It takes guts to share your mistakes and near misses with your colleagues. Who wants to look foolish when they can keep mum, silently vowing not to repeat said mistake? The Material Science Division (MSD) not only gets people to freely admit their mistakes and near misses, but it rewards the year’s best close call in an annual competition. “We’ve learned a lot of things and identified some significant problems since we started the near-miss program six years ago,” said Rick Kelly, MSD safety coordinator. More>
Posts Tagged ‘Materials Sciences Division’
Materials Sciences Safety Near-Miss Program A Hit
Thursday, May 16th, 2013Matt Francis Talks Food and Fat at Local Café as Part of MSD ‘Actual Science’ Series
Tuesday, May 14th, 2013
Fat is one of the most important elements of food when it comes to flavor, cooking, and nutrition, but few of us know the reasons why. In an effort to change that, and to share his love of both chemistry and cooking, materials scientist Matt Francis recently gave a lively introduction to the chemistry of fat at the Actual Café in Oakland. More>
Volunteers Sought for Garber Park Habitat Restoration Day
Tuesday, May 14th, 2013
Employees who enjoy the great outdoors are invited to join Materials Sciences Division employees on Saturday, 10 a.m. to noon, to participate in Garber Park Restoration Day. The 13-acre park is located in the hills behind the Claremont Hotel. Volunteers will help park stewards remove non-native plants (which helps fire prevention) and cage baby buckeye, maple and oak trees to prevent destruction by deer. Send e-mail here to sign up. More>
Saturday Nano-High Talk on Bad Sugars and its Adverse Affect on Health
Friday, May 10th, 2013
Employees are encouraged to invite their high-school aged children to attend the next Nano-High lecture on “Bad Sugars: Addictive and Hazardous to Your Health.” The talk, presented by UC San Francisco professor Robert Lustig, takes place tomorrow at 9:30 a.m. in 1 Pimentel Hall on the UC Berkeley campus. Lustig is a world leader in the study of nutrition-based metabolic disease and in particular the role of excess sugar in the disruption of normal metabolism. He says the “wrong” kinds of foods can lead to premature aging, debilitating diseases, and shortened lifespan. More>
Register now for JCAP’s Solar-Fuels Summer School
Wednesday, May 8th, 2013
The Joint Center for Artificial Photosynthesis (JCAP) will hold a weeklong summer school on solar fuels, starting June 17. All are welcome to attend lectures from leading experts in surface chemistry and physics, to be held each morning in the Building 50 Auditorium. To attend the full school, including hands-on laboratory and instrument-training workshops, registration is required. More>
MSD’s Yablonovitch Elected to Royal Society of London
Tuesday, May 7th, 2013
Eli Yablonovitch of the Materials Sciences Division has been elected as one of eight new Foreign Members of the Royal Society of London, the world’s oldest scientific academy. Yablonovitch is an electrical engineer who holds the James and Katherine Lau Chair in Engineering at UC Berkeley and directs the National Science Foundation’s Center for Energy Efficient Electronics Science. He’s a world authority on high-speed optical communications and photonic crystal. As an inductee, he will sign the parchment book that Sir Isaac Newton, James Clerk Maxwell and all other Fellows have signed since the beginning of the Society more than 350 years ago. More>
Composite Organic/Inorganic Thermoelectric is More Than Sum of Its Parts
Monday, May 6th, 2013
A team led by materials scientists Jeffrey Urban and Rachel Segalman have discovered highly conductive polymer behavior occurring at a polymer/nanocrystal interface. The composite organic/inorganic material is a thermoelectric — a material capable of converting heat into electricity — and has a higher performance than either of its constituent materials. The results may impact not only thermoelectrics research, but also polymer/nanocrystal composites being investigated for photovoltaics, batteries, and hydrogen storage. More>
Materials Scientist Vik Bajaj Wins Magnetic Resonance Prize
Thursday, May 2nd, 2013
The International Society of Magnetic Resonance (ISMAR) will award the first Anatole Abragam Prize to materials scientist Vikram Bajaj, a researcher in the Alex Pines lab, during the opening session of the ISMAR Congress in Rio de Janeiro in May. The Abragam Prize is awarded every three years to an outstanding young scientist in the field of magnetic resonance. Bajaj was cited for “his achievements in magnetic resonance methodology, including contributions to high field DNP, remote detection of microfluidic flow, optical encoding and detection of magnetic resonance, and new implementations of the xenon biosensor.” More>
Using Gold to Boost Power of Chromatography
Wednesday, May 1st, 2013
Frantisek Svec, a chemist with the Materials Sciences Division and director of the Organic and Macromolecular Synthesis facility at the Molecular Foundry, described a technique for boosting the power of chromatography for separating proteins and peptides. Speaking at the recent national meeting of the American Chemical Society, Svec explained how the addition of gold nanoparticles to the surfaces of polymer monoliths in chromatographs creates a universal ligand that can be used to fish out thiol-containing proteins and peptides and opens new avenues to the functionalization and control of pore surface chemistry. More>
Four Researchers Elected to American Academy of Arts and Sciences
Tuesday, April 30th, 2013
Four Lab researchers have been elected to the 2013 class of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, an honorary society founded in 1780 to recognize leading “thinkers and doers.” The new members affiliated with Berkeley Lab are (clockwise) Frances Hellman of the Materials Sciences Division, Don Tilley of the Chemical Sciences Division, Susan Marqusee of the Physical Biosciences Division, and Hitoshi Murayama of the Physics Division. All four also hold joint appointments as professors at UC Berkeley. More>
