A GOOD TIME WAS HAD BY ALL: Berkeley Engineering graduates and their families and friends, along with alumni and staff, celebrated this year's College of Engineering fall graduation at a breakfast on December 11, 2004, in the Hearst Memorial Mining Building. There were 208 students receiving their diploma. The EECS department graduated the most with 67 student.

More than meets the eye - Optics students investigate Berkeley's historical microscopes

In the 1830s, a Parisian optician named Charles Chevalier built a horizontal brass microscope using multiple lenses. The model produced a higher magnification power than earlier models and advanced microscope design. Chevalier christened his striking new instrument the Chevalier Universal Microscope and built more.

In the 1960s, Cal alumnus Orville Golub (Ph.D. '44 Bacteriology) acquired one of the Chevaliers and in 1995 donated it to his alma mater, where it was lovingly displayed in the east foyer of the Valley Life Sciences Building with his 44 other historical microscopes. But no one knew if the Chevalier or the other instruments in the Golub Collection still worked.

This past fall, eight teams of undergraduate bioengineering students took history - the Chevalier, the Henry Pyefinch, the Powell & Lealand Compound, and the Leitz Compound microscopes - off the proverbial shelf.

The BioE 164 Optics and Microscopy class wore gloves and a mantle of ...[FULL STORY]

EECS senior wins Gene Kan Memorial Scholarship for 'elegant' and useful technology

With a stroke of programming genius, EECS senior Patrick Shyu in 2002 created Final Distance, the website that generates your ideal class schedule and is now used by thousands of Cal students. He also designed UCB Live!, a Cal event-finder. For these two programs, Shyu was recently chosen as the inaugural winner of the Gene Kan Memorial Scholarship. The award honors an undergraduate student who has developed the most

simple, useable and useful technology. Winners receive a $1,000 cash prize.

"It was a very elegant solution," wrote Yaroslav Faybishenko (B.S. '01 LSCS), one of the scholarship's donors. "Its wide reach within the intended audience leaves no doubt as to the author's talent."

Shyu says he's honored and hopes to inspire others to develop their own projects. "Students can't just rely on coursework to get...[FULL STORY]

The serious business of inventing fun - ME design expo features the playful as well as the practical

It was mesmerizing and a little goofy. While the haunting music of Alicia Keyes's "Falling" poured from a nearby stereo, a plastic volcano erupted water, subsided, and erupted again in rhythm to the music. Sort of child's science experiment meets miniature Vegas water display. Whether it was the cool music or weird gurglings, students visiting the ME 102B Design Expo in December couldn't walk past the project without stopping.

"It's pure entertainment," explained then-ME senior (now alumnus) Phil Roan, who helped build it. "We really like listening to music and watching things." With this in mind, Roan and his teammates came up with their tabletop fountain-graphic equalizer, which they dubbed "Dancing Leprechaun." (The name came from the team's original idea, which, excuse the pun, never got off the ground.)

The official theme of ME professor Liwei Lin's class expo was innovation, but often that meant fun. Picture the Roll-Bot, for example: Someone places...[FULL STORY]

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