Congratulations to CEE Ph.D. candidate Zhe Fu, who placed second in the UC Berkeley Grad Slam with her project, “Stop-and-go No More: How a Few Smart Cars Can Fix Traffic Jams!”
Grad Slam is a UC-sponsored competition that challenges graduate students to present their research to a general audience in just three minutes. Students compete in preliminary rounds on their campus, with prizes awarded at each stage. The first-place winner from UC Berkeley will go on to represent the campus at the UC-wide Grad Slam Championship in May. As the second-place winner, Zhe Fu will advance to the systemwide competition if the first-place winner is unable to attend.
CEE Ph.D. candidate Jaewon Saw was also named a semi-finalist for her project, “Listening with Light: Unlocking the World with Distributed Acoustic Sensing.” Out of just 10 semi-finalists across UC Berkeley, CEE was the only department to have two students represented—an exciting recognition of the department’s strength in innovative research.
Watch their presentations on the Berkeley Grad Slam Competition website.
About the Researchers:
- Zhe Fu is a fifth-year Ph.D. candidate in Transportation Engineering, focused on sustainable solutions for mixed-autonomy traffic, where autonomous and human-driven vehicles coexist. Her interdisciplinary research combines physics-based modeling, control theory, and machine learning to reduce congestion, decrease emissions, and enhance energy efficiency in transportation systems. Outside the lab, Zhe enjoys singing, attending live performances, and playing sports.
- Jaewon Saw is a Ph.D. candidate in Systems Engineering, specializing in Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS)—a powerful technology with broad applications from infrastructure monitoring to geophysics. Her early fascination with the endurance of historic structures inspired her to pursue a career in structural engineering. Now, she brings that same curiosity and technical skill to advancing next-generation sensing tools.