In late March, UC Berkeley engineers drilled a borehole that extends 400 feet below ground, providing the first opportunity to study the properties of the bedrock that sits below campus. The information they gather will help determine whether a geothermal heat pump system — which uses the thermal properties of subsurface rock to help heat and cool buildings more efficiently — could be integrated into the campus’s long-term plans for decarbonization.

By Marni Ellery

Ashok Gadgil, professor of civil and environmental engineering at UC Berkeley, has been named the inaugural winner of the 2022 Zuckerberg Water Prize by the Zuckerberg Institute of Water Research at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel.

The award, announced this week, comes with a $60,000 prize in recognition of Gadgil’s “outstanding leadership, vision, innovation and lasting global impact in the field of water.”

Congratulations to eight CEE students selected for UC Berkeley's Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor Award!

Juan Caicedo

Ali El Hajj Chehade

Emma O'Hara 

Emma Lucken 

Zhe Fu

Drew Gomberg 

Alexandra Pan 

Adam Wise 

Professor Arpad Horvath is part of the team led by the University of California, Davis (PI: Professor Sabbie Miller) that will develop novel models that integrate material properties and characteristics into greenhouse gas sequestration scenarios to inform technological breakthroughs in carbon storing building materials.

Professor Kenichi Soga is one of the selected State-of-the-Art speakers in Geo-Congress 2022 on State of the Art and Practice in Geotechnical Engineering. His talk will focus on distributed sensing. 

Geo-Congress is the first and only conference focused on the State of the Art and Practice in Geotechnical Engineering. This year, the conference will take place in Charlotte, North Carolina, from March 20-23, 2022.