Spencer Klein/Courtesy

Right now, UC Berkeley graduate Zigmund Kermish should be preparing to launch a balloon-based telescope from Antarctica. This instrument, which would rise 120,000 feet into the atmosphere, collects data that might provide insight into the physics behind the Big Bang.

He would be on the ice by Nov. 1 if the U.S. government hadn’t shut down.

But without a spending bill to fund government operations, the National Science Foundation ran out of funds for the U.S. Antarctic Program about Monday, forcing a delay on Kermish’s work as well as that of other campus researchers. The shutdown comes at a crucial time for these scientists — the start of Antarctic summer, when many researchers head south to upgrade or begin projects.

Even if the federal government were to reopen tomorrow, Kermish said, researchers would not fully recover from the delay.

The base out of which these balloons are launched opens only for this period of about three months, during which weather further limits the time available for preparation and launch. Kermish, who is working on this project as a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University, said this instrument has been developing since about 2008.

Now, they must wait another year to collect data.

In an Oct. 8 statement, the NSF said it will continue to staff research stations in Antarctica at the minimum level, called “caretaker status,” required to keep people and property safe. What constitutes caretaker status, however, is still unclear to researchers.

“The rule is only essential operations can continue,” said Elizabeth George, a UC Berkeley doctoral student working on another project, the South Pole Telescope. “So in principle, you can say, ‘My equipment’s going to freeze — that is essential,’ but the reality of the situation is those decisions about what’s essential are not really made by scientists.”

The South Pole Telescope detects remaining light from the Big Bang, according to George, which can be used to study the early universe. Regardless of what the NSF decides to do, she said, any delay can wreak logistical havoc on such a large enterprise.

“Anything you do in Antarctica is driven by logistics: You need food, you need fuel, you need transportation,” said Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory senior scientist Spencer Klein, who is involved with the Berkeley IceCube group, which also does work in Antarctica. “Things that are just minor details here are enormous down there.”

George fears that, because of the current delay, the fuel required by these research stations will not arrive in time to start them up for next year. In that case, South Pole Telescope researchers will lose a year of data.

Additionally, contract workers, who agree to work in Antarctica for a set period of time, will be out of a job if a lack of funding prevents their deployment.

Klein faces similar issues in his South Pole project. The IceCube Neutrino Observatory — one cubic kilometer in volume — detects subatomic particles called neutrinos, which possess incredibly high energies. Scientists hope they can see how the particles reached such high energies by tracking their direction.

Klein said the NSF is unlikely to risk damaging equipment, considering the organization has already invested $242 million in IceCube. According to Klein, the observatory needs at least two people at the South Pole to maintain the technology and collect data. If data collection continues but the shutdown prevents researchers from flying down to upgrade the hardware this Antarctic summer, he said, the sacrifice will be survivable but not ideal.

“I just feel pretty helpless about the situation,” Klein said. “Everybody’s kind of making this up as they go.”

Contact Melissa Wen at mwen@dailycal.org.

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A new application developed by UC Berkeley researchers will harness mobile phones — thousands of mini-computers that often lie idle — for use as the equivalent of a multimillion-dollar supercomputer.

The new app, developed for the Android operating system by the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing, is based on its original Linux-based app for PCs. The mobile app became available Monday and is free.

“Consumers have already bought these computers,” said David Anderson, a Berkeley researcher who directed BOINC. “They’re paying for the electricity; they’re paying for the maintenance. We’re creating a framework where scientists can get access to (that computing power).”

In 2002, BOINC researchers thought to tap the power of idle PC processors and offered the capacity to researchers for free. According to Anderson, BOINC has already harnessed computing power roughly equivalent to that of the largest supercomputer in the world, which is worth more than $100 million.

Anderson said that today’s mobile devices are catching up to desktops and estimated that they are already 20 percent as powerful as the average desktop.

“The power of mobile devices … has increased by a huge factor in the last couple of years — to the point where the power of your phone, even though it’s really small, has a good percentage of the processing power of a big desktop computer,” Anderson said.

The app runs only when the mobile device is plugged in and connected to a Wi-Fi network, avoiding possible risks like overdrawing the battery or slowing the system. It includes a simple user interface that shows the user what projects the app is working on and is available on both the Google Play store and on the Amazon app store.

BOINC’s mobile platform has already been used by research groups like the Scripps Research Institute. There are currently six projects that use BOINC’s mobile app, with 20 or more expected in the next few weeks.

The mobile platform was funded in part by the National Science Foundation. Lisa-Joy Zgorski, a spokesperson for the NSF, said that BOINC was an easy way for individuals to contribute to important research at next to no cost to them.

Because BOINC runs behind the scenes on mobile devices, many potential users raised concerns about privacy. BOINC, however, uses complex encryption coding and allows users to download and inspect the app’s code for malware or other security threats.

“Whoever is in control here has a lot of power,” said UC Berkeley fourth-year molecular and cell biology major Salil Babbar. “I want to know about security protocols, who could have access to what I’m looking at.”

Contact Simon Greenhill at sgreenhill@dailycal.org and follow him on Twitter @simondgreenhill.

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Yasmin Anwar/UC Berkeley Media Relations/Courtesy

A group of doctoral and postdoctoral students is holding a career conference Friday aiming to introduce graduate students to private-sector jobs in light of diminishing availability of academic careers.

The conference, named Beyond Academia, allows doctoral and postdoctoral students to receive tips from company recruiters and hear from speakers who earned doctorates and have since transitioned into the private sector.

“We created the Beyond Academia conference based on our own interest in jobs outside of the traditional tenure-track professorship,” said Bryan Alvarez, one of the organizers of Beyond Academia and a seventh-year doctoral student in psychology. “The goal is just to let people look around in places they don’t normally have access to as easily and learn more about themselves in the process.”

The conference is taking place at a time when graduate students, who have traditionally gone into academic careers, find it more difficult to become faculty members and thus need to explore more career options.

A survey conducted by the National Science Foundation found that the percentage of graduate students in all fields who find academic jobs upon graduation fell from 23.2 percent in 1991 to 19.4 percent in 2011.

“In part, there are not enough available jobs for every graduate student to have a professorial job,” Alvarez said. “It seems unlikely that the hundreds of thousands of graduate students in the U.S. alone, qualified with the wealth and breadth of training they have received, would all want the exact same job. It’s OK for graduate students to reach beyond the career path they are assumed to want.”

According to a survey conducted by UC Berkeley’s Career Center, between 2007 and 2009, 57 percent of students who graduated with doctorates received jobs in academia, with 35 percent of those in tenure-track positions. Additionally, the percentage of UC Berkeley doctoral students who obtain faculty positions is higher than the national average of 41 percent.

Marty Nemko, a UC Berkeley doctorate recipient and keynote speaker for Beyond Academia, said that even for UC Berkeley doctoral students, the job market is far from easy due to cost-cutting measures that limit academic employment in some universities.

“Universities are under great pressure to convince prospective students that four to eight years and $100,000-plus is time and money well spent,” Nemko said. “To control costs, universities hire more part-time faculty and hire fewer professors by having current professors teach in large lectures or online.”

Alvarez said that this conference was requested by his colleagues, and he hopes that through this event, participants will understand that they are capable and qualified to obtain jobs that are not academic-related.
Beyond Academia will take place on March 22 from 9 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. in International House.

Contact Seif Abdelghaffar at sabdelghaffar@dailycal.org.

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If Congress fails to reach a compromise on how to address the national deficit by Friday, the University of California’s prestigious research programs are expected to lose about 10 percent of their federal grants. Currently, the university receives about $3 billion in federal research funds.

The estimated $49 million in research fund reductions from the sequester — described by Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., as “next to a major war, economically the worst thing that could happen to this country” — will take place over the course of the upcoming year.

“It means less resources, less money to the lab and personally, it means I will not be taking a graduate student this year,” said professor John Huelsenbeck of the campus department of integrative biology. “It’s the training aspect that concerns me the most. When you don’t have money, you can’t train new researchers.”

Higher education officials across the nation are largely unsure of the specifics of the cuts.

“Education will be badly impacted,” said Jason Furman, principal deputy director of the White House’s National Economic Council, in a press conference. “Across-the-board cuts will affect the priorities that we should be investing in.”

Graham Fleming, UC Berkeley’s vice chancellor for research, said that universities across the country will receive about a thousand fewer federal grants next year if a compromise is not reached.

Many federal agencies have cut back on granting research awards over the past fiscal year in anticipation of the reductions, Fleming said.

He added that the university does not have the funds to fully compensate for the millions in reductions.

“We will just have to do some temporary belt-tightening and hope we can get a more rational and sensible budget plan soon,” he said.

Furman said the cuts were never intended to actually be implemented but rather to serve as a mechanism for motivating Congress to reach a compromise.

Sequestration, approved as part of the Budget Control Act of 2011, was initially scheduled to take effect in January of 2013. The legislation had increased the debt limit, cut $1 trillion in discretionary appropriations and formed a “super committee” in hope of identifying an additional $1.2 trillion in cuts to federal programs over the next seven years.

However, the committee failed to reach an agreement. Now, with the extended deadline provided by the American Taxpayer Relief Act of 2012 just days away, many officials are considering the cuts inevitable.

With little guidance on how to implement the trigger cuts, departments across the University of California have not been able to make definitive plans for the future.

“There is a significant level of uncertainty, and that makes it particularly difficult for researchers to think through their research opportunities,” said Chris Harrington, associate director at the University of California Office of Federal Governmental Relations. “Its not just about the cuts but also about the broader budgetary uncertainty as we look for the future.”

Fleming said he hopes that elected officials realize that the federal government plays an important role in supporting research and development, especially at a university like UC Berkeley. From 2001 to 2011, UC Berkeley graduate students were awarded more National Science Foundation grants than those at any other university in the nation.

About 56 percent of UC Berkeley’s research is funded by federal agencies, Fleming said. He added that the federal government is the only institution that can support research at the scale necessary for competitive innovation. Although private industry does play a role in funding research, it is less willing to invest in long-term projects.

“If we don’t have that support, we won’t have the innovation that has kept the U.S. economy as the leading economy for the last 50 years or so,” Fleming said.

Huelsenbeck said he is already noticing a change in the United States’ ability globally.

One colleague of his, he said, moved to China because of the nation’s increasing investment in science and advanced labs and its ability to fund large amounts of graduate students.

Meanwhile, the United States is cutting back research funds by the millions.

“I can’t imagine a future where across-the-board cuts, without any rhyme or reason, continue in a permanent matter,” Fleming said. “I think this would be temporary  — or, at least, I really hope so.”

Alex Berryhill covers higher education. Contact her at aberryhill@dailycal.org and follow her on Twitter @berryhill93.

Correction(s):
A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that UC Berkeley could receive about 1,000 fewer federal grants as a result of sequestration. In fact, sequestration could mean 1,000 fewer grants to universities nationwide.

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Together, UC Berkeley, UCSF and Stanford University will coordinate the NSF Bay Area Regional I-Node Program, one of five Innovation Corps nodes established by the NSF across the country. The three universities will use the NSF’s $3.75 million grant to establish training programs to link researchers to the business aspects of innovation over a three-year period.

“The combination of the three schools makes for an incredible asset,” said Silicon Valley entrepreneur Steve Blank, an entrepreneurship lecturer at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business and the Stanford University School of Engineering.

According to node manager Andre Marquis, executive director of the Lester Center for Entrepreneurship at the Haas School of Business, the goal of the program is to educate scientists and engineers on how to create startups while simultaneously giving them the opportunity to test their business ideas.

Blank explained the importance of getting scientists past what the NSF calls the “ditch of death,” or the gap between when NSF research funding runs out and when a team is credible enough to raise private capital.

The I-Corps will teach entrepreneurs the Lean LaunchPad framework, a training program Blank developed for his UC Berkeley and Stanford classes. With an emphasis on frequent customer feedback, the method challenges researchers to test the applicability of their proposals in the business world.

“Every team has to meet with 100 customers over the course of the program to test their hypotheses,” Marquis said. “The method is to do experiments on your business model to figure out whether there’s a business behind your technology.”

The program is a hybrid of both on-site and online lectures. Thirty Bay Area startup teams will spend three days in the classroom and five weeks watching online lectures. Teams will be expected to pitch ideas to other teams weekly and to keep a blog documenting their findings.

According to Marquis, the node also hopes to facilitate open access to research between all participating institutions across the country.

To assist researchers in bridging the gap between science, engineering and business, the NSF hopes to build a “national innovation ecosystem” of universities that would allow academics to capitalize on financial opportunities that their research offers.

In his blog, Blank noted that compressing the time for commercializing scientific breakthroughs and reducing the early-stage risks of new ventures will mean more jobs, new industries and a permanent edge for innovation in the United States.

According to Blank, commercializing science and technology locally and nationally could give the country “an enormous competitive advantage.”

Contact Mia Shaw at mshaw@dailycal.org.

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The robot can’t walk. It can’t talk or clean your living room, but it might one day save your life.

A team of faculty and students at UC Berkeley are attempting to transform the way surgery is performed by inviting robots into the operating room and allowing surgeons to hand off some responsibility to these automated assistants.

Along with four other universities, these researchers have received a $3.5 million grant from the National Science Foundation to develop ways to teach robots to learn from their human counterparts and carry out complex subtasks — such as suturing — that are tedious for human surgeons.

“The big picture here is that humans and robots have different strengths, and what we’d like to do is exploit what robots are good at and exploit what humans are good at and then somehow combine them in a way that (allows for actions) that neither robot nor human could be doing on their own,” said Pieter Abbeel, an assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer science at UC Berkeley and one of the lead investigators on the study.

Robots, he said, are excellent at performing precise and repetitive tasks, while humans are better at identifying problems visually and adapting to new tasks and environments.

While medical robots that assist in surgeries have popped up in operating rooms in the past few years, although not widely due to their enormous cost, the researchers want to take things a step further and program the robots with the capability to learn.

In other words, instead of a surgeon having to manually guide the robot through each task, he or she could potentially demonstrate these subtasks to a robot and have the robot perform the necessary steps.

“A human surgeon might indicate by pointing that he or she needs five overhand stitches from this point to this point, and then the robot would perform them under the supervision of the surgeon,” said Ken Goldberg, professor of industrial engineering and operations research and EECS, a co-investigator on the study. “Our goal is to train the robot by observing human experts performing sutures.

Such “machine learning” has become a hot research topic in the past few years as humans look for ways to program computers to perform complex motions without being  directed to do so outright.

Laparoscopic surgery is one area where researchers hope to apply this technology. This minimally invasive surgery involves two small incisions made in the body through which surgeons can insert a camera and operate by simultaneously looking at a camera monitor and making necessary actions with a specialized surgical tool. The operation can be exhausting for a surgeon who is charged with making complex, delicate movements that can mean life or death for a patient.

“We can monitor or make changes to drive the motion of our robot using our own algorithms,” Goldberg said. “So that gives us much more freedom and flexibility to explore this frontier.”

The researchers say  they hope to demonstrate automated suturing techniques in the next four years and hope to see limited autonomy in operating rooms within the decade.

However, your surgeon of the future is likely to resemble McDreamy more than, say, R2D2.

“I don’t foresee robots doing surgery without human supervision,” Goldberg emphasized. “We don’t expect that to happen anytime in the future.”

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Tom Kunh/Courtesy

Randi Engle, a professor at the UC Berkeley School of Education, died in her home Friday after a two-year battle with pancreatic cancer. She was 45.

In 2005 Engle joined the UC Berkeley faculty, where she quickly became known as an optimistic and devoted scholar who was committed to her students.

“She was someone who, no matter what you did, no matter who were, she always believed in you,” said graduate student Aditya Adiredja, who had worked with Engle for the past seven years. “She wanted you to have your own voice.”

Engle’s family, former students and researchers described her as energetic and vigorous. Engle tried to celebrate her students’ successes often, even holding dessert parties at her home to celebrate the end of the semester.

“She approached everything with a serious passion for life,” said Adam Mendelson, a graduate student who had worked with Engle for the past six years. “She wanted to make sure that everybody’s successes were recognized and celebrated, no matter how small.”

Engle was born and raised in New Jersey. She graduated from Dartmouth College in 1990 with bachelor’s degrees in psychology and mathematics. In 2000, she received her doctorate in symbolic systems in education from Stanford University. She joined the Graduate School of Education at UC Berkeley in 2005 as an assistant professor and received tenure as an associate professor in 2011.

As a mentor, Engle broke down traditional divisions with students to develop deeper relationships.

“She was inviting and transparent in a way that I had never experienced with any other professor,” said Mendelson. “She let us feel like we were a part of what she was doing.”

Engle’s research at the school focused on understanding methods of effective teaching. She received a Faculty Early Career Development grant from the National Science Foundation in 2009 to investigate how methods of instruction can encourage students to transfer what they have learned between different educational settings. While at the school, she also received a Hellman Family Faculty award and a dissertation fellowship from the Spencer Foundation, among other awards.

“Randi was a truly remarkable researcher, teacher, and mentor,” said Judith Warren Little, dean at the Graduate School of Education, in an email. “Her passing leaves an enormous void in the Graduate School of Education.”

Engle shared a similar dedication toward her family, said Tom Kuhn, her husband of 21 years. She “cared deeply” about the couple’s two daughters, Rebecca Engle and Gwendolyn Kuhn, and enjoyed spending time outdoors. She is survived by her husband, two daughters, brother, mother, father and stepmother.

“She loved exploring places, both new and old,” Kuhn said.

Despite her passing, Engle’s legacy continues through the work of her students. Adiredja now serves as a math GSI on campus and credits his experience with Engle to be a leading influence in his relationship with his students.

“She inspired me to be the instructor I am today,” said Adiredja.

Contact Andrea Guzman at aguzman@dailycal.org.

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Michael Restropo/File

Sudden Oak Death, a disease that has plagued the oak and tanoak tree population in California for the past 20 years, has killed more trees this year than in the last two years, leading UC Berkeley researchers to be concerned that the epidemic is becoming more deadly.

The disease has been infecting oak and tanoak trees around the bays of California since its discovery in the 1990s, and this year, the number of trees killed indicates that a wave of the disease is spreading throughout the state, according to Katharine Palmieri, the spokesperson for the California Oak Mortality Task Force.

An annual aerial survey from the U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service found 376,000 dead oak and tanoak trees over 54,000 acres in California’s impacted areas, compared to 38,000 trees across 8,000 acres mapped in the same area in 2011.

Palmieri said the pathogen is primarily spread through the spores of infected plants but is expedited by the presence of water.

According to Matteo Garbelotto, the head of the UC Berkeley Forest Pathology and Mycology Lab, the heavy rains in 2011 are a major factor in the rapid spread of the disease this year.

Palmieri said that while there are as many as 137 different types of plants infected by the disease, oak and tanoak trees are some of the only plants killed by the disease.

“Oaks are a keystone species, which means they are fundamentally important to ecosystems,” said Doug Schmidt, a researcher in the lab. “They provide food and shelter to several different types of organisms. If they are lost, the entire ecosystem will be negatively affected.”

According to Palmieri, the symptoms of Sudden Oak Death vary from plant to plant. An oak or tanoak tree infected with the disease will present symptoms such as “oozing out of the trunk” — a canker — on the tree.

Palmieri said that there are two ways to deal with the disease — early prevention and eradication. Early prevention includes root zone management, pruning and proper irrigation of the trees, and eradication is completely removing the infected tree to prevent spread to healthy trees.

In addition to the aerial surveys, researchers could see that the disease had become more widespread this year because of the data collected from Sudden Oak Death Blitz surveys, according to Schmidt.

Schmidt said Sudden Oak Death Blitzes, founded in 2008, are community-based outreach programs coordinated by local organizers in cooperation with UC Berkeley, and the programs are endorsed by the U.S. Forest Service, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation and the National Science Foundation.

The volunteers in the program — referred to as “citizen scientists” — are trained to identify disease symptoms in different plants, and every spring for two days, they survey the land in their areas and collect samples of leaves that present symptoms of Sudden Oak Death. The samples are then sent to Garbelotto’s lab to be analyzed for the disease.

Schmidt said that this spring, a total of 10,000 trees were surveyed in 19 Sudden Oak Death Blitzes organized throughout Northern California by more than 500 volunteers.

Debbie Mendelson, a member of the county of Woodside’s Conservation and Environmental Health Committee, said she joined her local Sudden Oak Death Blitz because she read an article about Sudden Oak Death and its harmful effects on the environment, and from her own experiences, she wanted to raise awareness of the disease.

“There was a tree on my property that I had walked by every day until one day I noticed it had what looked like wood shavings near its trunk,” Mendelson said. “After having someone come to check it out, we found out that it was positive for (the disease). It was healthy for two years before finally becoming brittle, and I was forced to cut it down.”

The disease is currently found in the wildlands of 14 coastal California counties, from Monterey to Humboldt, according to Palmieri, and more counties are likely to be affected by  the disease if preventative measures are not taken.

“Last year, the Contra Costa County was really affected by SOD, and it seems to be moving into the urban areas in Alameda County,” Garbelotto said. “It’s time for them to do something to prevent the spread of this disease, or they will, unfortunately, face the same troubles.”

Schmidt said that so far, samples taken from campus have tested negative for the disease, but without preventative measures, that could soon change.

Contact Pooja Mhatre at pmhatre@dailycal.org.

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Kevin Hahn/Staff

Two UC Berkeley instructors are developing a new advanced placement computer science course geared in part at increasing historically low female and minority enrollment in the field.

The course, which is anticipated to be offered in high schools nationwide starting in the 2015-16 school year, aims to fill a critical gap in computer science education and a lack of gender and racial diversity in computer science — a trend that has been documented at UC Berkeley.

According to a February demographic summary of the UC Berkeley College of Engineering — which houses the campus computer science department — out of the 3,052 students enrolled in the college in 2010, only 20 percent were female. Underrepresented minorities made up only 7 percent of the college, compared to a campuswide 16 percent.

UC Berkeley computer science lecturers Brian Harvey and Dan Garcia are working to reverse that trend through the AP course by creating greater interest in computer science in high schools. Garcia has been a member of the course’s advisory group since its infancy in 2009, when the College Board received a roughly $2.5 million grant from the National Science Foundation to develop the class.

“The challenge that Berkeley Engineering faces is the challenge faced by 95 percent of engineering schools in the nation,” Garcia said. “It really is a pipeline problem in K-12 schools, which the NSF has been trying to fix.”

Garcia started teaching the campus course Computer Science 10 in 2009, which he said was heavily influenced by the framework proposed by the College Board for the AP class and now serves as a model for high school classes currently in pilot stages and other university classes across the country.

“When I got a list of guidelines of what this new course (was) about, I brought it back to Berkeley, and we transformed our computer science course,” said Garcia. “We launched our course in fall 2009, and we were the only one of the early pilots who had taught the course before.”

Many of the piloted courses being offered in participating high schools and universities across the country are also using BYOB  — open source programming software developed by Garcia and Harvey.

“At our university, we’re using BYOB as a programming platform,” said Jeff Gray, associate professor of computer science at the University of Alabama. “We’re also teaching disabled students to program using voice commands, and for that we’re using Snap!, another programming platform that UC Berkeley is developing.”

Gray said one of the problems with attracting students to computer science in college is that in high school there is a large jump between the skills required for basic computer courses and the existing AP Computer Science course, which focuses heavily on computer programming.

Scholars at a 2008 conference hosted by the NSF focusing on increasing computer literacy, where the idea for a new class was first introduced, also noted that the rate of college graduates majoring in computer science does not match the growing rate of jobs in the field.

Studies by the NSF show that the number of students taking the existing AP Computer Science exam fell by 15 percent between 2001 and 2007, while a study by the UCLA Higher Education Research Institute found that the number of college freshmen intending to major in computer science fell more than 70 percent between 2000 and 2005.

“There’s a gap between the fundamental computer literacy course in high school where you learn how to create spreadsheets in (Microsoft) Excel and the hardcore AP computer science course,” Gray said. “We think this new course fits the gap very well. It’s going to raise the bar of computing across high schools and colleges campuses.”

Another problem facing the field is a lack of high school faculty members who can teach at the intermediate level and get students interested in computer science.

To get teachers prepared for the new course, Harvey taught two six-week workshops to 60 high school teachers this past summer. The training was funded by two NSF grants totaling $1.2 million, which UC Berkeley shared with University of North Carolina at Charlotte and which will also contribute to future training.

“The NSF wants to have 10,000 new high school AP computer science teachers to teach the course by 2015,” said Harvey. UC Berkeley is on track to train more than 120 of teachers by the end of summer 2013.

Afsana Afzal is the lead academics and administration reporter. Contact her at aafzal@dailycal.org.

Correction(s):
A previous version of this article incorrectly identified Brian Harvey as a UC Berkeley computer science professor. The article’s headline also incorrectly identified him as a professor. In fact, Harvey is a senior lecturer.

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A UC Berkeley researcher who works on UC-owned research land in Albany known as the Gill Tract was awarded a $1.3 million grant on July 27 for his work on corn.

Damon Lisch, a researcher with the Department of Plant and Microbial Biology in the College of Natural Resources, was granted $1.3 million out of $3.4 million to conduct research on epigenetics using corn.

The project, which is being conducted by Lisch and three other researchers — one at the University of Minnesota, one at Hamline University in St. Paul, Minn., and another at the University of Texas, Austin — is being funded by the National Science Foundation.

According to Lisch, because the science community knows much less about epigenetic variation than genetic variation, the project will answer essential questions about the role of epigenetic variation in organisms. While epigenetic variation does not yield noticeable changes, genetic variation results in noticeable changes in the nucleotide sequence of a DNA molecule.

“What is fascinating about epigenetic variation is that it is much more unstable than genetic variation and can be affected by environmental conditions,” Lisch said.  “Scientists think it might be an important aspect of variation in all higher organisms, but we don’t yet know how important.  This project is an attempt to get at that question using maize as a model.”

Lisch has conducted much of his corn research on the Gill Tract, a site he said has yielded groundbreaking discoveries in epigenetics, plant development and plant gene regulation. The same land had been occupied in April and May by members of Occupy the Farm, who continue to break into the land to tend crops they had planted there.

According to campus professor Miguel Altieri, who conducts research on the Gill Tract and supported the Occupy the Farm protest, the results of the research conducted by Lisch directly affects the production of genetically modified organisms, known as GMOs, by large food production businesses.

“A survey of biotechnology patents that cites the research of Lisch and of his colleagues shows that some of their research has, in fact, resulted in the production of GMO technologies,” Altieri said in an email. “While Lisch might not be conducting GMO trials at the Gill Tract directly for Big Agribusiness, some of his findings are of key importance to researchers who are developing transgenic crops for their corporate employers.”

Lisch responded to Altieri’s claims by stating that his research is important regardless of how it can be used.

“Professor Altieri is certainly entitled to his opinion, and it is true that our research, like all basic research, can be applied to a variety of applications, including those that he disapproves of,” Lisch said. “That being said, knowledge is probably preferable to ignorance.”

According to Nathan Springer, an associate professor in the Department of Plant Biology at the University of Minnesota and principal investigator for the project, basic research on corn is still important to the study of genetics.

“First, in many ways corn provides an ideal organism for studies of genetics,” Springer said in an email. “It is easy to control crosses and to generate many offspring from any cross.  Second, the corn genome contains a mixture of genes and transposable elements. This genome organization is representative of most crop species.”

Springer said he is optimistic about the future of the project and anticipates that the capabilities of each of the researchers will yield a tremendous amount of discovery.

“Each of the four investigators brings unique research capabilities and expertise to this project,” Springer said. “I am excited about this collaboration and the potential for discoveries from this research.”

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