Also see the Fact Sheet with descriptions of all the winning proposals.

The winners are as follows:

Computational Nanoscience Innovation:

1st place, $5,000 - Surface and interface effects on nanoscale systems by Erik Garnett (Department of Chemistry)

2nd place, $2,500 - Tool for Experimental Characterization Validation via Simulation Fitting (ECVSF) by Kristie Koski (Department of Chemistry)

3rd place, $1,500 - Molecular Electronics Model; Semiconductor Nanocrystals by David Strubbe (Department of Physics)

Honorable Mention, $1,000 - A Computational Tool for Exploring Residual Strains in Nanostructures by Cathy Hu and P. Alex Greaney

Honorable Mention, $1,000 - Exploring the Necessity of Quantum Mechanical Simulations on Nanoscale Materials by Devesh Khanal (Department of Materials Science and Engineering)

Curricular Innovation:

1st place, $10,000 - CleanTech Solutions course by Sarah Barker-Ball, Max Baumhefner, Avery Cohn, Howard Chong, Jerome Fox, Louise Gibbons, Joseph Levin, Michael Martin, Maria Schriver, Ryan Stanley (Boalt Hall Law School, Haas Business School, College of Natural Resources - Environmental Science Policy and Management, Economics - Agricultural and Resource Economics, Chemical Engineering, School of Public Policy, Mechanical Engineering)

2nd place, $5,000 - Sustainability Breadth by Kelley Payne McKanna (Environmental Economics and Policy) and Aditya Rohilla (Environmental Science, Energy and Resources)

3rd place, $3,000 - Introduction to Coupled Human and Natural Systems by Iryna Dronova (Environmental Science, Policy, and Management Department)

4th place, $2,000 - New minor in Food Systems & Sustainability by Albie Miles and Nathan McClintock (Environmental Science, Policy, and Management Department, Geography)

Energy and Environmental Innovation:

1st place, $10,000 - The Use of New Financing Tools to Increase Residential Energy Effiency by Merrian Fuller, Ian Kim, and Alice LaPierre (Haas School of Business, Energy and Resources Group, Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, City of Berkeley)

2nd place (5 at $4,000 each) -

  • Coupling wind generators with flexible loads: a proposal for large scale integration of renewable energy by Anthony Papavasiliou, Mauricio Junca, and Thomas Dickhoff()

  • Guatemala Solar Hot Water Heater by Sara Al-Beaini, Alissa Johnson, Kenneth Armijo, Merwan Benhabib, Yang-Yang Chen, Howdy Goudey, Adam Langton, Samantha Engelage, Ernesto Rodriguez (Mechanical Engineering - Heat transfer and design, Environmental Engineering - water quality, Materials Science Engineering, Goldman School of Public Policy, Haas School of Business)

  • Fabric Recycling for Alameda County Residents by Noelle Cole(Landscape Architecture and City Planning)

  • Berkeley Green Campus Program by Kameron Kitajima, Shanw Orgel-Olson, Jessica Huang, Erin Martin (Civil and Environmental Engineering (COE), Haas School of Business, College of Natural Resources, Energy and Resources)

  • BERC Innovative Solutions by Sarah Barker-Ball, Max Baumhefner, Avery Cohn, Howard Chong, Jerome Fox, Louise Gibbons, Joseph Levin, Michael Martin, Maria Schriver, Ryan Stanley(Haas School of Business, School of Law - Boalt Hall, Environmental Science Policy and Management(CNR), Chemical Engineering, Goldman School of Public Policy, Department of Mechanical Engineering)

3rd place (7 at $2,500 each) -

  • Reducing Residential Energy Consumption through Metering, Monitoring, and Control Technology by Benoit Bouvard, Jon Burns, Kaan Ersun, Xiaofan Jiang, Shepherd Smith, Jay Taneja(Haas School of Business, College of Engineering(Computer Science))

  • Emerging technologies lifecycle design tool: biofuels by Avery Cohn, Sebastien Humbert, Shufei Lei, Sally Maki, Corrine Scown(Environmental Science, Policy & Management (CNR), Civil and Environmental Engineering (COE), Energy and Resources)

  • China Environmental Governance Database by Christopher Williams (School of Law, Boalt Hall)

  • LEEDing Boalt by Erica Schroeder, Heather Matsumoto, Christopher Williams (Boalt Hall School of Law)

  • Plugging in Bacteria by Heather Jensen(Department of Chemistry, Molecular Foundry - LBNL)

  • Helixair by Jesse Leaman and Justin Guyer(Department of Astronomy)

  • Deep Sea Energy Generation by Kenneth Armijo, Annabelle -Louie and Kunal Nagpal(Haas School of Business, Department of Mechanical Engineering)

Idea Labs:

  • Characterization and Imaging of Single Molecules and Assays CHARISMA by Hagar Zohar(Chemistry, Chemical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, BioEngineering, Physics )

  • Energy Efficiency and Conservation by Merrian Fuller, Sam Borgeson, Jit Bhattacharya, Zach Levine, Avery Cohn, and Benoit Bouvard (Energy and Resources Group, Haas School of Business, Industrial Engineering and Operations Research, Environmental Science Policy, and Management, Agricultural and Resource Economics, Boalt Hall School of Law)

  • Berkeley Water Idea Lab by Zachary Burt, Ashley Murray, Emily Kumpel, and Charlotte Smith(Energy and Resources Group, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Public Health)

  • Green Collar Jobs by Sarah Barker-Ball, Sunil Bector, Avery Cohn, Merrian Fuller, Christopher Williams (School of Law - Boalt Hall, Environmental Science Policy and Management, Haas School of Business)

  • POC-Dx by Tanner Nevill, Frankie Myers, David Liang, Octavian Florescu, and Rich Henrikson (Bioengineering, Computer engineering)

  • Better Blocks by Kyle Konis, Jon Mingle, Ellen Chen, Ling Huiling, Patricia Decker (School of Architecture, Energy and Resources, Goldman School of Public Policy, Haas School of Business, Structural Engineering, Mechanics, and Materials - Civil and Environmental Engineering)

  • Microbial Biofuels by Matthew R. Melnicki, Dara B. Goodheart, Jerome Fox(Agricultural and Environmental Chemistry, Plant and Microbial Biology, Chemical Engineering)

  • Rural Electrification in the Developing World by Jon Mingle and Josiah Johnston (Energy and Resources, Mechanical Engineering, Haas School of Business)

  • UC Information Studies by Megan Finn, Dan Perkel, and Christo Sims in collaboration with Lilly Nguyen and Lilly Irani (UC Berkeley School of Information, UCLA Department of Information Studies, UC Irvine Department of Informatics)

  • Green Policy Innovations by Avery Cohn et al (Environmental Science, Policy and Management, Goldman School of Public Policy, Energy and Resources, Anthropology, City and Regional Planning)

Improving Student Life:

1st place, $10,000 - The Resource Green Bike Share Initiative: Campus-Wide Pilot Project by Marcelo Felipe Garzo Montalvo and Justin Jay Wiley (College of Letters and Science - Ethnic Studies, College of Natural Resources - Conservation and Resource Studies)

2nd place, $6,500 - Creating a Standardized XML Model of Students to allow extensibility and new services to be built on top of legacy infrastructure by Eun Kyoung Choe, Michael Lee, and Seung-Hyun Rhee (UC Berkeley School of Information)

3rd place, $3,500 - Dean's TEAM by Maggie Dunbar and Janet Choi (Interdisciplinary Studies, Environmental Economics and Legal Studies)

Information Technology for Society:

First prize of $15,000: Minimally Obtrusive Wearable Device for Continuous Interactive Cognitive and Neurological Assessment by Antoni Ivorra, Charlotte Daniels, and Boris Rubinsky, UC Berkeley (Department of Bioengineering, Department of Mechanical Engineering)

Second prize of $7,000: Integrated Diabetes Management by Christopher Hannemann and Sarah Beth Eisinger, UC Berkeley(Department of Mechanical Engineering, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science)

Third prize of $5,000: Coupling Wind Generators with Deferrable Loads by Anthony Papavasiliou, Shmuel Oren, Mauricio Junca, Alex Dimakis, and Thomas Dickhoff, UC Berkeley

In addition to the top three prizes, there were three honorable mentions, who each received $1000 to support their work:

Honorable mentions, $1,000:

1) Game-Based Disaster Emergency Response Training by Kenneth Hullett, Computer Science, UC Santa Cruz

2) Bringing Reliable Power and Mobile Communication to West Africa to Improve Emergency Obstetric Care by Laura Stachel, Christian Casillas, Melissa Ho, Hal Aronson, and Andrew Sproul, UC Berkeley (School of Public Health, School of Information, Energy and Resources, Solar School House, Adax Inc.)

3) Application of Bayesian Networks to Infrastructure Risk Management by Michelle Bensi, Armen Der Kiureghian, Daniel Straub, UC Berkeley (Civil and Environmental Engineering)

Neglected Diseases:

1st place, $5,000 - Modular Riboswitch Diagnostics by Rick Henrikson, Hangsang Cho, and Frankie Myers(UCSF/UC Berkeley Bioengineering)

2nd place, 4,500 - Survey of the Prevalance of Rickettsia prowazekii by Jennifer Wai Yan Quan (Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management - Molecular Environmental Biology)

Social Innovation:

1st place, $8,000 - Arsenic Free Water in Cambodia by Jessica Huang, Susan Amrose, Deborah Cheng, Michele Itten, Marianna Kowalczyk, kristin Kowolik, Marc Muller, John Wang (Physics, Energy and Resources, Civil Engineering & Business, Mathematics, Environmental Engineering, Chemistry)

2nd place, $6,000 - Sierra Leone by Peter Maybarduk, Jamie O’Connell, Mohammed Abdul Basit Khan, Stephanie Weber, Khalid Kadir, Ian Mountjoy(School of Public Health, Environmental Engineering)

3rd place, $4,000 - Village International by Benn Eifert, Robert Van Buskirk (Department of Economics, Lawrence Berkeley Laboratories)

4th place, $2,000 - Magnolia Project by Joseph Guzman, Alice Chamberlain, Christa Lim, Nuru Abdu, Jessica Fabro, Ali Glenesk(Development Studies, Environmental Economics and Policy, Business Administration, Architecture, Arabic, Philosophy and Economics) )

Synthetic Biology:

1st place, $5,000 - Synthetic Platelets by David Richmond, Wilbur Lam, Ross Rounsevell, Benjamin Rhau (Bioengineering, Biophysics (UCSF))

2nd place, $3,000 - Synthetic Biology for the Developing World: A Partnership Between SynBERC and the Peace Corps by Andrew Horwitz, Alexander Watters, Angela Chau, Daniel Mandell (Department of Cellular and Molecular Pharmacology, UCSF, UCSF/UCB Joint Graduate Group in Bioengineering, Biological and Medical Informatics Program, UCSF)

A Fact Sheet with descriptions of all the winning proposals will be available in the next few weeks. Additionally, the winning submissions who agreed to online public dissemination of their papers will be posted on the contest site in the next few weeks.

In addition to receiving funding for their proposals, award recipients will also have the opportunity to post their projects on the Big Ideas marketplace site. We are also looking for ways to support more of the excellent student proposals we received in the weeks and months ahead. Feel free to visit bigideas.berkeley.edu or contact Annie Yeh with further questions about this.

Congratulations to everyone!

Sincerely,

Tom Kalil

Chancellor's Office and Big Ideas @ Berkeley Hosted by the OCF