May 2004
Friends of the College of Engineering,
On April 24th , a group of our top research faculty presented at the 4th annual Berkeley in Silicon Valley event. The event was a great success, attracting alumni and students from around the Bay area. The theme, Engineering a Better World, rang true for many of the attendees with one student commenting to me that "It gave me a perspective on engineering we don't usually get in the classroom and it made me think about engineering in a totally different way." For those who couldn't attend, you can see the presentations online at www.coe.berkeley.edu/bisv . We are very grateful to Sun Microsystems for hosting our Silicon Valley event again this year.
Of course, our major event in May is our annual commencement. This year the College will graduate 900 students, bringing our Berkeley Engineering alumni population to over 50,000 engineers. I am personally delighted that Floyd Kvamme (BS'59), a partner at the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, will speak to our graduates this year. Among his many accomplishments, Floyd was on the team that relaunched the then-bankrupt National Semiconductor corporation, a firm that went on to become a multi-billion dollar business. Remarking on his early days in the semiconductor industry, Floyd recalled recently, "We knew it was an emerging field, but we didn't imagine it was going to become a $200 billion field! Our company motto at National was, 'a nything using springs, levers, stepping motors and/or gears is performing logic, and that could be done better with silicon'." How right that turned out to be!
Once again, our College faculty is in the spotlight. Professor Paul Alivisatos, who holds a joint appointment with Materials Science and Engineering and with Chemistry, and is also director of the Molecular Foundry at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences, one of the highest honors accorded a U.S. scientist or engineer. Congratulations Paul.
Finally, I am pleased to announce that these very Lab Notes have won a silver medal from the Council for Advancement and Support of Education (CASE) in this year's Circle of Excellence Awards.
Very best wishes from the College, and Go Bears!
/rich
A. Richard Newton
Dean, College of Engineering and
the Roy W. Carlson Professor of Engineering
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