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Robert Birgeneau named chancellor
On July 28, a few months later than expected, Berkeley got a new chancellor. Meeting in the Morrison Reading Room of Doe Library, the Board of Regents announced that Robert J. Birgeneau, currently president of the University of Toronto, will succeed Robert M. Berdahl on or about October 1.
Birgeneau (pronounced burge-uh-no), 62, was born and raised “in very modest circumstances” in Toronto, Canada; after becoming the first in his family to finish high school, he went on to the University of Toronto, majoring in math and graduating in 1963. He earned a Ph.D. in physics at Yale in 1966, then spent a year on the faculty at Yale and one year at Oxford. In 1968, he joined the technical staff at Bell Laboratories, serving for a while with fellow Canadian physicist (and current UC President) Robert Dynes. Birgeneau went to MIT in 1975 as a professor of physics, receiving an endowed chair in 1982 and becoming chair of the department in 1988. He was appointed dean of science at MIT in 1991. Four years ago, he accepted the presidency of his alma mater in Toronto.
“Everything Bob Birgeneau has done has prepared him to be chancellor of UC Berkeley,” said his old friend Dynes while introducing him in Morrison. “He is a distinguished scientist of the highest academic caliber, known internationally as a leader in his field. He is a compassionate and courageous man who possesses a deep commitment to social equity and to the social responsibilities of a public university. He is also one of the most highly sought-after leaders in higher education today, and we are extremely proud to be bringing him to the University of California.”
Several students, in the public comment period at the end of the regents’ meeting, urged the new chancellor to help reverse the decline in the number of minority students attending Cal. Each time Birgeneau took the floor--at the regents’ meeting, at the subsequent press conference, and in front of Doe Library, where he was greeted by several hundred people and the Straw Hat Band--he spoke of his strong commitment to providing access and supporting inclusion. “I firmly believe that people from all segments of society must be included in the opportunities afforded by institutions like Cal,” he said, “and that we must work to remove impediments to that opportunity.”
Birgeneau’s scientific research focuses on understanding the fundamental properties of materials. He is one of Canada’s most widely cited physicists and has received numerous awards, including the American Physical Society’s O.E. Buckley Prize (which has been a prelude to the Nobel Prize) and the same society’s J.E. Lilienfeld Prize, given to a physicist who has made outstanding contributions to physics and also has “exceptional talent” at explaining physics to diverse audiences. (We’re hoping he’ll do that for us in the next issue.)
Birgeneau and his wife Mary Catherine, also a University of Toronto graduate, have four grown children. He said in Berkeley that when he was offered a teaching position at Stanford some years back, the family vote was “4-2 against”--which, as he looked around the room, Birgeneau quickly corrected to “6-0.” He said it was certainly a 6-0 positive vote the family cast this summer about coming to Berkeley. But he will have to make some adjustments. During his trips to the microphone in late July, twice he forgot to say something, and twice he rushed back to close with: “Go Bears!”
Report on Novartis
A long-awaited independent review of the Berkeley campus’s $25-million, five-year agreement with Novartis (1997–2003) was released at the end of July by Lawrence Busch, a professor of sociology at Michigan State University who was in charge of the study. Busch said that there were two main findings: The Novartis agreement did not cause the harm most feared by critics, nor did it bring the benefits most touted by supporters.
But the scholars recommended that universities should avoid such controversial agreements in the future. “While an intriguing experiment, there appears little rationale for repeating the approach,” the report says. It also suggests that Berkeley’s relationship with Novartis “played a very clear role and an unsatisfactory role in the tenure process” of Ignacio Chapela, an assistant professor of microbial biology and a Novartis critic who was denied tenure last November. Earlier this summer, the campus administration granted Chapela, who was to have stopped teaching in June, an extension through the fall 2004 semester.
New energy at the lab
The first challenge confronting the new director of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Steven Chu, Ph.D. ’76, will be to save his job. Congress has required the University of California to compete for the right to continue managing the Department of Energy lab, with a decision scheduled for late this year. By selecting Chu, a highly regarded physicist and Nobel Prize winner, UC significantly bolstered its case. Chu himself is confident--he is leaving an endowed chair at Stanford to take over LBNL--and acknowledges that his appointment, ahead of several “sterling” inside candidates, is “a sign that UC is serious about winning.”
Chu’s biography has an Einsteinian note: the underachiever at school who grows up to become an eminent scientist. Born in St. Louis to an academically demanding family (his father was a university professor), Chu was overshadowed scholastically by an older brother. But he had an inspiring math teacher in high school and excelled at mechanical tasks, constructing devices with his erector set, the toy for would-be scientists in the 1950s, and later building small rockets. These experiences gave Chu a feel for resolving three-dimensional problems that served him well as a student at the University of Rochester and later as a doctoral student and faculty member at Berkeley.
Chu moved to Bell Labs in 1978, when it was one of the leading research institutions in the world. There, he formed several core ideas about how science should be practiced. At lunch table discussions, Bell scientists with different interests helped each other solve problems and sometimes launched collaborative projects. While at Bell, Chu also performed the experiments that led to his Nobel Prize, which involved cooling atoms to slow them down sufficiently to be grabbed by lasers. Later, he invented related methods to grab and manipulate strands of DNA.
At Bell, Chu crossed paths with Robert Dynes, now the president of the UC system, and Charles Shank ’65, the outgoing LBNL director--who hired him to run one of Bell Lab’s divisions. He also knew Berkeley’s new chancellor, Robert Birgenau, whose work in theoretical physics at MIT Chu employed in his own experiments. He allows that this arrangement of physicists and friends now convening at UC is “a bit incestuous,” but says that the humanities have nothing to fear and predicts the physicists will “bend over backwards not to show favoritism towards physics.”
Chu plans an ambitious building program at the lab, which he says is crucial to house expanding research programs in genomics, nanotechnology, and other fields, as well as to encourage “lunch room” collaborations. Personable and direct, and with experience in building facilities at Stanford, Chu seems well-suited for the challenges of new development in Berkeley, always a political hot potato. “We hope to be very nice neighbors,” he says and, with a laugh, adds, “I hope the residents will be nice neighbors, too.”
Chu believes scientists should tackle big questions. “We’re projecting into the future when fossil fuel is running out, we’ve maximized conservation, and yet the world has energy needs that are greater than today,” he says. “If I could help in any small way to develop sustainable, non-polluting energy, I’ll be very happy.”
--Kerry Tremain
 | Dick Ackerman ’64 was unanimously elected California Senate Republican Leader. |
Berkeley professors appointed to key advisory positions in the Kerry campaign include technology expert Tom Kalil and economists George Akerlof and Alan Auerbach. |  |
 | Charles Harris, professor and department chair in chemistry, was selected dean of the College of Chemistry. |
Sociology professor John Lie was named the dean of International and Area Studies. |  |
 | In July, biochemist Hiroshi Nikaido received the Freedom to Discover Award for Distinguished Achievement in Infectious Disease Research. |
Michele Tafoya ’88 is the new sideline reporter for ABC’s Monday Night Football. |  |
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