and exotic pets like ferrets and iguanas. With a staff of 26, thehospital has about 15,000 client visits a year.

“I get a lot of pleasure from communicating with the pets’ owners and connecting with the ani-mals,” he says. Although he rarely uses his engineering skills, he says his various career choiceshave steered his life in the right direction.

“If I had gotten involved in medicine right off the bat (no pun intended),” Nye says, “I would haveended up in human medicine, and I wouldn’t have been happy. I prefer working with animals.” ■

CEE alumnus hits home run on third career choice

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Call for 2005 DEAAnominations Nominations are now being accepted for2005 distinguished alumni who will be honored at next year’s event on Saturday,September 24, 2005, at Hearst MemorialMining Building. Nominations may be sub-mitted online and must be received byMarch 15, 2005. Go to www.coe.berkeley.edu/alumni_friends/deaa/index.html tonominate your favorite alum.

For details and updates visit www.coe.berkeley.edu/alumni or call 510.643.7100.

The Grass gets Greener...when you come home to Berkeley’s Northside

February 3 4:30-7:30 p.m. Real World EngineeringParticipate as a panelist at this popular student/alumni event.Bechtel Engineering Center

April 16 Cal Day & Engineering Alumni Society Annual MeetingBegin your day by visiting with alumni, parents, and friends, then tour Berkeley’s labs, lecture halls, and museums at the campus’s largest open house.McLaughlin Hall Plaza

May 7 Berkeley in Silicon ValleyJoin us at the 5th annual faculty symposium and networking event.Sun Microsystems Conference Center, Santa Clara

May 21 8:30 a.m. - noon. College of Engineering CommencementGreek Theater

Berkeley Engineering. It’s your College.

Join us for these upcoming special events

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JOHN H. AUSTIN (Ph.D.’63 CE), envi-ronmental engineer, died last August athis home in Arlington,Vermont. In morethan 20 years with the U.S.Agency forInternational Development (USAID), heworked to improve water supplies andsanitation systems worldwide.A professorat four universities, he conducted trainingin sanitation and public health throughoutthe world.A bird-watcher and mountaineer,he once climbed the Matterhorn.

WILLIAM C. CHENOWETH (M.S.’40

CE), a civil engineer who survived theBataan Death March, two years in a Japa-nese prison camp, and the destruction ofa Japanese transport ship during WorldWar II, died last June in Seattle. He grad-uated at the top of his class from WestPoint and joined the Army Corps ofEngineers, retiring as a lieutenant colonelin 1946.

JAMES EATON (B.S.’58, M.S.’61,

Ph.D.’63 EE), a Sacramento native whoreached the rank of master inventor in 40years of working for IBM, died last Septem-ber in San Jose. His contributions includedearly generations of supermarket check-out scanning equipment, magnetic tapedata storage products, and serving on thecommission that recommended computercontrol of the power grid following the1965 East Coast blackout.

JOHN R. EDMUND (B.S.’47 ME) ofBerkeley died last April.

JOHN JAY FISKE JR. (B.S.’41 EE) ofCoulterville, California, who worked forWestinghouse as electronic control spe-cialist during World War II, died lastMarch. He organized the electronic components professional group, whichbecame the Institute of Electrical andElectronics Engineers.

in memoriam

John Austin Sam Ruvkun Lawrence Stark Charles Susskind

GEORGE RICHARD HERRICK

(B.S.’39 ME) died in Reno last May. A testand trials engineer at Consolidated SteelCorporation, he enlisted in the U.S. Navyand served as an aviation ordnance officerin rocket training during World War II.He retired in 1983 after 27 years withH.C. Smith Oil Tool Company. He wasalso a gardener, specializing in orchids.

SAM RUVKUN (B.S.’41 CE) of Pied-mont, a Kaiser Engineers vice presidentand founding president of the EngineeringAlumni Society, died last June. His careerat Kaiser coincided with the lifespan ofthe company. Ruvkun helped fund thebuilding of Soda Hall and BechtelEngineering Center.

LAWRENCE W. STARK , Berkeley professor emeritus of physiological opticsand engineering, died last October ofnon-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.Trained as aneurologist, he was a pioneer in usingcontrol and information theory to char-acterize neurological systems and apply-ing engineering principles to biologicalsystems. He joined the Berkeley facultyin 1968 with joint appointments inoptometry, EECS, and ME.

CHARLES SUSSKIND, 82, professoremeritus of EE at Berkeley, died in Juneof Alzheimer’s. His research focused ongeneration and transmission of micro-waves and their interaction with biologicaltissues. His work formed the foundationfor bioengineering at Berkeley, whichbecame a department in 1999.A nativeof Prague, Susskind joined the U.S.Armyas a radar specialist during World War II,then moved with his wife to the U.S. Hejoined the Berkeley faculty in 1955 andwas assistant dean of engineering from1964 to 1968. He loved classical musicand played the cello.

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ROBERT S. SWANSON (B.S.’38 EE),a former research scientist with NASA’sprecursor, the National AdvisoryCommittee for Aeronautics, died lastSeptember in Fairfax,Virginia, at age 89.Working with testing models in windtunnels, he developed procedures for correcting test data for the constrainingeffects of wind tunnel walls and for eval-uating the effects of propeller thrust onairplane stability. He worked for Lockheedand Northrop before founding AstroConsultants. He was an avid golfer, tennisplayer, and enjoyed square dancing.

GEORGE MASLACH (B.S.’42 ME), deanof engineering from 1963 to 1972 andvice chancellor for research and academicaffairs, died November 11 at age 84 fol-lowing a stroke.A native of San Francisco,he began his career as an aeronauticalengineer and joined the Berkeley facultyin 1952.As dean, he boosted engineeringenrollment, and the school rose to No. 2in the national rankings of engineeringschools. In 2001, a campus building wasnamed for him and his wife.

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