Berkeley Electrical Engineering ranked #1, and Computer Engineering ranked #2, in the 2021 US News and World Report graduate school rankings.  EE tied with MIT and Stanford as the top graduate Electrical/Electronic/Communications Engineering program in the nation, while Computer Engineering tied in second place with Stanford after MIT.  It should be noted that tuition for both MIT's and Stanford's Master's programs come to over $53.4K annually, while Berkeley's costs $11.4K in-state and $26.5 out-of-state per year.   Berkeley was ranked as the third best Engineering school overall.

Ruzena Bajcsy has won a 2020 RISE! Women Leader Award from the UC Berkeley Gender Equity Resource Center in the Division of Equity and Inclusion.  RISE! Leader Awards highlight "the exceptional endeavors and efforts of women leaders as they continue to support and empower our community of Berkeley women through their participation and representation" and recognize women who have demonstrated "strong leadership, care and love for the community, as well as, inspired resilience in other women."  Bajcsy was honored at the RISE! Celebrating Women, Community Love and Leadership celebration on March 4th.

Berkeley RISE Lab visiting researcher Edmon Begoli is interviewed in a Data Exchange Podcast titled "Hyperscaling natural language processing," in which he discusses distributed online learning and its applications in public health.  In particular, Begoli is collaborating with CS Prof. Ion Stoica and his team on how to use RISE-developed frameworks, including the Ray framework, for real-time, robust and resilient analytic decision making.  One application is to potentially identify veterans at risk for suicide by tracking their medical prescriptions.  Begoli, Stoica, and CS Prof. Michael Jordan will all be participating in the first Ray Summit in May.

EE Prof. and alumnus Chenming Hu (M.S. '70, Ph.D. '73), who won the 2020 IEEE Medal of Honor, has chosen to donate his $50K prize to the EECS department.   Hu, who was cited “for a distinguished career of developing and putting into practice semiconductor models, particularly 3D device structures, that have helped keep Moore’s Law going over many decades," is also the subject of an IEEE Spectrum article.  He was hired on the Berkeley faculty in 1976 and has been called the "Father of the 3D Transistor" due to his development of the Fin Field Effect Transistor in 1999.  Intel, the first company to implement FinFETs in its products, called the invention the most radical shift in semiconductor technology in more than 50 years.

UC Berkeley ranked a very close second on Gradreports' list of "25 Best Colleges for Electrical Engineering 2020."  The rankings are based on the median salary of students who graduated with a B.S. in EE one year after college.  Graduates of MIT and Berkeley both earned a median salary of $116,600 but the median debt carried by MIT students was $614 less than that of Berkeley (at $14,347).  By contrast, graduates of third-ranked Carnegie Mellon earned median salaries that were $17,600 less than Berkeley salaries, and carried $9,424 more in debt.  Gradreports' methodology was based on data reported by the US Department of Education in November 2019.

The Accel Scholars program, a joint venture between Silicon Valley venture capital firm Accel and the EECS Department, was created to empower undergraduate engineering and computer science students by providing access to Silicon Valley leadership, personalized mentorship, and an industry-relevant curriculum that covers topics not generally taught in class— like how to grow a career, how to build a professional network, and how to raise money to start a company.  Accel Scholars is open to all Berkeley undergraduates who have demonstrated leadership, excellence in their pursuits, and/or a deep passion for a particular area of their discipline.  Apply by visiting the Accel Scholars page on the EECS website until April 5, 2020.

An anonymous donor has pledged $252 million to help fund the construction of a building for the newly christened Division of Computing, Data Science, and Society (CDSS): it is the single largest gift in Berkeley’s history.  The new "Data Hub" will be located at the intersection of Hearst Avenue, Arch Street, and MacFarlane Lane, at the site previously occupied by Tolman Hall.    An additional $300 million of private support will need to be raised to complete the capital project.  The building will house faculty offices and labs, robotics and other artificial intelligence laboratories, research centers and workroom spaces, public gathering areas, and teaching space, including a large auditorium and classrooms to accommodate the 6,000+ undergraduates who take data science courses each year.

The 4th Annual Women In Tech Symposium, part of the Women In Tech Initiative (WITI) will be held at UC Berkeley on Friday, March 6, 2020.  The theme will be "Reimagining Cybersecurity for All."  Many members of the EECS community will be involved, including: alumna and Prof. Dawn Song (PhD '02) - opening remarks; WITI@UC co-founder and dean of Engineering Prof. Tsu-Jae King Liu - fireside chat; Prof. Raluca Ada Popa - Panel: What’s at Stake? Global and Systemic Cyber Threats;  and CITRIS Director Prof. Costas Spanos - Athena Awards presentation. Tickets will be available until Monday, March 2nd.

Research on Microrelays presented at the IEEE International Electron Devices Meeting (IEDM) by Prof. Tsu-Jae King Liu and alumna/graduate student, Xiaoer Hu (M.S. '18), is highlighted in an IEEE Spectrum article titled "4 Ways to Make Bigger Quantum Computers."  It is difficult to scale quantum computers because quantum-computer processors must operate inside cryogenic enclosures at near absolute zero, but the electronics needed for readout and control don’t work at such temperatures and must reside outside the refrigerator.  King Liu and Hu have developed micrometer-scale electromechanical relays as ultralow-power alternatives to transistors that operate better when cooled to 4 kelvins than at room temperature.  Freezing temperatures solve two of the mechanical problems the devices encounter:  the reaction of ambient oxygen on electrode surfaces, and the way that microscale relays tend to stick together.  “We didn’t suspect ahead of time that these devices would operate so well at cryogenic temperatures,” says King Liu. “In retrospect, we should have.”

Negative Capacitance, a field of research pioneered by EECS Prof. Sayeef Salahuddin, is featured in a Nature Materials article celebrating "A century of ferroelectricity."  Ferroelectricity is a characteristic of certain materials which have a spontaneous electric polarization that can be reversed by the application of an external electric field. Ferroelectric capacitors are used in sensor applications, like Ultrasound.  To highlight examples of recent advances in the field, the article references a 2008 paper co-written by Salahuddin, which proposed that negative capacitance could be used to provide voltage amplification and was observed in thin ferroelectric films.