Well, summer is nearly upon us! I have already participated in a number of graduations. It is a thrill to bestow the degrees that represent so much cleverness and dedication.
Many of you will be traveling over the summer, while participating in UC sponsored and supervised off-campus activities both domestically and abroad. Did you know that the Office of Risk Services within the Financial Management Department at the UC Office of the President has arranged for students to be covered for a wide variety of accidents and incidents while away from the campus or primary place of work. Upon completion of the short Traveler Insurance Form, they will provide you with information to use in an emergency while traveling. Registration (by filling out the form) is required for activities taking place out of state and in foreign countries. This broad coverage includes medical care and evacuation, loss of personal property (UC employees only), extraction for political and weather related reasons, and more, at no cost to you. You can find out more by visiting their website.
If you are going to be away, it is also a very good idea to let your program staff know where you will be and how to contact you. I recall vividly personally contacting students in Lebanon via their mobile telephones during the recent conflict. It is sometimes very important for the University to be able to contact you.
So, do the right thing: register for travel insurance before you go — if your trip qualifies, and in any case be sure to let your program know where you will be and how to reach you.
Safe travels,
Andrew J. Szeri
Dean of the Graduate Division
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Recognition
- Limelight for GSIs and faculty mentors of grad students
- The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) picks six from Berkeley
- More honors for Chemistry's high-climbing Arlene Blum
Graduate Funding
- A wide menu of possibilities to help fund your graduate education
Breaking Ground on Northside
- The Blum Center: now we are three — time for a building!
University Health Services
- Workshops: Insurance after graduation
Texture
- 'On the Same Page' with two Hollywood icons
Signs of the Season
- This way to Hades
- No dust covers on these circulating library assets
- Parting shot
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TopThe colorful new issue of the Graduate Division's magazine is off press and will soon be in department/program offices. Meanwhile, you can leaf through or read the entire contents online here, in small preview or full size.
Limelight for GSIs and faculty mentors of grad students
The Graduate Division, which oversees graduate education at Berkeley, and the Graduate Assembly, the grad students’ government, are making up for lost time. For decades, the campus did little to reward the vital role many faculty members play as mentors to their students. Countering that non-trend, the two groups have joined forces for the third year in a row, presenting their own faculty honors in a combined ceremony.
On April 22 the two entities presented two different awards for faculty mentoring of graduate students to a total of five faculty members. Those honored were: Marianne Constable, professor of Rhetoric, and Amani Nuru-Jeter, assistant professor of Public Health, each of whom received the Graduate Division’s Sarlo Distinguished Graduate Student Mentoring Award; and Loren Partridge, professor (and chair) of History of Art, and Inez Fung, professor of Earth and Planetary Science, and Carla Hesse, professor of History (not pictured), each were given the Graduate Assembly’s Distinguished Faculty Mentoring Award, or FMA — to the hearty acclaim of their GSIs, students, and colleagues at the presentation ceremony in Tan Hall. The Sarlo Awards honor the mentoring of graduate students, while the slightly more specialized FMA recognition is for mentoring graduate students as researchers.
Left: Sarlo Award winners Constable and Nuru-Jeter. Center: FMA winners Partridge and Fung (Photos: Peg Skorpinski). Right: FMA winner Hesse (Photo from her website)
A week later, a new round of faculty mentoring awards began with “ambush” presentations to Gordon Silverstein, professor of political science, and Robert Reich, professor of public policy (and former U.S. Secretary of Labor).
By convenient coincidence, the two teach at the same hour in side-by-side classrooms in Valley Life Sciences Building. A “prize patrol” consisting of representatives from the Academic Senate’s Graduate Council and the Graduate Division’s GSI Teaching and Resource Center launched friendly takeovers of first Silverstein’s and then Reich’s classes, interrupting each in mid-lecture for a brief presentation.
Both were nominated by their graduate student instructors for the Faculty Award for Outstanding Mentorship of GSIs. Each received his award certificate from the chair of the Graduate Council’s Advisory Committee for GSI Affairs, Jeffrey Reimer, who also chairs of the chemical engineering department. Nearly speechless with surprise, Silverstein and Reich were separately roundly applauded by their throngs of students (Reich got a standing ovation). Then each, using virtually the same words, said “Where were we?” and resumed his lecture.
The surprises were cooked up because Reich and Silverstein had schedule conflicts and couldn’t attend a somewhat more sedate ceremony that took place May 6. Three of their colleagues — Gillian Hart, professor of geography, Margaretta Lovell, professor of history of art, and Lisa Pruitt, professor of mechanical engineering — received the Faculty Award for Outstanding Mentorship of GSIs at that gathering.
With the friendly connivance of his GSIs, Public Policy Professor Robert Reich was surprised in mid-lecture during his afternoon class in 2050 VLSB. He received the Graduate Division’s Faculty Award for Outstanding Mentorship of GSIs.
Flanked by his political science GSIs, Professor Gordon Silverstein holds aloft the mentoring award he had just received in a surprise presentation April 29 in his 2060 VLSB classroom during a constitutional law lecture. One of the GSIs, in nominating Silverstein for the honor, said “Gordon’s most amazing feat is that he teaches us as the graduate students that we are, while treating us as the colleagues that we aspire to be.”
Three more who mentor grad students in their teaching roles are, left to right, Gillian Hart, professor of geography, Lisa Pruitt, professor of mechanical engineering, and Margaretta Lovell, professor of history of art. Nominated by their GSIs, each received the Graduate Division’s Faculty Award for Outstanding Mentorship of Graduate Student Instructors at a ceremony May 6. (Since they were there, they didn’t need to be “ambushed.”)
A hearty portion of the more than 270 graduate students chosen as 2008-2009 recipients of the Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor Award assembled for a group portrait in Alumni House May 6 after the presentation and reception in their honor. It was very much a family affair, with partners, parents, and even a few children in attendance. (Photos: Peg Skorpinski)
GSIs act as a bridge —
Sara Atwood spoke on behalf
of the honored grad students.
(Photo: Peg Skorpinski)
The May 6 ceremony honored more than 270 graduate students as Outstanding Graduate Student Instructors. Since there were a few too many for individual responses, one GSI, mechanical engineering grad student Sara Atwood, spoke on their behalf, remembering other significant recognition that happened in their time here, including George Smoot’s Nobel Prize in physics, and the appointment of Steven Chu as U.S. Secretary of Energy. GSIs, Atwood said, “act as a bridge — to use an engineering metaphor — between busy faculty doing amazing research and busy students contributing to an active campus life.” Being a GSI, she said, “may not be the most glamorous job: coming up with ‘fun’ activities the students are hesitant to try at first, grading papers, holding review sessions, sometimes even helping students with graduate school applications or other classes. But those of us here today know that it is our passion, and that we are rewarded throughout the semester in many small ways: when a struggling student aces an exam, or when a student drops by to tell us he got a fellowship at his top-choice grad school, and was so excited the night he heard that he woke his family to tell them.” She thanked the GSI Center and the Graduate Council, adding that “while our efforts often are not rewarded with the worldwide fanfare accompanying a Nobel Prize, I think we can all claim a piece of every award conferred on Berkeley professors and students, because I think we are all a big part of making those achievements possible.”
Consummate volunteer —
Psychology's Nilofar Sami.
(Photo: Peg Skorpinski)
At the annual Chancellor’s Awards for Public Service ceremony, which took place April 24, two Ph.D. candidates were singled out for their extensive community work. Paula Agentieri of the School of Education’s social and cultural studies program was honored for her 14 semester of serving as the lead GSI and co-cordinator for Education 190, the core class for education minors, during which she has taught more than 1,000 students and has trained more than 70 undergraduate teaching assistants to teach and facilitate a class democratically and to serve the local community. Nilofar Sami of the Department of Psychology’s clinical science program has volunteered year-round each of the last three years, serving the charter high school CAL Prep, in which UC Berkeley is a partner. She has taught 85 students each summer, advised three cohorts of CAL Prep students (about 200 in each), and coached parents in ways to become more involved in their children’s education.
Center of attention — Paula Argentieri, with her award and her “peeps”. (Photo: Peg Skorpinski)
The National Academy of Sciences (NAS), one of America’s most prestigious societies of scholars engaged in science and engineering research, at the end of April announced its election of 72 members, six of whom are Berkeley researchers.
They are:
Alex Filippenko, Robert Fischer, Sarah Hake, Hiroshi Nikaido, Christos Papadimitriou, Mu-ming Poo
Election to the academy is considered one of the highest honors that can be accorded a U.S. scientist or engineer. The academy is congressionally chartered, with an act of incorporation signed by President Abraham Lincoln in 1863. Its members serve pro bono as “advisers to the nation on science, engineering, and medicine.” The academy’s current president is atmospheric scientist Ralph Cicerone, a former chancellor of UC’s Irvine campus.
Arlene Blum
Biochemist and mountaineer Arlene Blum Ph.D. ’71, who won the $100,000 Purpose Prize late last year for mobilizing society to protect its members by reducing toxic chemicals, has received still more honors in 2009, and the year isn’t even half over.
Her undergraduate alma mater, Reed College, chose an alumnus or alumna from each department to write an essay for a 100th anniversary volume, and picked Blum to represent chemistry. In March, National Women’s History Month, she was honored among the likes of Jane Goodall, Hilary Clinton, Sally Ride, and Alice Waters (a Cal alumna, B.A. '67), all “Women Taking the Lead to Save Our Planet.” And in April, the City of Berkeley gave her an “Outstanding Woman of Berkeley” award. Blum took time away from chemistry after completing her doctorate to pursue the high-altitude climbing life (in which for many years she was a pioneering woman) and associated endeavors, before returning to her primary profession. For the last few years she’s been back on this campus, where in her early career she helped ban a carcinogenic fire retardant from children’s sleepwear. Her new research centers on the same compounds, which she has found are used extensively as retardants in the polyurethane foam inside household and industrial furniture. She acknowledges that furniture fires can be a danger, but puts them in a context of scale, as shown in a report from the Consumer Product Safety Commission. According to that report, she says, “560 Americans died in house fires that started in upholstered furniture in 2003. But by contrast, cancer killed more than 500,000.”
Her favorite part of the city’s award ceremony, she says, “was the speech by my Berkeley Ph.D. advisor, Nacho Tinoco, who had nominated me. I had worried that my career path disappointed him, and it was a huge happy surprise to hear him speak of my contributions to science and the world.”
In mid-April, atop Barrows Hall, Chancellor Robert Birgeneau honored three teams and 22 individuals with the Chancellor’s Outstanding Staff Award, nicknamed COSA. He praised all for going beyond the call of duty, especially in these financially difficult times, not just through the everyday hard work they perform, which improves campus systems and helps staff and faculty work more efficiently, but for “making us a more inclusive and welcoming campus community.”
Among those recognized, two are from the Graduate Division, Moira Pérez, the division’s chief administrative officer, and Marilyn Seid-Rabinow, the GSI Center’s assistant director for language proficiency. Pérez, whom many on campus know from when she directed the division’s fellowships office, introduced new and effective ways for graduate student affairs officers to communicate with each other and with the Graduate Division. Seid-Rabinow created Berkeley’s language-testing program and established language standards for international GSIs and professional-development instruction for graduate assistants and student affairs officers.
Chancellor Birgeneau and Moira Pérez (above left). Marilyn Seid-Rabinow (above right).
Listed chronologically by deadline date.
Resources provided by the Graduate Services: Fellowships office
The California Council on Science and Technology has established a new program of Science and Technology Policy Fellowships for Ph.D. scientists and engineers to serve as fellows to provide the California State Legislature with scientific and technical advice. The fellowships will provide those looking for a professional development opportunity to incorporate science and technology into public policy while assisting the California state legislature to receive critical, unbiased scientific and technological input on issues it is dealing with. The deadline for applications for the 2009-2010 program is noon Pacific Daylight Time on May 29, 2009. Additional information and application materials are available online.
This is the first year for new joint scholarship funded by the Siemens Corporation and the Meat Industry Suppliers Association (MISA). A $10,000 scholarship will be awarded to an outstanding graduate student or undergraduate (junior or senior) pursuing a degree in the engineering or meat sciences fields. The recipient will be selected on the basis of academic performance, potential for success, and commitment to a career in the engineering or meat sciences fields. Further information and the application are available online (PDF). The application deadline is June 1, 2009.
Doctoral students are invited to carry out non-degree research programs during 2010-2011 at Hosei University in Tokyo, Japan, under the direction of, or in cooperation with, Hosei faculty and researchers. Areas of research include the humanities, social or natural sciences, and engineering. The fellowship period is six or 12 months, beginning in either April or October of 2010. Application and further information are available online from Hosei’s International Center. Completed application documents must reach the International Center by June 5, 2009.
The American Institute of Indian Studies Fellowships is a cooperative, non-profit organization of sixty American colleges and universities that supports the advancement of knowledge and understanding of India, its people, and culture. Non-U.S. citizens are welcome to apply for AIIS fellowships as long as they are either graduate students or full-time faculty at a college or university in the U.S. Citizens of the U.S., however, may apply even if they are not affiliated with an institution in the U.S. Applications from those who are not affiliated with AIIS member institutions are welcome.
Applications to conduct research in India may be made in the following categories:
Junior Research Fellowships. Available to doctoral candidates at U.S. universities in all fields of study. Junior Research Fellowships are specifically designed to enable doctoral candidates to pursue their dissertation research in India. Junior Research Fellows establish formal affiliation with Indian universities and Indian research supervisors. Awards are available for up to eleven months.
Senior Research Fellowships. Available to scholars who hold a Ph.D. or its equivalent. Senior Fellowships are designed to enable scholars in all disciplines who specialize in South Asia to pursue further research in India. Senior Fellows establish formal affiliation with an Indian institution. Short-term awards are available for up to four months. Long-term awards are available for six to nine months.
Senior Scholarly/Professional Development Fellowships. Available to established scholars who have not previously specialized in Indian studies and to established professionals who have not previously worked or studied in India. Senior Scholarly/Professional Development Fellows are formally affiliated with an Indian institution. Awards may be granted for periods of six to nine months.
Senior Performing and Creative Arts Fellowships. Available to accomplished practitioners of the performing arts of India and creative artists who demonstrate that study in India would enhance their skills, develop their capabilities to teach or perform in the U.S., enhance American involvement with India’s artistic traditions, and strengthen their links with peers in India. Awards will normally be for periods of up to four months, although proposals for periods of up to nine months can be considered.
Fellowships for U.S. citizens are funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities (also available to permanent residents); the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs of the U.S. State Department and the Council of American Overseas Research Centers under the Fulbright-Hays Act of 1961, as amended; and the Smithsonian Institution. Some fellowships for non-U.S. citizens and artists can be funded from the AIIS Rupee Endowment in India. Fellowships for six months or more may include limited coverage for dependents.
The application deadline is July 1, 2009.
Applications are invited from candidates in any area of the humanities and social sciences whose work falls within the scope of Edinburgh’s Institute for Advanced Studies’ research themes or across disciplinary boundaries in the humanities. Applications from both within and beyond the University of Edinburgh are welcomed. Applicants must have been awarded a doctorate, normally within the last three years, and should not have held a permanent position at a university. Further information is available online, as is the application. The closing date for the receipt of applications is July 10, 2009.
The competition for the 2010-2011 round of Fulbright Scholar Grants is open. The application deadline is August 1, 2009. Grants typically begin about one year following the application deadline. As a traditional U.S. Fulbright Scholar you can enjoy an experience of a lifetime, one that will provide broad cultural perspectives on your academic discipline or professional field and connect you with colleagues at institutions around the globe. Grants typically range from three months to an academic year. More information and materials to download are online.
J. William Fulbright (1905-1995) was a U.S. Senator from Arkansas for three decades and had been a Rhodes Scholar and served as president of the University of Arkansas. His 1945 bill to use surplus war property to fund the “promotion of international good will through the exchange of students in the fields of education, culture, and science” created what has become the Fulbright Program, the U.S. government’s flagship international exchange program. Approximately 500 American institutions of all sizes are represented in each year’s competition. To date, there have been 294,000 participants in Fulbright programs in more than 125 countries throughout the world. 
One degree of separation: this newly-minted School of Information master's degree-holder takes a last look at the just-emptied scene of his commencement festivities. South Hall, still unchallenged as the oldest building on campus, has his back. (Photo: Peg Skorpinski)
Graduate Division Calendar
Campus Events Calendar
Denotes Graduate Division sponsored event
May 27 (Wednesday)
Deadline to register for Proquest feedback session on June 3
Proquest UMI, the electronic and microfilm publisher and source archiving firm, needs the feedback of UC Berkeley doctoral students. It invites 27 doctoral students to participate in a 90-minute feedback session on Wednesday, June 3 (time and location to be announced). Proquest is developing a new research tool that will allow you to conduct high-level searches in the Proquest Dissertation and Theses Database (PQDT) based on a semantic framework platform. The session will help ensure that the tool will meet your needs. Participants will receive a $50 VISA gift certificate at the end of the session. All information provided during the session will be completely confidential. Spaces are limited and the deadline is near, so register soon using the online form.
August 18 (Tuesday)
New International Graduate Student Orientation
International House Auditorium
More information is available online
August 19 (Wednesday)
New International Student Resource Fair
International House Auditorium
More information is available online
August 24 (Monday)
Orientation for New Graduates
12:30 to 5 p.m., Wheeler Auditorium, Wheeler Hall
All new graduate students are invited to attend. Registration starts at noon. A plenary session is followed by on one break-out session (by discipline, in separate rooms in Wheeler Hall).
More information via email or on the Graduate Assembly website
August 24 (Monday)
Dean’s Reception for New Graduate Students
5 to 7 p.m. Toll Room and patio of Alumni House (just north of Zellerbach Playhouse, near Haas Pavilion). This event immediately follows the Orientation for New Graduate Students. All new graduate students are invited to attend.
August 25 (Tuesday)
New Graduate Minority Student Orientation
Time and place to be announced. An orientation for all focusing on issues facing underrepresented students. Duration: approximately one-half day.
More information via email or on the Graduate Assembly website
Perfect form: Former Vice President Al Gore excelled his co-groundbreakers momentarily as his spadeful of dirt kept its shape on the way to the pile of “new ground” for the future home of the Blum Center for Developing Economies. Flanking Gore on the left were four undergrads wielding one shovel (a true test of teamwork), and on the right Richard Blum, engineering dean Shankar Sastry M.A.’79, M.A.’80, Ph.D. ‘81 and city and regional planning professor Ananya Roy M.C.P.’94, Ph.D.’99, UC President Mark Yudof, and, at the podium, Chancellor Robert Birgeneau. (Photo: Peg Skorpinski)
Operating under the motto “Real-world Solutions to Combat Poverty,” the Richard C. Blum Center for Developing Economies has been operating with little fanfare since it was launched in 2006. Its namesake and backer is Richard Blum B.S. ’58, M.B.A. ‘59, the current chair of UC’s Board of Regents, who also happens to be a San Francisco financier and philanthropist and the husband for nearly three decades of Dianne Feinstein, the first woman to represent California in the U.S. Senate.
Richard Blum — a canny and
humanitarian investor.
Forty-fifth U.S. Vice President &
winner of the 2007
Nobel Peace
Prize Al Gore — the Blum Center’s
students
and faculty “can change
the world.”
Justice Stephen Breyer.
(Photos above: Peg Skorpinski)
Former Irish president Mary
Robinson. (Photo: euroresidentes)
Blum’s gift established the center but he attributes its growth to the energy and talent of faculty and students committed to helping the world’s poor. “Of all the investments I’ve made in my life,” Blum says, “what we’re doing here certainly ranks near the top. Our real impact is in training the next generation of global leaders committed to making lasting change for the poor.”
More than 1,500 students have participated in the center’s three years of classes, symposia, and events. Its continuously-evolving portfolio of coursework includes an academic minor, “Global Poverty and Practice,” already the fastest-growing minor on campus. Students from over 30 different majors have already enrolled in the minor, whose combination of multidisciplinary knowledge and real-world experience has proven magnetic for the “Yes We Can” generation.
The center’s spectacular growth has necessitated a true physical home. One way of getting that involved some recycling. Blum offered to pay for restoring a historic 1914 structure designed by John Galen Howard, the Naval Architecture Building. The brown-shingle landmark on Northside has “needed work” for decades, and will now receive it, along with a new wing.
The center currently supports 16 initiatives which are expanding access to safe water and sanitation, adapting wireless technologies to increase access to lifesaving health care services, and deploying efficient new energy technologies that minimize harmful environmental impacts. Former Vice President Al Gore, a featured speaker at the center’s April 23 groundbreaking, said that what’s keeping us from solving the climate crisis is a way to bridge “the divide between the wealthy countries and the poor countries.” The Blum Center, he predicted, “will be one of the key places where that piece of the puzzle is solved, and where it is fitted in as the capstone of the arch.” The center’s faculty and students, he said, “can change the world.”
The symbolic groundbreaking was only one event in a one-month string of celebrations of the center’s first three years. Earlier in April, it hosted U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer’s talk about the rule of law in developing countries and a lecture on global health and human rights by Mary Robinson, who was Ireland’s president in the 1990s and was United Nations High Commission for Human Rights from 1997 to 2002. By far the best-attended of these occasions was an address by Tenzin Gyatso, better known as His Holiness the Dalai Lama, which filled the Greek Theatre with a crowd of 7,000. (That event was co-sponsored by the Blum Center and the American Himalayan Foundation, which Richard Blum established after his first trip through the mountains of Nepal in 1968 to help alleviate the region’s most vulnerable and poor by building bridges, schools, clinics, and hospitals.) Prior to the Dalai Lama’s address, but on stage in his presence, Chancellor Robert Birgeneau presented Blum with the Berkeley Medal, the highest honor the campus bestows. In accepting it, Blum told the amphitheater crowd that the day was “a merger of the two things I care most about: UC and the Tibetan people and their plight.”
Hot ticket — Students had lined up the night before, some with sleeping bags, mattresses, and even tents, for tickets that went on sale March 11 for the Dalai Lama’s April 25 appearance. The line ultimately stretched around buildings for hundreds of yards. The last, and perhaps only, time there was one this long? When the Dalai Lama first appeared in the Greek Theatre in the ‘90s. (Photo: Jeffrey Kahn)
Full house —The Greek Theatre from the upper rim.
The microdot on stage left is the very popular Dalai Lama. (Photo: Peg Skorpinski)
Another long line —The Dalai Lama is 14th in a succession of reincarnations believed to extend back to 1391, left wearing a Cal visor, to a standing ovation, Now 73, he has been to Berkeley twice before, in 1994 and 1997. He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989 for his longstanding advocacy of peaceful solutions to conflict. Sitting cross-legged in an armchair on the Greek Theatre proscenium, he told he crowd, “Peace does not equal absence of problems.” Peace is when, despite “disagreement and the possibility for open conflict,” people exercise restraint and will power to “seek ways to solve it” without coming to blows. (Photo: Peg Skorpinski)
August 6 (Wednesday)
2:30 to 4:30 p.m., Education Center, first floor of the Tang Center, 2222 Bancroft Way
August 10 (Wednesday)
2:30 to 4:30 p.m., Education Center, first floor of the Tang Center, 2222 Bancroft Way
If you are a SHIP member who will be graduating this semester, or if you are losing SHIP eligibility because you are no longer a registered student at UC Berkeley, it is important to plan ahead for continuing health coverage. A variety of plans are available to you once your SHIP coverage expires. Plan types include short-term coverage, individual plans with low deductibles or co-payments, a conversion plan for persons with ongoing medical conditions, and public health insurance programs. Please RSVP to ship@uhs.berkeley.edu. Contact the Student Health Insurance Office at (510) 642-5700 for additional information or workshop questions. For more resources, visit the UHS web page on this topic.
Top
Genre-jumpers — director Ang Lee, left, and producer James Schamus discuss the often-successful results of their long partnership, a wide variety of films that are significantly unalike, a rarity in their business. (Photo: Peg Skorpinski)
The academic year at Berkeley is frequently punctuated by visitors with star power from the worlds of government, sciences, and the arts. In March, undergraduates in the College of Letters and Science got a twofer from the latter sphere, with filmmakers Ang Lee and James Schamus in person.
The two have collaborated on 11 films (among them Brokeback Mountain, Sense and Sensibility, and Eat Drink Man Woman) and scooped up more than a few Academy Awards. They came to Berkeley last fall in virtual form as part of L&S’s “On the Same Page” program in which all new students in the college receive an artist’s work (in this case, two of the team’s films on DVD), and then participate in discussions through classes, seminars, and even online via Facebook. This spring they came in person, appearing in a conversation event in Zellerbach Auditorium, a Q&A with Lee after his film Lust, Caution screened, and dined intimately at the Faculty Club with eight lucky undergrads who won the opportunity in a drawing.
Lee is best known as a director, although he has written screenplays. Schamus, a prolific screenwriter, is also a producer, most widely known for his longtime, multi-picture collaboration with Lee.
Schamus is what is sometimes called a triple alumnus of Berkeley. He earned his bachelor’s degree here in 1982, his master’s in 1987, and his Ph.D. in 2003, all in English. In what for some would be a day job, he is an associate professor in Columbia University’s School of the Arts, where he mainly teaches MFA students in filmmaking.
She was on the opposite coast from 1998 to January 20 of this year. Infectious disease expert Julie Gerberding, M.D., an alumna of the School of Public Health (M.P.H. '90), left the Bay Area to join the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), as director of its division of healthcare quality promotion. She was appointed director of the entire agency, the first woman to hold that position, in 2002.
She was the public health school's alumna of the year in 2003. Two years later, Time named her in its Top 100 innovators of the year or her leadership in modernizing the $9-billion CDC as it faced unprecedented challenges, including new and emerging infectious diseases and bioterrorism. In 2007, Forbes listed her among "The World's 100 Most Powerful Women."
What brought her to Berkeley this year was an invitation to be the principal speaker at the School of Public Health commencement, which was held May 16 in Zellerbach Auditorium.
Julie Gerberding. (Photo: Peg Skorpinski)
The utilitarian southern entrance to Barrows Hall took on a more foreboding aspect as semester’s end loomed: gremlins had altered the sign over the door to read “Barrows Hell.” Fortunately, the more aesthetic main north entrance remained intact.
(Photos: Dick Cortén)
First heard in bare outline (so to speak) from a library employee-to-remain-unnamed, an annual ritual was re-enacted as finals began. The Wikipedia says UC Berkeley “current traditions include streaking during finals week,” and so it came to pass. On a hot, tension-filled evening, Thursday, May 15, a correspondent for the Daily Clog, the Daily Californian’s blog, reported that “Moffitt Library computer lab patrons were treated to a show of pure, unadulterated nekkid-ness at around 10:05 p.m. this evening.” The generous streakers made the rounds of the Gardner Stacks as well. Library employees, periodically used to the sight, were nonetheless astonished by the sheer abundance, some estimates saying the throng (not thong) numbered at least 100. (That would translate as 200 bare feet and so forth, for the statistically inclined.)
This being the all-everything-all-the-time age, with motion-picture capability built into cell phones as well as digital point-and-shoots, someone promptly posted a video of the event on YouTube — which, with nearly equal alacrity, took it down.
We are assuming that all participants were undergraduates, but it was a very hot night...
(There’s no available collective noun for such celebrants, so we offer the following for future use: an altogether of streakers. Or a flash, an exhibition, a buff, a goggle, a watch-us.)
Source(s) unknown quietly suspended these letters from this bridge over Strawberry Creek near Dwinelle Hall shortly before finals. Their gentle sentiment: “Just Breathe.” (Photo: Dick Cortén)
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