Professor Eva Harris, The Edward E. Penhoet Distinguished Chair in Global Public Health and Infectious Diseases
“I generally have about 10 undergraduate students in my lab at any given time, along with four to six Ph.D. students. I am committed to working on diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging, particularly by creating opportunities for first-generation students. Mentoring students with immigrant or international backgrounds is a major focus in my lab, and, in general, my lab is very international, frequently with over a dozen countries represented.… As a professor at Berkeley, you reach students who will devote themselves to positive work, and that’s how you change the world. I am motivated by the values beyond the research: I don’t want only to do good science and publish it; of course, that is necessary and rewarding in its own way, but I also need to connect science to society.”
— Professor Eva Harris, The Edward E. Penhoet Distinguished Chair in Global Public Health and Infectious Diseases
Professor Clark Nguyen, The Conexant Systems Distinguished Professorship in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences
“The best thing about being a faculty member at UC Berkeley is the ability to work with our students. The greatest thing about students is their fearlessness, perhaps arising from a lack of past failures that so often makes more experienced researchers hesitate, to the detriment of progress. We, at UC Berkeley, benefit enormously from a student audacity that allows us to pursue wild ideas deemed impossible by prevailing theory and in the process discover that the ideas really work, often because the theory was not quite correct, or the initial conditions were off. Fearlessness induces discovery, and it is very inspiring to be able to work alongside my colleagues and students in an environment permeated by it.”
— Professor Clark Nguyen, The Conexant Systems Distinguished Professorship in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences
Professor Ashok Gadgil, The Andrew and Virginia Rudd Family Foundation Distinguished Chair in Safe Water and Sanitation
“We responded to the acute and persistent shortage of affordable disinfectants for health care, which worsened in the developing world during the COVID-19 pandemic. We came up with a novel way to make an old disinfectant, first testing it in the lab and then in various developing country locations.… We achieved excellent results with our newly invented technology to inexpensively seal lead water pipes from the inside to stop them from leaching.…We obtained truly exciting and impactful results in a large, randomized control trial in Rwanda on the effectiveness of a non-electric, safe, and inexpensive neonatal infant warmer.”
— Professor Ashok Gadgil, The Andrew and Virginia Rudd Family Foundation Distinguished Chair in Safe Water and Sanitation
