Undergrad wins Young Botanist of the Year award

Berkeley senior Gracie Benson-Martin, a plant and microbial biology major, has been honored by the Botanical Society of America, for her research on a genus of tropical plants found throughout South and Central America.

Architect named Fulbright NEXUS scholar for Western Hemisphere research on sustainable, affordable housing

María-Paz Gutierrez, a University of California, Berkeley, assistant professor of architecture, has been named to the 2011-2012 Fulbright Regional Network for Applied Research (NEXUS) Scholar Program as part of a 20-member team working to promote best practices in fighting poverty and inequality in the Western Hemisphere. She will be focusing on building a sustainable, affordable housing prototype for deployment in an emergency, especially flooding.

MBA students, Haas School faculty win sustainability research grants

The Haas School of Business’s Center for Responsible Business made an Earth Day announcement today (Friday, April 22) that several MBA students and Haas School faculty have won research grants to work on innovative sustainability projects dealing with reinforcing friends’ healthy habits to green supply chains and clean water.

Symposium to report ROI on programs investing in girls

Positive outcomes and lessons to be learned from new approaches to help girls and women struggling in developing countries will be explored at an April 28 symposium to be hosted by the Center for Evaluation of Global Action (CEGA), based at UC Berkeley.

Prenatal pesticide exposure tied to lower IQ in children

A new UC Berkeley study has found that prenatal exposure to organophosphate pesticides – widely used on food crops – is related to lower intelligence scores in children. Every tenfold increase in measures of organophosphates detected during a mother’s pregnancy corresponded to a 5.5 point drop in overall IQ scores in children at age 7, the researchers found.

Agilent helps launch new synthetic biology center

Agilent Technologies Inc. has signed up to support the newly launched Synthetic Biology Institute (SBI), which will help advance efforts to engineer cells and biological systems in ways that could transform health and medicine, energy, the environment and new materials.

Saez wins AEA prize for tax paper

Emmanuel Saez, the E. Morris Cox Professor of Economics at UC Berkeley, has been named by the American Economic Association as recipient of the first ever American Economic Journal: Economic Policy “Best Paper Prize” for his “Do Taxpayers Bunch at Kink Points?”