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April 20, 2007 Vol. 77,
no. 12S
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| GROOMING FOR GREEN: CEE associate professor Arpad Horvath led the effort to create a new certificate program in sustainability. “Our society needs all the talent that is willing to come forward to work out the questions and dilemmas of sustainable development,” he says.
PEG SKORPINSKI PHOTO
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New certificate program aims to create legions of problem solvers working on sustainability
With global warming and the fate of the planet top-of-mind
these days, a group of Berkeley professors has launched a new interdisciplinary
certificate program to train graduate students in sustainable engineering
practices and in managing systems to protect the environment. The Engineering
and Business for Sustainability (EBS) Certificate Program begins this
fall and is currently under academic review. The launch of the program
has been supported by a grant from the Henry Luce Foundation.
CEE associate professor Arpad Horvath, the program’s director,
led the initiative, which was several years in the making. “Our
students don’t just want courses on the principles of sustainable
development, but rather they want us to educate them in the best practices,
in the methods and tools of doing engineering, business, sciences and
all other facets of the highest education for the environment,” he
explains. “We are about creating leaders in sustainability.”
To receive a certificate, students must take nine EBS units from a
pre-approved list of mostly graduate courses within various schools.
There is no separate admissions process, and the program is open to
all Berkeley graduate students.
CEE graduate student Sharif Kayum plans to complete the program in
the next couple years. “It will teach me the tools and methods
that can help me make more informed decisions when it comes to our
natural resources,” he says. “The program will also help
me identify what technologies are less harmful than others and thus
plan, organize and control such technologies to everyone’s advantage.”
Horvath anticipates an ever greater demand for problem solvers who
can work across disciplines to come up with creative and viable solutions
to problems of energy, pollution and diminishing resources.
Read more about it at http://sustainable-engineering.berkeley.edu.
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