Welcome to all of you!
To our newest students — about 2,900 of you, out of some 32,000 applicants — welcome to Berkeley! To those of you who are returning — welcome back! Together you number over 10,000 students in 105 graduate programs. You comprise nearly a third of the student population at Berkeley.
The entering group ranges in age from 18 to 68, with most of you in your mid-20s. Incoming men only slightly outnumber incoming women. Nearly half of you are Californians, almost a third hail from among 49 other states, and a fifth of you come from among 66 other countries. You are an admirably diverse group, and you will find that the combination of excellence and diversity at Berkeley is unique in the world.
Your representative arm of student government is the Graduate Assembly. Over the summer I've been meeting with the new officers to discuss exciting plans for this academic year. I encourage you to learn how the GA can make your experience here richer — or, better yet, explore how you can make your own contribution to our greater common good. Stop by the Graduate Assembly offices in Anthony Hall (the "Pelican Building") and visit their website regularly as the semester gears up.
I encourage you to become familiar with our own Graduate Division website. It's easier to use than ever and has a wealth of information for students, much of it vital and some simply very interesting.
I look forward to seeing many of you later this month at Welcome Week activities, some of which are listed in the calendar below, and I hope you all have a productive and rewarding semester.
Best wishes,
Andrew J. Szeri
Dean of the Graduate Division
University Library
- Keeping up with new electronic resources.
- Library Bookstore’s still open, just harder to get to
University Health Services
- Have dependents who need health care? Find out what to do.
Honors
- Grad alumna Jody Lewen receives the Haas Public Service Award
Newslinks
- Grad students reflect on their summer abroad doing human rights fieldwork
- Berkeley-Davis team fins e-voting machines vulnerable to security attacks
- Virtual Reality photographers meet at Berkeley, induce vertigo and learning.
Opportunities
- Fulltime postdoc position in Public Health
- Write for Greater Good magazine
If you’re planning on filing for your degree and are registered for 2007 Summer Sessions at Berkeley, here are several suggestions that can make filing go more smoothly. Note that you must be registered in Summer Sessions in at least three units, or on approved Filing Fee status for fall 2007 to be eligible to file. August 17, 2007, is the final day for you to file using the Summer Sessions option. (If you are on Filing Fee status for fall 2007, you have until the last day of the fall semester, December 20, 2007, to file.)
The Ehrman Fellowship is open to students in any field of student who wish to study at King’s College, Cambridge. To be eligible, you must have either a bachelor’s degree or master’s degree from UC Berkeley OR a bachelor’s degree from Yale University, and be in good academic standing. The award is a $15,000 stipend per semester. The application deadline is Wednesday, September 25, 2007. For more information and an application, contact Shaya Kahali (phone: 642-0672; email: shaya@berkeley.edu) in the Graduate Student Services: Fellowships Office, 318 Sproul Hall.
Applications are now being accepted for the Willis W. and Ethel M. Clark Foundation Investment in Community Graduate Fellowship for 2008-2009. Up to $10,000 per academic year is awarded to students currently enrolled full time in a graduate program who have demonstrated a commitment to community service. Applicants must be directly connected to the Monterey Peninsula and intend to return to or remain connected through work and/or residence and community service. The Clark Foundation was incorporated in 1953 and has provided community service for more than half a century. Its founders were pioneers in the field of educational testing and research who started the California Test Bureau (now known as CTB/McGraw-Hill) in 1926. The fellowship may be renewed annually, but subsequent awards may be smaller than the initial award. Applications are due January 31, 2008. More information is available online.
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Denotes Graduate Division sponsored event
AUGUST 10 - 31
From the Tsars to the Stars — A Journey Through Russian Fantastik Cinema
A compendium of rare works showcasing the startling imagination and agitprop fascination of Russian science fiction and fantasy cinema. Pacific Film Archive, 2575 Bancroft Way, 642-5249.
AUGUST 16, 17, 18, and 24
Welcome and Orientation Programs for New International Students
International House Auditorium, various times. Full details are available on the Services for International Students and Scholars (SISS) website.
AUGUST 17 (Friday)
Summer Session ends
AUGUST 17 (Friday)
Community Computer Recycling Event
9 a.m. to 3 p.m., 1000 Folger Avenue, Berkeley (two blocks west of the intersection of Ashby and San Pablo avenues). The third Friday of each month, the Cal Overstock and Surplus Den offers free recycling of laptops, CPUs. Monitors, TV sets, portable DVD players, keyboards, circuit boards, and power cords.
AUGUST 17 (Friday)
UCTV: Conversations with History — “Freedom of Expression, Tolerance, and Human Rights”
6 p.m., cable channel 33 in Berkeley, channel 27 in San Francisco. Host Harry Kreisler talks with Harvard philosophy professor T. M. Scanlon. (Also available “on demand” on your computer all day, every day, as are all the “Conversations with History,” many Graduate Council Lectures, and other programs from Berkeley, via the UCTV website. If you’re interested in the wide range of topics and speakers in the Graduate Council Lectures series, there’s a permanent archive of those programs on UCTV.
AUGUST 20 (Monday)
New Graduate Minority Student Orientation: An Orientation for All Focusing on Issues Facing Underrepresented Students
10 a.m. to 4 p.m., (Note room change) Tilden Room, fifth floor, Martin Luther King Jr. Student Union. Sponsored by the Graduate Division's Graduate Diversity Program and the Graduate Assembly. All are invited.
AUGUST 22 (Wednesday)
Orientation for New Graduate Students
8 a.m. to 6 p.m., third, fourth, and fifth floors, Martin Luther King Jr. Student Union. Sponsored by the Graduate Division and the Graduate Assembly.
AUGUST 22, 29, and September 5
Workshop for students with dependents in need of health insurance
See below under University Health Services.
AUGUST 23 (Thursday)
Teaching in the U.S. Classroom: A Conference for International GSIs
9:30 a.m. to 3 p.m., various locations in Dwinelle Hall. Details are online (PDF). Sponsored by the Graduate Division's GSI Teaching and Resource Center.
AUGUST 23 (Thursday)
Dean’s Reception for New Graduate Students
4 to 6 p.m., Lipman Room, eighth floor of Barrows Hall.
AUGUST 24 (Friday)
Fall Teaching Conference for GSIs
8:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. Registration: Martin Luther King Jr. Student Union. Details are online (PDF). Sponsored by the Graduate Division's GSI Teaching and Resource Center.
AUGUST 27 (Monday)
Memorial for Classics graduate student Corinne Crawford
5 p.m., Alumni House. See Newslinks, below.
AUGUST 28 (Tuesday)
Reception Honoring American Indian/Alaska Native Graduate Students
5 to 7 p.m., Toll Room, Alumni House (just north of Zellerbach Playhouse). Sponsored by the Graduate Division's Graduate Diversity Program. All are invited.
AUGUST 30 (Thursday)
Reception Honoring Graduate Diversity
5 to 7 p.m., Toll Room, Alumni House (just north of Zellerbach Playhouse). Sponsored by the Graduate Division's Graduate Diversity Program. All are invited.
AUGUST 30 (Thursday)
Back-to-School Social
6 to 9 p.m., East Pauley Ballroom, Martin Luther King Junior Student Union.
Featuring pizza (from West Coast; vegan and vegetarian available), beer (from Trumer Pilsner), and live music by Berkeley grad students (Aaron Platt’s beatbox routine, The Thrillionaires, and The Old Fashioned Way). $3 entry fee, UC Berkeley student ID and proof of age required. You may bring up to three guests. Presented by the Graduate Social Club.
AUGUST 31 (Friday)
Application deadline for graduate events funding
Noon, Anthony Hall (just north of Barrows Hall). More information is available online from the Graduate Assembly.
SEPTEMBER 3 (Monday)
Labor Day holiday
SEPTEMBER 6 (Thursday)
Reading: Lunch Poems — Series Kickoff
12:10 to 12:50 p.m., Morrison Library, 101 Doe. Hosted by poet and professor Robert Hass and university librarian Thomas Leonard, the kickoff features distinguished faculty and staff from a wide range of disciplines introducing and reading a favorite poem. This year’s participants: Aftab Ahmad (South & Southeast Asian Studies), Ben Braun (Men’s Basketball), Janet Broughton (Dean of Letters & Science, Philosophy), Jennifer Dormer (Library), E. Bond Francisco (Physical Plant), Cecil Giscombe (English), Lucia Jacobs (Psychology), Kathleen McCarthy (Classics and Comparative Literature), Paul Parish (Faculty Club), Kay Richards (East Asian Languages and Cultures, Center for Korean Studies).
SEPTEMBER 7 (Friday)
Berkeley Writers at Work
Noon to 1:30 p.m., Morrison Library, 101 Doe. Sponsored by the College Writing Programs. Bonnie Wade, the music department’s chair, will read from her work, be interviewed about her researching, drafting, and revising process, and take questions from the audience. Among her books are Music in Japan; Thinking Musically: Experiencing Music, Expressing Culture; and Imagining Sound: An Ethnomusicological Study of Music, Art, and Culture in Mughal India.
SEPTEMBER 12 (Wednesday)
55th Annual Noon Concert Series: Cello and Piano
12:15 to 1 p.m., Hertz Hall. Kevin Yu, cello, and Chen Chen, piano (Brahms sonata number 1 in E minor, opus 38); Tony Lin, piano (Schubert sonata in A major, D.664).
The library subscribes to more than 800 premium online information sources, and the list keeps growing. Just in one month, it added AskART, Black Studies Center, CEIC Global Database (economic time series), Encyclopedia of the Quran, Encyclopedia of Women and Islamic cultures, E-STAT (Canadian statistics), Everyday Life and Women In America, Greenwire (environmental news), Science.gov, Social Theory, and Thomson Datastream. To stay on top of new resources and services, consider subscribing to the “What’s New in the Library” RSS feed.
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The Library offers a variety of orientations, workshops, and tours to help you learn to make effective use of Berkeley’s world-class research collections. During Welcome Week (August 20-24) these include:
If you’d like to learn more, many libraries offer drop-in workshops throughout the semester. These workshops will help you get started, and many address specialized topics such as subject databases, government information, and bibliographic software such as EndNote. Full listings are on the tours page.
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The Library Bookstore, located in room 132 of the Doe Library, remains open during the season of construction in Doe. Its hours are Monday through Thursday, 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. Use Doe’s south entrance (across from Wheeler Hall) until the first floor north-south corridor reopens in mid-August.
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UHS is offering a new workshop on coverage options available for spouses, partners, and children of students, on three separate dates for your convenience. Determining which plan is best for your family can be challenging. Kathy Gage, UHS’s insurance advisor for dependents, will explain how to choose and enroll in a plan. All workshops will be held in the Education Center on the first floor of the Tang Center, 2222 Bancroft Way. Students may choose one of the following dates:
August 22 (Wednesday), 3 to 4:30 p.m.
August 29 (Wednesday), 9 to 10:30 a.m.
September 5 (Wednesday), 3 to 4:30 p.m.
Please RSVP. Questions about this event? Call the Student Health Insurance Office (642-5700).
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Photo: Peg Skorpinski
While studying for the rhetoric Ph.D. she earned in 2002, Jody Lewen did volunteer work as an instructor in a program at San Quentin prison through which inmates can earn an associate of arts degree in liberal arts. Contrary to stereotypes, she found her students there to be not callous or sadistic, but intelligent, compassionate, and funny. And she found a calling.
At Cal Day in April of this year, her work in furthering educational opportunities for prisoners and changing prison culture through the on-site program, unique in California’s vast penal system, brought her a reward, the Peter E. Haas Public Service Award. The inmate-students, many of whom have thought of themselves under labels like gang members, addicts, or high school dropouts, have begun to redefine their lives through the program. Lewen directs the Patten University extension site at San Quentin, through which the for-academic-credit aspect of the program (typically 12 classes per semester) is carried out, and she founded and directs the Prison University Project, which supports the program financially and advocates statewide for systemic reform.
The program’s instructors are all volunteers — teachers, teaching assistants, tutors, and others from Bay Area campuses. The largest contingent are graduate students, and of those, roughly 70 percent come from UC Berkeley, in many different disciplines.
“The Promise of Higher Education at San Quentin,” filmed by Dan Krauss M.J. ‘05
Current volunteers include Hovig Bayandorian, grad student in Physics; Becca Carter, fifth-year Ph.D. student in Environmental Science and Policy Management (ESPM); Amy Cook, second-year grad student in Psychology; Roland de Putter, Physics grad student; Erik Douglas, Bioengineering grad student; Alex Fabricant, grad student in computer science; Melissa Fabros, Ph.D. candidate in English; Lisa Garbus, alumna with a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature; Trevor Gardner, doctoral student in Sociology; Donna Hamamoto and Brian Kessler, both Physics grad students; Maureen Lahiff, lecturer and academic coordinator in Public Health; Sang Lee, sixth-year doctoral student in ESPM; Kater Murch, fifth-year grad student in Physics; Andrew Ritchie, grad student in ESPM; Jodi Short, grad student in Sociology; Andrew Swan, alumnus with a Ph.D. in Computer Science (06); Ambuj Tewari, Computer Science grad student; and Jim Watkins, third-year grad student in Earth and Planetary Science.
A dozen graduate and professional students from Berkeley, sponsored by the Human Rights Center, have been doing fieldwork with human rights organizations in ten different countries on issues ranging from land rights and conservation to gender-based asylum claims and disability rights.
Three of them have written accounts of the first part of their fieldwork experience which are now available online.
Ariel Meyerstein
Ariel Meyerstein, a law student at Boalt, is volunteering with Reprieve, a London-based organization that’s representing current and former Guantanamo detainees.
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Daria Tsagaan
Daria Tsagaan, who’s working for her master’s in journalism, returned to her native Mongolia to create a multimedia documentary about domestic violence.
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Simon Morfit
Simon Morfit, a Ph.D. candidate in Sociology, is investigating the allocation of resources for HIV/AIDS versus other pressing needs in Malawi.
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In May, California Secretary of State Debra Bowen commissioned a “top-to-bottom” review of electronic voting systems used in the state. In late July and early August, she released reports by researchers from UC Davis and UC Berkeley who evaluated three systems from various standpoints.
Intended to restore public confidence in the integrity of the electoral process through machines that are secure, accurate, reliable, and accessible, the review did not have good news.
Security-wise, there’s a Swiss-cheese factor. All three systems, by different manufacturers, had common problems.
David Wagner, right, and then-grad student, now alumnus
Naveen K. Sastry (Ph.D. '07)
Photo: Peg Skorpinski
David Wagner M.S. ’99, Ph.D. ‘00, the associate professor of computer science who led the Berkeley contingent, said “The most severe problem we found was the potential for viruses to be introduced into a machine and spread throughout the voting system. In the worst-case scenario, these malicious codes could be used to compromise the votes recorded on the machines’ memory cards or render the machines non-functional on election day.”
Furthermore, Wagner said, “We found flaws that could allow an attacker to defeat all the technological countermeasures in the software. Unfortunately, these vulnerabilities are not trivial implementation bugs that can be patched up. The software just wasn’t designed with fundamental safeguards in place to make them resilient to intrusion.”
The researchers acknowledge that in the real world someone intent on hacking in would need an electronic voting machine in hand to find the security flaws. However, as recent news reports and voter watchdog groups have pointed out, people have bought them on eBay.
The 42 members of the Berkeley and Davis teams included internationally recognized experts in computer science, computer security, electronic voting, law, and public policy — faculty, postdocs, grad students, and experts from industry and other universities.
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The First International Virtual Reality (VR) Photography Conference was held at Berkeley in June, hosted by the Geography Computing Facility in the Department of Geography. It may not have made headlines around the world (after all, Paris Hilton was in and out of and back in the slammer around that time), but interesting things went on nonetheless.
The 100 or so participants could learn about high-altitude panoramas, high-resolution panoramas, selling panoramic prints to the corporate art market, VR photography as a business, using VR in real estate and journalism, and much more.
A souvenir of the conference lives on the web: a gallery of VRs taken in relation to the event (on-site or during field trips). They’re panoramic and interactive; the image moves according to where you move the cursor (take it slowly and your lunch stays where it belongs). Views include vehicle interiors, campus and San Francisco locales, and dramatic Yosemite scenics.
A fulltime postdoctoral position is available in the laboratory of Gertrude C. Buehring, Ph.D., in the School of Public Health at UC Berkeley. Research in the laboratory focuses on the potential of bovine leukemia virus (BLV) to infect humans and cause cancer. BLV is widespread in U.S. cattle, infecting 89 percent of dairy herds and 38 percent of beef herds. While less than five percent of infected animals develop bovine leukemia/lymphoma and are required to be culled from the herd, the majority of infected cattle are asymptomatic — and are the source of our beef and dairy products. Some humans have antibodies reactive with BLV and their cells contain BLV proteins and DNA. The breast cells of some women with breast cancer have a greater frequency of BLV DNA that those of normal women.
Among the projects a postdoc would be involved with are:
The postdoc researcher will also assist in writing and preparing grant applications.
Desired skills and experience:
Email any questions or submit CV (with names of three references) to buehring@berkeley.edu, indicating that you are responding to this notice.
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Greater Good is a quarterly magazine based at UC Berkeley in the Greater Good Science Center, and it’s always looking for graduate students who want to write for a popular audience about the work they and other researchers are doing. The publication reports on the science of social and emotional well-being, including subtopics such as compassion, happiness, empathy, and altruism. Read the current issue and others at the Greater Good website and learn more by emailing editor Jason Marsh.
eGrad is produced by Graduate Communications & Events, distributed by email, and archived online. Graduate students, alumni, faculty, and staff are invited to send timely news and announcements of interest to or utility of graduate students and the graduate community. Please submit items to Dick Cortén, editor, at gradpub@berkeley.edu.
