Four UC Berkeley faculty members joined the California Academy of Sciences as fellows earlier this month, joining the group of about 300 fellows currently at the academy.

Of the 10 new fellows announced Oct. 4, three are UC Berkeley professors Claire Kremen, Mark Richards and Benito Tan, and one is adjunct professor Jonathon Stillman.

Each year, the academy elects up to 15 scientists to join the fellowship, and the number of scientists elected each year depends on the caliber of the scientists in the nominee pool. Existing fellows nominate the researchers, and once researchers are elected to the academy, they stay on as fellows for life.

According to Terrence Gosliner, dean of science and research collections at the California Academy of Sciences, the fellows are selected based on several criteria: having a proven record of scientific excellence and a good track record in collaboration, being able to attract external grants, doing integrative research “that cuts across disciplines” and doing research relevant to current events in society, among others.

“We’re looking for people with a proven record of really advancing their science,” Gosliner said. “It’s not just doing routine publications with scientific approaches but really moving the needle in a particular field.”

A professor in the campus department of earth and planetary science and dean of the division of mathematical and physical sciences, Richards said he plans to continue geological research on the Galapagos Islands as a fellow of the academy in upcoming years.

Richards, who has been researching the Galapagos on and off for two decades, said he plans to study how the islands’ geological and physical aspects are connected to the biological evolution of the islands’ species, which undergo significant evolutionary changes over time after they migrate. Richards’ research also involves studying how islands form and change over time.

According to Gosliner, one of the advantages of becoming a fellow includes networking with other scientists regionally and nationally. Fellows can attract external funding, and they can also contribute to increasing the breadth of scientific knowledge through working closely with the academy.

Tan, a researcher at the University and Jepson herbaria at UC Berkeley, said that as a fellow, he will take care of the academy’s moss collection by checking the specimens and making sure they are properly classified and maintained.

Prior to achieving his fellow status, Tan established strong relations with the academy by collaborating on a research expedition in the Philippines, where he studied moss.

The other fellows include Kremen, a professor within the College of Natural Resources whose research involves studying the protection of biodiversity and ecosystems, and Stillman, an adjunct professor of integrative biology whose research involves studying the environmental physiology of marine life.

“Having four (UC) Berkeley faculty members nominated in that limited scope exemplifies how Cal has some of the leading top-notch scientists in the region and beyond,” Gosliner said.

Lydia Tuan covers research and ideas. Contact her at ltuan@dailycal.org.

The post 4 UC Berkeley faculty members elected fellows at the California Academy of Sciences appeared first on The Daily Californian.

Charlotte Passot/Staff

UC Berkeley has a new honor code. The wording is brief and to the point – “As a member of the UC Berkeley community, I act with honesty, integrity, and respect for others.” Although college campuses across the country have adopted various forms of honor codes, Berkeley is the first UC campus to do so.

Why now?

Berkeley already has a lengthy, detailed and rather legalistic-sounding Code of Student Conduct, covering various forms of undesirable behavior ranging from theft to sexual assault to cheating on exams. We also have our Principles of Community, an elegant set of aspirational statements that few of us can recite and fewer still see as a binding declaration. In comparison, the UC Berkeley honor code is a simple statement of, and a personal commitment to, the bedrock values of our academic institution ­— honesty, integrity, and respect — in a form that will be easily remembered and repeated. The honor code will serve as a constant reminder of who we are and who we are committed to be as a community of scholars, teachers and colleagues.

The idea of an honor code at Berkeley is hardly new. However, as new technologies have led to increased collaboration in students’ coursework, the boundaries that define cheating have become increasingly blurred. We are therefore trying to create more awareness about issues of academic integrity and respect for others by creating a consistent message across various departments and disciplines. There are also increasing public demands for educational institutions to instill a greater sense of personal responsibility and integrity. It was several years ago that a distinguished group of faculty from the College of Letters and Science recommended that the campus consider adopting an honor code, along with a number of other reforms of the undergraduate experience at Berkeley.

Subsequently, the Academic Senate, the senior administration of the campus, the Graduate Assembly and the ASUC came together and endorsed the above wording of our new honor code, with the ASUC enthusiastically taking the lead on efforts to generate campus awareness and hasten implementation.

How will the honor code become part of UC Berkeley’s culture?

In the coming weeks, you will see a general campus email announcement from ASUC President Connor Landgraf and Chancellor Birgeneau, and all incoming undergraduate and graduate students will be asked to click a box on their online Statement of Intent to Register forms, agreeing to abide by the UC Berkeley honor code. The deans of the College of Letters and Science and their colleagues across the campus will be circulating a succinct one-page statement elaborating on how the honor code can play out in courses of instruction. Recognizing that the nature of coursework and testing varies according to department and discipline, this explanatory statement will serve as a template designed to be adapted by campus faculty for inclusion in their course syllabi.

Moreover, all instructors, including graduate student instructors, will be urged to use the honor code as a springboard for conversations about cheating, the boundaries of plagiarism, issues of originality that may arise in collaborative assignments and other questions related to academic and personal integrity. Instructors will also be encouraged to ask students to sign statements on their written examinations certifying that, e.g., “I have neither given nor received any assistance in the taking of this exam” or similar statements as may be appropriate for different types of courses and teaching methods. Expect also to see signs, posters, placards and other visual reminders in classrooms and residence halls, reminding us all of our highest values as scholars and members of the UC Berkeley community.

The ASUC has set up an honor code website, complete with FAQ, to serve as a resource for the campus (asuc.org/honorcode). We invite you to join the ASUC as well as the Graduate Assembly, the Academic Senate and the chancellor in making the UC Berkeley honor code a proud new tradition of our campus community.

Connor Landgraf is the ASUC president. Mark Richards is the executive dean of the College of Letters and Science.

Contact the opinion desk at opinion@dailycal.org.

The post A new honor code for UC Berkeley appeared first on The Daily Californian.

Developed jointly by the ASUC, the Graduate Assembly, the Academic Senate and the deans of the College of Letters and Science, the one-sentence UC Berkeley Honor Code states: “As a member of the UC Berkeley community, I act with honesty, integrity, and respect for others.”

The aim is to spread the message of academic honesty instead of delineating rules against student misconduct, according to a promotional website created by the ASUC.

“The gray areas regarding collaboration, plagiarism, the Internet and so forth are becoming more and more difficult for students and faculty alike to understand,” said Executive Dean of the College of Letters and Science Mark Richards in a statement. “The idea is to create a talking point, or a focus for discussion, in each class among students about academic integrity, because it’s not just black and white all the time.”

David Presti, chair of the Academic Senate’s Student Affairs Committee, contrasted the Honor Code with UC Berkeley’s Principles of Community, which are campuswide guidelines for personal and collective conduct.

“The Honor Code is one sentence — one affirmative sentence,” Presti said. “What is in that one sentence is certainly also in the Principles of Community. The purpose of the Honor Code is to have this pithy condensation of these important principles more available for daily reference.”

To promote the code on campus, the ASUC and a committee headed by former ASUC Senator Aviv Gilboa and composed of students, faculty and staff will work to monitor its impact on academic conduct.

“(The Honor Code is) not going to be introduced and implemented in one semester,” Gilboa said. “This is an ongoing process that requires time, not only to introduce but also to implement the Honor Code for all members of the campus community.”

Presti said that the Honor Code’s condensed form makes it easy to place on class syllabi and to bring into lectures and discussions.

Beginning next fall, all incoming UC Berkeley students will be required to indicate that they agree with the Honor Code when they accept their offer of admission. The Honor Code will also be integrated into graduate student orientation programs, GSI training modules and the current CalSO program that offers orientation for new undergraduates.

Discussions about implementing the Honor Code started three years ago. According to Presti, the idea for the Honor Code surfaced during a faculty forum that discussed ways of enhancing both undergraduate and graduate education.

“(The Honor Code) didn’t come out of a cheating scandal or anything like that,” said ASUC President Connor Landgraf. “The motivation wasn’t because of a lack of academic integrity; rather, it came from a goal to be proactive and hold ourselves to the highest standards possible as the No. 1 public university in the nation.”

Contact Yvonne Ng at yng@dailycal.org.

Correction(s):
A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that Aviv Gilboa is currently an ASUC Senator. In fact, Aviv Gilboa is a former ASUC Senator.

The post UC Berkeley unveils new campuswide honor code appeared first on The Daily Californian.

The former chair of the Berkeley Division of the Academic Senate began his term this fall in a newly created associate dean position in the campus College of Letters and Science as part of an initiative begun by the college in 2010 to analyze the effectiveness of its undergraduate education.

As the college’s first associate executive dean for educational initiatives, Bob Jacobsen will lead an effort to reevaluate the college’s breadth requirements and develop a set of courses taught by groups of professors from different disciplines to broaden the undergraduate curriculum, said Mark Richards, the executive dean of the College of Letters and Science.

“At a campus this large and complex, things don’t usually happen quickly,” Richards said. “But when things happen, it’s because someone is steadfastly trying to get the ball rolling.”

Richards added that Jacobsen was chosen for the position largely because of his experience as a liaison between campus faculty and administrators last year.

Jacobsen said he found out about the position over the summer and is currently working on getting various committees to coordinate their activities. He said that his experience teaching physics to a pre-med class a couple years ago convinced him that different people learn in different ways and got him interested in the sort of initiative he is now helping lead.

“The idea is that we have a lot of people who want to do things to improve undergraduate education,” Jacobsen said. “Right now, there are a lot of people who really want to do a better job. We have to find smarter ways of doing better.”

Jacobsen joined the faculty at UC Berkeley in 1995 after earning a doctorate from Stanford University. When asked about teaching at its rival, he joked he “got smarter as he got older.”

Contact Shannon Carroll at scarroll@dailycal.org

The post College of Letters and Science appoints new associate dean appeared first on The Daily Californian.

Joe Wright/Staff

Bodies were colliding like excited atoms in a nuclear accelerator as an estimated 500 UC Berkeley students, alumni and community members overflowed into the aisles of the Chan Shun Auditorium Friday afternoon for a panel discussion on the Higgs boson discovery.

UC Berkeley physicists, whose work helped lead to the discovery, led the panel discussion “The Higgs Boson Explained: What is the Higgs and Why is Everyone So Excited About it?” to explain the Higgs boson, a newfound elementary particle that had been theorized over for more than 50 years.

It was announced July 4 that the new particle was discovered by both the ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research that is headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland.

“If (the Higgs boson) wasn’t there, we wouldn’t have humans or galaxies,” said campus associate professor of physics Beate Heinemann during the panel discussion. “It is a critical particle and we wouldn’t have mass without it. It is fundamentally different from other particles.”

The particle accelerator that hosted the experiments is the Large Hadron Collider — an accelerator with a 27-kilometer circumference on the Swiss-French border near Geneva and the testing site for ATLAS and CMS — according to Heinemann.

Panel moderator and College of Letters and Science Executive Dean Mark Richards described the accelerator as the most complicated machine ever built by mankind, which draws 5,000 scientists from around the world “all in the search for truth and beauty.”

The discussion had a delayed start due to the overly large crowd who had to be cleared from the aisles by the the campus fire marshal.

But panelist Louise Skinnari, a UC Berkeley doctoral student and ATLAS experiment member, said it was exciting to see such public attention and mainstream reporting of the discovery.

“I’m amazed by the public interest and media attention,” Skinnari said. “I really hope it continues and spreads interest about these issues.”

Chancellor Robert Birgeneau was also in attendance and opened up the panel by stating that the discovery “deals with the fundamental nature of the universe.”

The particle has widely been referred to as “the God particle,” since it is thought to be the origin of all mass. When asked about whether this term was an appropriate designator for the particle, all of the panelists rejected the notion as either meaningless or misleading.

Andrew Critch, a mathematics doctoral student who arrived early enough for a seat, said he was in attendance to gain a more specific understanding of Higgs boson and out of sheer interest in the nature of the universe.

“I wanted to come because I read lots of pop culture news about it,” Critch said. “I wanted to get an independent view of it that I wouldn’t find Googling.”

The post UC Berkeley physicists hold panel on Higgs boson appeared first on The Daily Californian.

The lecture and discussion will be held on campus at the Chan Shun Auditorium in the Valley Life Sciences Building.

Last week, two teams of physicists conducting experiments at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, Switzerland, announced the discovery of a new particle they believe could be the Higgs boson. The Higgs boson has been dubbed the “God Particle” because it imbues all particles in the universe with mass.

The announcement by the physicists at the Large Hadron Collider — the world’s largest and highest-energy particle accelerator — was hailed by some scientists as a success worthy of a Nobel Prize, and equated the results to the discovery of DNA.

Campus physicists at the lecture and discussion will explain what the Higgs boson is, why it was predicted and how a Higgs-like particle was proven to exist.

Speakers include UC Berkeley associate professor of physics Beate Heinemann, who is also a member of the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider run by CERN — the European Organization for Nuclear Research — and UC Berkeley professor of Physics Lawrence Hall, the former director of the Berkeley Center for Theoretical Physics.

After presentations by Heinemann and Hall, Mark Richards, the executive dean of the College of Letters and Science, will moderate a discussion between Heinemann, Hall and three other UC Berkeley physicists.

All members of the campus community and the public are invited to attend.

The post UC Berkeley physicists to hold lecture on Higgs boson appeared first on The Daily Californian.

The forum — which will take place from noon to 2 p.m. in Wheeler Auditorium — will feature Henry Brady, dean of the Goldman School of Public Policy, campus performance studies professor Catherine Cole, Student Regent Alfredo Mireles, Jr. and Student Regent-designate Jonathan Stein as speakers. Former Stanford University President Donald Kennedy, who is also an expert in environmental science and policy, was recently added to the speaker panel.

The Council of Deans Task Force on the Future of Public Universities has worked since June to organize a series of four forums on public higher education, according to Mark Richards, executive dean for the College of Letters and Science and an organizer of the series.

“We wanted to create a forum or venue to have an open and stimulating conversation about the future of public higher education not only just in Berkeley or California, but really the whole country,” he said.

The October forum focused on social inequality and opportunity and featured UC Berkeley professor of public policy and former U.S. Secretary of Labor Robert Reich. Forum organizers hope to increase the number of student attendees in contrast with the October forum’s low turnout by shortening presentations and including a group discussion segment moderated by ASUC President Vishalli Loomba where the audience can ask questions, Richards said.

Cole, who is currently researching ways of restructuring public education, said her talk will focus on citizenship and protest. She said such forums should have been held earlier after major protests such as the November 2009 Wheeler Hall occupation.

“It comes two years too late, but better late than never,” she said.

She added that in light of recent Occupy protests, it is “very hard for people to have that conversation when our campus doesn’t respect the rights of its own citizens.”

Mireles, who has visited every UC campus to speak about its financial situation, said he will be addressing dwindling state funding for the university.

“I, too, think that the UC should be free,” he said. “But if the state continues to cut and if we want to maintain our level of excellence, we have to be realistic.”

The drastic drop in funding is caused by a shortfall in state revenue, the majority of which comes from income and sales and corporate taxes. Brady’s talk will focus on the role taxation plays in supporting public higher education, which he describes as “the way we pay for things that we want and need.”

“Taxation is the price of civilization,” he said. “Public education is a public good that typically would not be supplied enough without some public support.”

The post Forum to continue discussion on state of public universities appeared first on The Daily Californian.

The Targeted Decoupling Initiative, which will affect approximately 180 to 200 professors, will increase faculty’s salaries in an effort to reduce the campus’s number of retention cases and to lessen the salary inequalities that the cases create, according to Vice Provost for the Faculty Janet Broughton.

All faculty nominations, which are made by the deans of each school, have already been made and are in the Berkeley Division of the Academic Senate’s Budget Committee for review, according to Executive Dean of the College of Letters and Science Mark Richards.

The $1.5 million for the initiative will come from the operating budget of the university, which is primarily funded through state funding and student tuition, Broughton said. The funds are allocated to the different schools in UC Berkeley and will be distributed to faculty at the time of each member’s next merit review, he added.

Richard Mathies, dean of the College of Chemistry, said that faculty are considered for nomination based on how strong they are in terms of performance in teaching and research and how their salaries compare to their peers at other institutions.

In light of rising tuition costs and further budget cuts, Mathies acknowledged the possibility of controversy and student disapproval, but said the initiative would actually help the campus save money.

The process of retaining faculty costs the campus more than the money allocated for the initiative, Mathies said. Both Mathies and Broughton said the campus wants to avoid the more costly salary raises from retention cases by introducing more reasonable and timely increases from the initiative.

“The idea is to reduce the cost of retention because we have to throw a lot of money to keep professors around here,” Mathies said. “Retention almost always drives up salary unusually well above the levels that we would do with the Targeted Decoupling Initiative.”

Because of UC Berkeley’s financial circumstances, other colleges and universities have been targeting UC Berkeley professors, Mathies said. In most scenarios, UC Berkeley has to compete with better-funded private schools, he added.

He also said the initiative would free up resources to raise funds that could be directed towards students and research.

“Because of the financial notoriety of California, the faculty at Berkeley are being targeted like crazy by other universities,” Mathies said. “I’m spending so much time on retention these days so I don’t have enough time to do fundraising.”

UC Berkeley faculty have consistently been underpaid compared to their peers, averaging around 10 percent lower than the global average, according to Mathies.

Despite the financial difficulties, Broughton said UC Berkeley has done well in retaining faculty. She cited Yale University and Stanford University as UC Berkeley’s biggest retention competitors for the 2010-11 academic year.

Of the 49 retention cases that began in 2010-11, 30 of the faculty members involved have decided to stay as faculty at UC Berkeley. The campus has lost six cases, and 13 of the cases are still in progress.

“If we look at our best performers and make sure they’re not being undervalued, we can nip that in the bud,” Mathies said. “These retentions take up an incredible amount of time and an awful lot of money.”

The post UC Berkeley launches initiative to increase faculty salaries, improve retention appeared first on The Daily Californian.

The program, to be launched in the 2012-13 academic year, will include courses that take a basic concept or question and analyze it through different disciplines, allowing students to examine varied approaches to a single situation. Six to seven Big Ideas courses will be offered within the next two years and will be designed for lower division students.

“I think the way these courses will help students is that the really important problems and the big questions facing us all require interdisciplinary approaches,” said Alix Schwartz, director of academic planning for the College of Letters and Sciences’ Undergraduate Division, in an email. “Students who can learn to think across disciplines will be much better prepared for the world of the present and the future.”

Each course will be taught by at least two faculty members from different departments.

The program will be similar to the Discovery Courses already taught in the College of Letters and Sciences, but these courses will be designed to fulfill at least two breadth requirements.

According to Mark Richards, Executive Dean of the college, a report on Big Ideas course proposals will be finalized within the next two weeks.

Richards said in an email announcement to campus faculty that the new program stems from “a strategic planning process to reform undergraduate education at Berkeley.”

Possible topics include “Disasters, as examined from the point of view of Earth and Planetary Science, Religious Studies, and Economics” and “Language and Mind, as explored by a team from Linguistics, Philosophy, History, or Psychology,” Richards said in the email.

The teams of professors selected to teach the courses will be granted around $10,000 per course. The funds for the first year of the program will come from the Discovery Courses budget — funded through the executive vice chancellor and provost — and donors to the college, according to Schwartz.

Students can expect these topics to be fun and intellectually stimulating, Schwartz said in the email.

The post College of Letters and Sciences has ‘Big Ideas’ for undergraduate education appeared first on The Daily Californian.