2012 Awards and News

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10 2012

Berkeley will be showing its appreciation on Thursday September 20th at The Bancroft Hotel* from 12 noon ‘til 2 pm, with a luncheon. Please attend, the food is delicious and we will announce this year’s winners of a very hotly contested ‘2012 Faculty Award for Excellence in Postdoctoral Mentoring’. This year we received many, very competitive applications. Because we received such great nominations, we were unable to select a single winner. Instead, we chose two faculty members who stood out above the rest as outstanding postdoctoral mentors. The faculty winners of the 2012 Faculty Award for Excellence in Postdoctoral Mentoring are:

Professor Roland Bürgmann of the Department of Earth and Planetary Science  and

Professor William Jagust of the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute

Your spouse, partner, and family members are also invited, but everyone has to register using the following link: http://npadsept202012.eventbrite.com 

 

8 2012

Ernesto and the water sampling rosette system he used at sea. Berkeley's Optical sensors are attached to an electronics package on the rosette that transmits real-time data to the ship. When the package reaches a depth a few meters above the seafloor, the 24 bottles are sequentially closed at specific depths as the package is raised to the surface.

Canadian Coast Guard Ship John P Tully returned to it's Vancouver Island, British Columbia, port after 16 days at sea surveying carbon-dioxide, ocean biology, and related properties in the waters from the coast of North America to a well studied spot in the ocean named Ocean Station PAPA (50N 145W). Aboard the Tully, EPS marine science undergraduate student and Undergraduate Research Apprentice Program (URAP) intern, Ernesto Martinez conducted an optical survey of particulate organic carbon (POC) and particulate inorganic carbon (PIC) at from surface to seafloor at 26 locations along the 1600 km transect. Along the way he filtered particles from water samples to validate the new optical sensors.

PIC is produced by calcifying organisms, including coccolithophores, foraminifiera, and pteropods and plays an important role in carbon sedimentation. These organisms, which synthesize calcium carbonate minerals, are believed to be sensitive to the effects of fossil fuel acidification of the surface ocean but up to now scientists have had very few observations of PIC in the ocean.

A new ocean profiling optical sensor for PIC addresses this gap of observations. The sensor, developed in Professor Jim Bishop's laboratory, uses transmitted cross polarized light to detect photons that interact with biologically produced calcium carbonate minerals calcite and aragonite. This cruise is the first science application of Bishop's new PIC sensor. In 2013 Bishop's group will launch Carbon Explorer floats outfitted with POC and PIC sensors at PAPA which will operate in real time on a 24/7/365 schedule and return data to shore in real time.

Ernesto Martinez received a summer URAP internship for this work which is also supported by the National Science Foundation. Dr. Marie Robert, of the Institute of Ocean Sciences, BC, Canada led the expedition. WETLabs, Inc. Philomath, OR is our industrial partner on this project. 

 

6 2012

ChronoZoom is an open-source community project dedicated to visualizing the history of everything. Big History is the attempt to understand, in a unified, interdisciplinary way, the history of cosmos, Earth, life, and humanity. It is a collaboration between a team at Berkeley led by Professor Walter Alvarez and Microsoft Research and Moscow State University in Russia. ChronoZoom was developed to make time relationships between different studies of history clear and vivid. In the process, it provides a framework for exploring related electronic resources. It thus serves as a “master timeline” tying together all kinds of specialized timelines and electronic resources, and aspires to bridge the gap between humanities and the sciences and to bring together and unify all knowledge of the past. For more information, and to try ChronoZoom beta, visit http://www.ChronoZoomProject.org/

 

4 2012

Professor Romanowicz is being "recognized as one of the most influential seismologists of our time, a leading scientist in global seismology and geodynamics whose work has illuminated the structure and dynamics of the deep Earth." The Faculty Research Lectureship is the highest honor of the Berkeley Division of the Academic Senate.

 

Professor Barbara Romanowicz  received The Reid Medal at the April 17, 2012 annual meeting of the SSA in San Diego, California.

The Harry F. Reid Medal, is the highest honor of the Seismological Society of America (SSA). The Reid Medal is awarded for "outstanding contributions to seismology and earthquake engineering." Dr. Romanowicz was  honored as an exceptional scientist who has made fundamental contributions to theoretical seismology, seismology infrastructure and global geodynamics.

Her nomination for the award noted that she is one the most influential seismologists of our time and has made fundamental contributions to practically all areas of global seismology, from body-wave studies of the anisotropic and anelastic structure of the inner core, to normal-mode studies of the Earth's density distribution, and surface- waves studies of the upper mantle.

 


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