Faculty Award Recipients in the News

The United States is facing a serious public health problem from lead contamination of drinking water, especially in rural areas and large cities where efforts to replace aging water service lines has lagged. Bakar Fellow Baoxia Mi believes she and her research group have found a solution. An expert on advanced membrane processes and nanotechnology, Mi has focused her research on addressing the challenges to maintaining a healthy and sustainable water supply, including in addition to drinking water quality, desalination, wastewater reuse, renewable energy production, and public health protection.

The Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), the nation’s largest biomedical research foundation, announced today the appointment of 33 American scientists as investigators, and three of them are from the University of California, Berkeley.

Raffaella Margutti, a newly arrived associate professor of astronomy, and Norman Yao, an assistant professor of physics, are among nine winners of the 2022 New Horizons in Physics Prize, awarded every year to early-career scientists by the Breakthrough Prize Foundation.

Psychologist Alison Gopnik, a world-renowned expert in child development and author of several popular books including The Scientist in the Crib, The Philosophical Baby, and The Gardener and the Carpenter, has won the 2021 Carl Sagan Prize for Science Popularization.

Markita Landry, Asst. Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, has been named a 2021 Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar. This award recognizes faculty within the first five years of their academic careers, who have created an outstanding independent body of scholarship, and are deeply committed to education.

Michael Jordan, UC Berkeley’s Pehong Chen Distinguished Professor in the Departments of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences and of Statistics, is among 10 foreign members elected today to the Royal Society, a prestigious honor accorded to researchers who have made “exceptional contributions to science.”

Gabriel Zucman, associate professor of economics at the UC Berkeley College of Letters & Science, associate professor of public policy at the Goldman School of Public Policy, and director of the James M. and Cathleen D. Stone Center on Wealth and Income Inequality, has been selected as one of 26 recipients of the 2021 Andrew Carnegie Fellowship Award.

Six UC Berkeley faculty members and top scholars have been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAAS), a 241-year-old organization honoring the country’s most accomplished artists, scholars, scientists and leaders who help solve the world’s most urgent challenges.

The UC Berkeley School of Public Health is very pleased to announce that Stephen Shortell, PhD, MPH, MBA, UC Berkeley School of Public Health Dean Emeritus and Blue Cross of California Distinguished Professor of Health Policy and Management Emeritus, has been named to Modern Healthcare’s Hall of Fame for his visionary leadership, relentless dedication to timely and relevant research, and extraordinary contributions to the healthcare field.

The College of Chemistry is pleased to announce that Evan Miller, (Ph.D. ’09, Chem) Associate Professor of Chemistry and Molecular & Cell Biology and of Biochemistry, Biophysics & Structural Biology, has been awarded the 2021 Donald Sterling Noyce Prize for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching. 

SCET Faculty Director & Chief Scientist, Prof. Ikhlaq Sidhu has been awarded the University of California, Berkeley’s Extraordinary Teaching in Extraordinary Times Award for demonstrating his commitment to students and excellence in teaching, even under extraordinarily difficult circumstances.

Four UC Berkeley faculty are among this year’s 184 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellows. The prestigious awards recognize scholars with impressive achievements in fields ranging from the natural sciences to the creative arts.