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Remember when you fell in love with polymers?
FANTASTIC PLASTIC:
In December, teams of BioE/ME C223 students demonstrated
the fun properties of polymers for elementary school children
visiting Lawrence Hall of Science. Here ME graduate student
Fabian Beltran (left, foreground) leads a young visitor in
a hands-on exercise about brittle versus ductile. Beltran
gave the student a small disk of paraffin and asked him to
smash a metal heart into it with a soup can. “Oooh,
you smashed it big time!” Beltran enthused when the
child splintered the disk. “That’s called brittle.” Beltran
then handed him a new disk that was warm. “Feel it?” he
asked. “Now smash this one.” The student throttled
the disk, but was impressed when it remained intact with
just a heart imprint. “That’s ductile,” Beltran
explained. “The heat hits the molecules, causing them
to vibrate, and that allows them to slide past each other.” The
child nodded solemnly, collected his souvenir disk, and headed
to another demonstration, “Let’s Get Soaked:
Which material makes the best diaper?” (Rachel Shafer
photo)
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How do you choose? For insight, come to the opening panel of Real
World Engineering (RWE) on Thursday, February 2, at 4:30 p.m. in Sibley
Auditorium. Dean Richard Newton will explore this topic with two Berkeley
engineers who have chosen distinctly different career paths: Claire
Tomlin (Ph.D.’98 EECS) is an EECS associate professor at Berkeley
and Gani Jusuf (B.S.’86, M.S.’90, Ph.D.’93 EECS)
is vice president at Marvell Semiconductor. Learn how they selected
their career paths and what factors influenced their choices. Here’s
a preview.
Claire Tomlin
Q. You chose an academic career after graduate school. Why?
A. In graduate school, I got to work on a research topic of my choice
very intensively and, at the same time, I had opportunities to do research
in industry and at NASA, bringing aspects of this research into my
Ph.D. dissertation. I chose academia because of this “best of
both worlds” aspect. And I love working with students. [FULL STORY]
Sigrida Reinis (B.S.’84, M.E.’89, Ph.D.’97 CEE) likes to
see things done right. When the Navy dragged its feet cleaning up the decommissioned
shipyard Hunters Point in south San Francisco, Reinis held those feet to the
fire.
“It was ridiculous what the Navy was trying to get away with,” the
senior environmental engineer says. “We worked with city officials to
help them take a stand and negotiate with the Navy for the best technical
solution.
Now, Hunters Point is being cleaned up to meet current environmental
standards. It was the right thing for the community.”
Reinis works at Treadwell & Rollo, a geotechnical-environmental engineering
consulting firm with offices in San Francisco, Oakland, and Sacramento.
Among her many projects, she has also helped the Presidio Land Trust complete
a
closure of two landfills there. [FULL STORY]
Come meet Ken Behring on Wednesday, February 1, at 4 p.m.
in Sibley Auditorium. In a conversation with Dean Richard Newton,
Behring will
discuss his passion for advancing technology that supports safe drinking
water. A reception will follow in Garbarini Lounge. The event is part
of the College’s View from the Top lecture series.
By age 27, Ken Behring was a millionaire and worlds away from the
poverty he’d experienced as a boy during the Depression. From
a young age, he was propelled to earn money and earn it as quickly
as he could. He sold newspapers, cut lawns, and worked in a lumberyard
as a youngster. Right out of high school, he sold cars, and it was
there, in the car industry, that he discovered a talent for salesmanship
and an eye for business. Soon he owned a dealership. Then several.
In the 1960s, he moved to Florida and parlayed his gifts into real
estate development, later moving to California to found and build
Blackhawk, an exclusive East Bay residential community. By the 1990s,
Behring
was a billionaire, and the force that drove him to earn money took
a new direction. He began giving his fortune away to help those in
need. [FULL STORY]
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