You’ve said the role of research administration is to support faculty and provide “the best possible environment for pursuing world-changing research.” As the new vice chancellor for research, how do you create that environment and what does it look like?
Twenty years ago, two chunks of rock plummeted from space. One landed in Texas in March, only yards away from a children’s basketball game. The other hit the ground in Morocco five months later. At the time, no one guessed that the meteorites carried some very unique passengers: crystals embedded with clues to the origins of life on Earth.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has decreed a roll-back of fuel economy and greenhouse gas emission standards for automobiles, benefitting automakers and oil companies while predictably enraging environmentalists. In making the announcement, EPA administrator Scott Pruitt declared the CAFE (for Corporate Average Fuel Economy) standards set by the Obama administration were too high and “didn’t comport with reality.”
Posted on April 5, 2018 - 1:53pm
In 2014, 59-year-old Brian Landers, a fifth-grade teacher in otherwise good health, began bleeding internally. After tests detected something on his small intestine, he was rushed into surgery to have it removed and awoke to the news that he had stage IV melanoma. The cancer was not only in his intestine, but his bladder and right lung, as well.
In a career where success often doesn’t come until later in life, if at all, comic Irene Tu has an impressive resume for her mid-20s.
It may not be a true meteorological “March Miracle,” but it’s close enough for government work, as government workers are wont to say. The series of storms that have battered California in recent weeks have pumped up the snowpack in the Sierra and swelled streams at lower elevations. And it looks like we could be in for a last wet gasp from the Pacific, with a fairly robust front poised to dump rain and snow mid-week. For a state that still teeters on drought despite last year’s extraordinarily wet rainy season, that’s good news.
Posted on April 2, 2018 - 12:52pm
Perry Solomon is used to people extolling the virtues of medical cannabis.
Dr. Solomon is the chief medical officer of HelloMD, a website that bills itself as one of the nation’s largest online medical cannabis communities. Over the past five years, the site has issued more than 70,000 recommendations for patient cannabis use in the state of California alone. And 65 percent of those recommendations, Solomon says, have been for pain.
If Barry Barish ’57, Ph.D. ’63, looks familiar, perhaps it’s because we profiled him in this very same space last issue.
In that article, we took pains to explain the nature of Barish’s work as director of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, or LIGO, for which he shared the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics. Little did we know we’d be featuring him again, this time as CAA Alumnus of the Year.
But, hey, fine with us. When the company’s good, who doesn’t like a second helping?
In 2010, Patrick O. Brown, then a biochemist at Stanford University, and Michael Eisen, Berkeley professor of genetics, were at a board meeting in Washington, D.C., for PLOS, the Public Library of Science.
At Cal, Vanessa Lavorato, owner of Marigold Sweets and cohost of the TV show Bong Appétit, was like many another college undergraduate: She had a fondness for both cannabis and chocolate. But her appreciation was from an amateur’s perspective.
Richard Sanford graduated from Berkeley in 1965, served a combat tour in Vietnam, and by 1971 found himself working from a mossy old barn near Lompoc with no plumbing or electricity.
A geographer by training, the Navy veteran was engaged in an improbable quest—transforming the barn and adjoining bean fields into a classic, Burgundian-style vineyard.
Posted on March 21, 2018 - 11:25am
Water managers and hydrologists are a mite worried. The good news is that the recent cold storms dumped a lot of new snow in the Sierra. That will help keep reservoirs charged and Californians adequately hydrated through the coming year. But there’s a literal dark cloud counterbalancing that silver lining—a massive “atmospheric river,” aka the Pineapple Express, now poised to wallop California.
Posted on March 20, 2018 - 3:46pm
On Wednesday, theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking died at his home in Cambridge, England at age 76. In his brief history of time on Earth, Hawking arguably became one of the most pivotal figures in science—known most widely for his calculations showing that the surface of black holes emit radiation (known as “Hawking radiation”) that makes them eventually disappear.
Posted on March 15, 2018 - 5:09pm
Elizabeth Swaney’s day-to-day life is not unlike that of any other Olympic athlete. She trains with a coach in Park City, Utah, and spends hours practicing her sport, freestyle skiing. She works multiple jobs—eight, at one point, by her count—in order to make ends meet. And just like any other Olympian, she expected all that hard work to pay off during the Winter Games in Pyeongchang.
Posted on March 14, 2018 - 5:06pm
