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March 16, 2007 Vol. 77,
no. 9S
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| FUNDED! Winners of the 2006 CITRIS white paper competition with Tom Kalil and CITRIS director Shankar Sastry (back row, right).
AARON WALBURG PHOTO
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Calling all big ideas and research projects
Bears Breaking Boundaries contest will award $138,000 to students
Need funding?
The Big Ideas @ Berkeley program, in conjunction with the ASUC student
government, is again offering its Bears Breaking Bound-aries contest,
with $138,000 up for grabs this year. The competition sponsors creative,
high-impact student research and ideas in 10 different categories,
including bio-inspired innovation, global poverty reduction, synthetic
biology and improving student life, to name a few. There’s
also an “open” category for additional proposals.
Last year, 29 student teams received funds, including several engineers.
ME graduate students Alex Do, Thomas “Trey” Cauley and
Brian Sosnowchik received $7,500 for their project called AgLinx. (Read
about their research on the Engineering News website at www.coe.berkeley.edu/engnews/Spring06/EN12S/vine.html.)
Leading the contest, which received 91 submissions last year, is Tom
Kalil, special assistant to the Chancellor for science and technology. “Berkeley
students have great ideas, and they are willing to tackle big problems,” he
says. “Sometimes they can get great results with a small amount
of money, some advice and a few introductions to the right people on
or off campus.”
As part of the competition, CITRIS (the Center for Information Technology
Re-search in the Interest of Society) is offering its own mini-contest
with $25,000 in cash prizes.
Interested students must submit a white paper for review. Deadlines
are approaching; see the website below for more information. Kalil
offers these tips for making a successful proposal:
• Propose something that you really care about.
• Develop a high-quality, high-impact idea with some concrete
next steps.
• Look for the type of innovation that can occur when team members
from different disciplines and backgrounds collaborate to address an
important
problem.
To apply or for more information, go to http://contest.berkeley.edu.
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