February 8, 2024
Black Lives at Cal adds the Joseph Gier Memorial to UC Berkeley’s first self-guided Black history tour. Black Lives at Cal (BLAC) is a multi-year initiative formed in 2021 “to celebrate, defend, and advance the legacy of Black people at the University of California, Berkeley.
December 21, 2022
A community is defined by the heroes it chooses to celebrate. We invite you to join the EECS department in recognizing a previously overlooked hero, Berkeley EE Prof. Joseph T. Gier, the University of California’s first tenured Black professor. Raised in Oakland by a single mother, Gier came to…
February 21, 2022
Lee Julian Purnell is the first Black student known to have graduated from the EECS department. He was born in Washington, D.C. in 1896, graduated from Berkeley High in 1915, earned a B.A. from Cal in 1919, a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from MIT in 1921, and an M.S. in Electrical Engineering from Berkeley in 1929. He settled into a career at Howard University where he eventually became Dean of Engineering.
March 8, 2021
We are thrilled to spotlight Xinyun Chen, an EECS PhD student under Professor Dawn Song. We had the opportunity to interview her about her research and advice for undergraduate students. Here’s what she had to say! Tell us about your research? My research lies at the intersection of deep…
March 8, 2021
Happy March and welcome to Berkeley EECS Women’s History Month (EECS WHM)! EECS WHM is a celebration held during Women’s History Month to recognize women, both past and present, in the fields of electrical engineering (EE) and computer science (CS). The goal of EECS WHM is to facilitate the conversation about diversity and inclusion in the field through a…
September 1, 2020
Since the late 1970s, WICSE has pursued the goal of increasing the number of women in those disciplines and supporting their academic progress. WICSE has become a permanent force in EECS, and, indeed, is the first such group in an American university with a disciplinary focus on computer science or electrical engineering. Since then, women’s groups have been created in most computing departments. The establishment of WICSE created peer support and a strong voice for women graduate students, and the faculty has relied on WICSE to monitor the climate for women ever since.
October 4, 2019
I grew up as a “Nuyorican” kid in the Woodlawn Reservoir neighborhood of The Bronx. My dad’s parents were from the Eastern side of Puerto Rico (Ceiba and Fajardo), and both came over in the…
September 27, 2019
I was born and raised in New York City. Both my parents are from Cuba and fled as political refugees after the Castro government took power. At that time, professionals were simply not allowed to leave the country, but my parents couldn’t live in an unfree society, so they…
September 25, 2019
I was born and grew up in Santurce, a region of San Juan, Puerto Rico. My mom was from Kentucky, my dad from Puerto Rico. My dad was a descendant of some notable Puerto Ricans, particularly the poet…
March 22, 2019
During the first hundred years at UC Berkeley women students and faculty were minimally present in science and engineering. By 1870, in its second year, the Faculty Senate proposed to the Regents the admission of women “on equal basis with men.” The Regents voted unanimously and next year Berkeley opened…