UC Berkeley College of Engineering Dean S. Shankar Sastry will join a new United Nations Scientific Advisory Board that will provide counsel on international decisions regarding sustainable development.

Sastry received notice of the appointment Sept. 27, three days after U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon announced his intention to create the board in an effort to further integrate science into policy discussion.

The 26-member board, organized by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, will have two United States representatives — Sastry and Susan Avery, director of a nonprofit marine-science research institution.

“I’m honored, really honored,” Sastry said. “It’s humbling to be included in this group.”

Sastry said the appointment is in line with a long history of work on sustainable development at UC Berkeley. As examples, he pointed to his 2008 meeting with former U.S. Secretary of Energy Steven Chu and the work of colleagues such as UC Berkeley professor of energy Daniel Kammen.

“There are a lot of people on campus who have a lot to say, and so I think it’s really a pleasure to sort of bring to voice a lot of what we’ve been talking about on campus,” Sastry said. “I do think it will help us get the Berkeley message out to an international forum.”

Kammen said Sastry has pushed for many sustainability research projects on campus. Sastry’s record includes his work on Berkeley-India Joint Leadership on Energy and the Environment and his position as faculty director of the Blum Center for Developing Economies.

The creation of the board, Kammen said, also fits with what he sees as Ban’s respect for science’s ability to inform policy.

“It’s really consistent with what I think the U.N. is doing right, and that is emphasizing what science and technology can offer in the process of sustainable development,” Kammen said.

Although Sastry acknowledges the extra time commitment joining the board entails, he sees the role as harmonious with his other jobs, calling them “synergistic.” Additionally, College of Engineering Associate Dean of Research Jeffrey Bokor noted that Sastry’s experience on the board can influence his work on campus.

“It brings him a visibility of what UNESCO is up to in a way that he could not otherwise have had,” Bokor said. “What Dean Sastry will learn from serving on this board will come back to the university.”

Other board appointees include Ahmed Zewail, a Nobel laureate in chemistry and Linus Pauling Chair professor of chemistry at California Institute of Technology, and Rajendra Pachauri, chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, according to Sastry.

“(The board is) really a way to engage the whole world, because the planet that they have to save is ours — is all of ours,” he said.

Contact Melissa Wen at mwen@dailycal.org.

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Mary Zhou/Staff

The UC Berkeley College of Engineering presented designs for a planned building to be built next to Soda Hall at a community open house Thursday.

The building, called Jacobs Hall, is set for completion in fall 2015 and is part of a plan to make the campus’s engineering program focus more on design and hands-on experience. The 24,000-square-foot building will hold a series of studios, workshops and spaces where students can work on design projects in a team environment. The $20 million project is funded by the Paul and Stacy Jacobs Foundation.

The College of Engineering will use the building’s facilities for research projects embedded in new classes and will hold a space for students from different departments to work together on projects. The building will also support the college’s new minor in design innovation — available for all majors — and an expansion of Engineering 10, Introduction to Design and Analysis, that is currently being considered.

According to Karen Rhodes, executive director of communications at the College of Engineering, there has been a growth in demand and interest from students for hands-on engineering experience.

“(The institute) is an effort to rethink and reshape engineering education, particularly at the undergraduate level, with more of a focus on design,” Rhodes said. “We’re seeing a real interest in employers to see engineering BAs who have experience on hands-on experience.”

The institute is also a response to an increasing emphasis on manufacturing by federal lawmakers and the growing popularity and decreasing costs of 3-D printing.

“You have this big push by the Obama administration to try to elevate the role of manufacturing to create jobs,” said David Dornfeld, chair of the campus department of mechanical engineering department. “The development of 3-D printing has also allowed everyone to become a designer and manufacturer.”

The institute may also be open for high school students during the summer to better expose them to science, technology, engineering and math.

For Bryant Luong, director of Pioneers in Engineering, a campus student group that aims to make those fields more accessible to high school students, an intended partnership with the Jacobs Institute represents an exciting opportunity to improve the quality and effectiveness of their efforts.

Construction will start in spring of next year, and classes are planned to begin in fall 2015 — an ambitious schedule, according to architects from Leddy Maytum Stacy Architects, the firm that is working on the construction.

Shankar Sastry, dean of the College of Engineering, said the institute’s hands-on program is important because it allows all students to actually manifest their ideas into real products.

“We can’t send our students into the world thinking they can think lofty thoughts and have someone else manufacture those ideas,” Sastry said. “The two go hand in hand.”

Contact Mary Zhou at mzhou@dailycal.org

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The report considered both undergraduate and graduate degrees earned by founders from 1920 onward and found that UC Berkeley alumni started more than 150 of the 4,500 companies studied. UC Berkeley was beaten only by Stanford University, which had more than 350 founders, and Harvard University, which had approximately 250.

Other schools in the top 10 included the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia University, USC, MIT and Yale University. The vast majority of founders had studied computer science, but many came from economics, electrical engineering, business and computer engineering fields.

“The numbers are in computer science and engineering — there’s no question,” said Shankar Sastry, dean of UC Berkeley’s College of Engineering. “It’s where the most money is going; it’s where the most money is being made. Not surprisingly, it’s where the most entrepreneurs are.”

Sastry also said that founders of companies tend to have visionary qualities that go beyond simple business skill and that that type of person is more likely to study engineering than business.

Eddy Kim, the research analyst who authored the report, said highly ranked schools might have benefited from geographic location as well as selectivity. Kim added that there were too many factors in play to point to just one.

“That would be a entire article, if not a thesis, on its own,” he said.

Andre Marquis, executive director of UC Berkeley’s Lester Center for Entrepreneurship, also pointed to location as a source of success for UC Berkeley alumni. He said that the Bay Area is a perfect incubator for startups due to the large amount of venture capital available.

Rosemary Hua, a student at Haas School of Business, founded Empathy FX International — a nonprofit that uses funds from a travel service to build schools in Ghana — and said that the culture at UC Berkeley nurtures budding entrepreneurs and encourages them to start businesses.

“The Haas School of Business puts a really big emphasis on innovation and creativity,” Hua said. “There’s a huge innovation movement going on campus.”

CrunchBase relies on individuals reporting their information, including schools they have attended and companies they have founded. The report notes that it took eight years on average for the companies to be founded but qualifies that figure by saying that the report had a small sample size, as few contributors reported their graduation dates.

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

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Carli Baker/File

UC Berkeley has been awarded $20 million from the U.S. Agency for International Development as part of the agency’s new partnership with seven universities around the world.

The award will fund the creation of the multidisciplinary Development Impact Lab, jointly run by the campus’s Blum Center for Developing Economies and the universitywide Center for Effective Global Action.

The lab will allow for the creation of a new field of research called development engineering, which utilizes engineering to effectively impact poverty, said Ashok Gadgil, a campus professor of civil and environmental engineering who will serve as principal investigator for the program on campus.

“There have been a lot of critiques in the past on foreign aid efficiency,” said Dominic Molinari, a civil and environmental engineering graduate student who was hired in October as a researcher for the initiative. “(The network) rebrands USAID and allows them to more sustainably address poverty rather than simply provide blanket solutions.”

Shankar Sastry, faculty director of the Blum Center and dean of the campus College of Engineering, said the goal of the lab is to promote development that advances social and economic welfare. With the initiative, researchers will put more emphasis on assessing the effects of development solutions, an aspect of poverty alleviation that they say has previously been lacking.

USAID selected UC Berkeley to be part of the network that also includes the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Duke University, Texas A&M University and Makerere University in Uganda, among other universities. The network was created to develop collaborative and entrepreneurial solutions to poverty alleviation, according to a Nov. 9 press release announcing the network.

For the next five years, USAID will provide the universities a total of $130 million in research funds. For every $10 from USAID, each university and its partners have agreed to contribute an additional $6.60 to the research, according to the press release.

When USAID administrator Rajiv Shah visited the campus on Oct. 10, he called the Blum Center’s work a “model for a network of development laboratories we’re forming across the country.”

In 2011, UC Berkeley received an initial grant from USAID to begin researching how to take a new approach toward addressing today’s development challenges — providing groundwork for the most recent USAID award.

But UC Berkeley being part of a larger consortium of universities is indicative of a new era in U.S. foreign policy, Gadgil said.

“Through this network … we will recapture the legacy of science, technology, and innovation as core drivers of development — as well as inspire and support the next generation of development leaders,” Shah said in a statement.

Contact Alex Berryhill at aberryhill@dailycal.org.

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The new center, called the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing, will be housed in Calvin Hall and will begin operations in 2013.

Research at the institute will focus on applying computational science to interdisciplinary fields such as mathematics, health care and climate modeling, according to a campus press release.

“We expect that, within the next two decades, every major field of science will have among its most significant achievements — at least one that is computational in nature,” said electrical engineering and computer sciences professor Richard Karp, who will be heading the institute, in the release.

According to the foundation’s website, the new institute will receive an initial award of $6 million per year for 10 years — “contingent on excellent performance in the first five years” — with $1 million per year going to direct costs. After 10 years, a renewal or an endowment gift will be considered.

Shankar Sastry, dean of electrical engineering and computer sciences, will be one of three campus administrators overseeing the institute and said the primary goal of the institute will be to “bring into the educational mainstream, the role of computing and theory of computational science.”

The institute will be able to house about 70 visiting researchers including faculty members, postdoctoral researchers and graduate students at any one time, according to Alistair Sinclair, the institute’s founding associate director and a computer science professor. Sinclair estimates that about 20 to 25 of those researchers will be graduate students.

At Wednesday’s meeting of the Berkeley Division of the Academic Senate, Chancellor Robert Birgeneau said the other institutions competing for the grant spoke to the foundation about UC Berkeley, saying the campus would not be relevant in 10 years.

“I sort of gasped and had one half-hour full-frontal assault on why Berkeley was a great university now and in 10 years,” Birgeneau said.

UC Berkeley was the only public campus among the finalists for the grant.

“The award shows that Berkeley maintains its ability to compete with the highest private universities in the world, despite disinvestment from the state,” said Vice Chancellor for Research Graham Fleming. “It is a symbol of strength and continues the public mission of the university.”

Fleming said that one of the reasons UC Berkeley was selected as the grant recipient was because of its proximity to Silicon Valley.  The institute has attracted the attention of several technology companies, including Google, who has signed on as the institute’s first founding industrial partner.

The campus plans to host an event on May 21 to celebrate the center’s establishment.

Staff writer Sara Grossman contributed to this report.

Clarification(s):
A previous version of this article, said the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing will begin operations in 2013. In fact, it will begin operations later this year and be fully operational in 2013.

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The college garnered much attention last October when a California Watch article pointed out instances of sexism in the campus’s male-dominated engineering student population. In a December letter, college dean Shankar Sastry admitted that the representation of women and underrepresented minorities was “markedly low in comparison to the rest of the Berkeley campus and to our engineering peers” and planned to dedicate efforts toward increasing diversity.

According to a demographic summary of gender and racial distribution released this month, out of the 3,052 students enrolled in the college in 2010, only 20 percent were female. Additionally, underrepresented minority students made up only 7 percent of the college in 2010 — compared to a campuswide 16 percent — with American Indian and Pacific Islander students at less than 1 percent.

To help rectify the lack of diversity, the college has been focusing on K-12 students in the hopes of attracting a broader range of applicants, according to Karen Rhodes, executive director of marketing and communications for the college.

“We are constrained from using ethnic or gender quotas by law, but what we can do is look at the current numbers and improve them,” Rhodes said, adding that there is “strong potential” for increasing the college’s acceptance yield rate.

Rhodes said the college is also working on planning partnerships with student groups and inviting students from “low-performing schools” for overnight stays.

Additionally, Oscar Dubon, an associate professor of materials science and engineering, began a new appointment Jan. 1 as associate dean of equity and inclusion for the college. Dubon is charged with overseeing and coordinating departmental efforts to recruit and retain underrepresented students and faculty, among other duties, according to the December letter.

Perhaps because the efforts are concentrated more on recruiting future students than on the existing student body, however, tangible results of the college’s efforts to increase diversity have been largely unobserved by current engineering students.

Ryan Shelby, a graduate student in mechanical engineering who spearheaded diversity efforts on behalf of student organizations representing minorities, said the college has been trying to address the issue of diversity since 2009 but with a stagnant task force and “unfulfilled objectives.”

He said Dubon, with whom he has met, is “passionate about fixing the problem” but has no budget at the moment.

Shelby said the college should begin setting hard numbers for percentage increases of underrepresented students.

“They’ve made a lot of cosmetic changes, setting up committees — I want to see change actually happen,” Shelby said. “I hope it does happen.”

The lack of diversity is not quite as pressing an issue to all, however. Claire Thompson, a freshman studying electrical engineering and computer science — the major with the smallest percentage of female students, according to the demographic summary — said she has grown somewhat used to the gender disparity in her classes.

“When you first walk into the room and see you’re one of the only girls, you think it’s kind of weird,” Thompson said. “But after a while, you get used to it.”

Amy Wang covers academics and administration.

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