On Wednesday, the UC Berkeley Society of Women Engineers (SWE) hosted Mini University! This one-day free event introduces underserved high school students to the college environment and research involved in pursuing STEM careers. Undergraduate students from SWE led lab tours for high-school students to help them learn about the different engineering disciplines available and the cutting-edge research happening on campus.
This semester, students in CE 167: Engineering Project Management completed seven site visits hosted by the companies Webcor, Suffolk, and West Builders. All visits took place in Berkeley and Oakland and happened while construction projects were in progress. These visits proved to be valuable learning experiences for students, who had a great time exploring the sites and getting a good feel for the construction industry.
Attention CEE students!
On October 14, CE112 students went to the Center for Smart Infrastructure at Richmond Field Station to observe a pipeline failure test in a lecture by Professor Kenichi Soga and East Bay Municipal Utility District staff. Soga adds that as part of the test, students observed the failure of the pipeline to understand the mechanism behind how the pipeline works and get to know the details.
Last Friday, students from CE 249, an "Experimental Methods in Structural Engineering Class" taught by Professor Khalid M. Mosalam, conducted a test on the sixth-floor outdoor bridge of Davis Hall to investigate the behavior of the structure. They evaluated the bridge's condition at different intervals using a computer to get the frequency data points and other measures.
Dr. Ioanna Kavvada, who just graduated from the ECIC program (and was advised by Professors Arpad Horvath and Scott Moura), has won the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute's 2023 EERI Annual Graduate Student Paper Competition for the article "Probabilistic Seismic Hazard Analysis for Spatially Distributed Infrastructure Considering the Correlation of Spectral Acceleration Across Spectral Periods," published in Earthquake Spectra with Professors Moura, Horvath, and Abrahamson.
In a San Francisco Examiner article, CEE Professor Susan Shaheen comments on essential factors that the California Public Utilities Commission should consider in their decision to uphold or negate both Cruise and Waymo's requests for confidentiality regarding trip-level data. Both companies filed requests with the CPUC to protect trip data from riders, including location, date, time, and trip distance offered through their autonomous vehicle ride-hailing services.
On October 13, the department hosted an advising forum for undergraduate students to learn more about faculty members' career paths and the classes that they teach. Students got to learn about the value of a CEE degree, courses that will help advance their chosen career, and the importance of research opportunities. Faculty members also shared what makes the program or area they work in the department interesting and the value and potential for pursuing a graduate degree program.
After two years of meeting virtually, the National Academy of Engineering held its annual meeting on October 2nd to welcome new inductees from the Classes of 2020, 2021, and 2022! This year, CEE alumni and faculty were part of the inductees honored in the NAE ceremony, one of the highest professional honors in engineering.
In a Nature article, CEE Professor Amy Pickering talks about how she created a water purification device named the Venturi that runs without electricity and removes contaminants that can enter leaky pipes. In her postdoctoral research, from 2012 to 2015, she helped make drinking water safe in Dhaka by developing an automated disinfection system to sterilize water directly from the tap in communities that lack access to clean water, or sanitation tools and have many diseases circulating.
