The Bay Area Earth Science Institute was established in 1990 to provide teachers with earth science concepts and strategies for teaching them. Children of all ages and backgrounds enthusiastically welcome news of dinosaurs, tornadoes, earthquakes, and gemstones. Unfortunately, few pre-college teachers have the background needed to teach an effective earth science course or to integrate earth science with other subjects. BAESI's mission is to remedy this situation and to promote earth science, with its multi-disciplinary approach and relevance to everyday life, as a powerful tool for attracting more students to science.
BERI is constituted of faculty from the Biology, Chemistry, Chemical and Civil Engineering departments in an effort to address the personnel needs of the Bay Area's rapidly expanding biotechnology industry.
The goal of BERI is to enable the university to offer state-of-the art curricula and research experiences in biotechnology-related sciences. The institute currently consists of more than a dozen faculty members committed to education. The institute continues to develop facilities to enhance teaching and research in biotechnology, including specialized laboratories designed for mammalian cell culture, hybridoma and recombinant DNA technology, and molecular modeling. The focus of the biotechnology curriculum is to integrate courses from the disciplines of biology, chemistry, chemical and civil engineering such that our students have a comprehensive experience in the theory and application of the techniques of biotechnology.
The biotechnology curricula at both the undergraduate and graduate levels emphasize a "hands-on" approach to education and are augmented by opportunities for undergraduate and graduate level research in the laboratories of BERI faculty.
The Center for Applied Mathematics and Computer Science (CAMCOS) provides mathematics and computer science majors with practical experience that will make them more effective employees after graduation. The center is run much like a consulting agency with sponsors from outside the university providing problems of significant magnitude and complexity. Teams of students and faculty supervisors work on the problems for academic credit.
Students learn how to apply abstract tools to obtain concrete solutions as well as how to formulate and clarify problems, plan and evaluate solutions, and function as a member of a team. A wide variety of projects and topics have been funded by such sponsors as Hewlett Packard Labs, EPRI, IBM, Intel Corporation, Lockheed, NASA, and GTE Advanced Systems.
The Institute for Modern Optics is an organized research unit in the College of Science. Physicists and chemists recently hired specifically for their research expertise in the areas of optics and lasers and for their interest in working with students have been added to the faculty, bringing the total number of professors associated with the institute to fourteen.
A wide variety of research and educational projects are carried out in the institute by faculty and students, both graduate and undergraduate, from the various departments in the College of Science. Some of the projects are incorporated into graduate student masters' theses. In addition, some projects are carried out with collaborators from local research institutions.
IREES promotes interdisciplinary research in environmental engineering in sciences and facilitates opportunities for research and other extramural programs.
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