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Flirting with Disasters
In 1988, Robert Bea was preparing to bring four decades of ocean engineering experience to UC Berkeley as a newly-hired professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering. Then something unexpected happened. The Piper Alpha oil production platform in the North Sea exploded, killing 167 people and causing $4 billion in damage. Bea was called in to help determine the cause of the accident. The trail he uncovered led him down a long research path where engineering, business management, and the social sciences intersect.
Eyeing a New Ion Beam
UC Berkeley nuclear engineer Ka-Ngo Leung has developed a highly-efficient ion beam technology that could edge out tried-and-true methods for fabricating myriad microscale products. Medical implants that are currently manufactured one at a time could be batch produced in bulk. The new ion beam technology could also boost production at microchip fabrication facilities while helping keep Moore's Law on track, says Leung, the head of the Plasma and Ion Source Technology Group at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
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Assembling the Future of Nanotechnology
In his robotics laboratory at UC Berkeley, engineering professor Ron Fearing is taking an engineering cue from the feet of geckos to develop new dry adhesives for future wall-climbing and surgical robots. Across campus, physicist Carlos Bustamante is exploring whether the energy in a tightly wound DNA molecule could drive a motor that's 300 times smaller than the diameter of a human hair. Back in the College of Engineering, Arun Majumdar is devising a biosensor chip laden with tiny cantilevers that flex like diving boards when minute molecules indicative of cancer or other diseases bind to them. These efforts are just a sampling of the research projects that will be accelerated by UC Berkeley's new $11.9 million Center of Integrated Nanomechanical Systems (COINS), launching this fall.
Cool Alumni: Astronomer Donald Brownlee
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2004 UC Regents. Updated 1/3/05.
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