UNIVERSITY UPDATES

Campus responds to hurricane disaster

The Berkeley community came together to help victims of Hurricane Katrina, which devastated the Gulf Coast in late August. From enrolling students from affected universities and providing expert assistance to study levee repair, to sending money and providing care for evacuees, campus groups have provided aid and compassion. Additionally, campus members have traveled to southern states to work with volunteer groups as part of a program granting paid administrative leave to staff and faculty to assist the evacuees, and town meetings on campus have attracted experts from various fields as the city of New Orleans embarks on its rebuilding plans.

The campus community began dipping into its pockets early on, collecting $25,000 for the Red Cross at the Sept. 3rd home opener football game. Additionally, the Graduate Division accepted more than 20 graduate students displaced by the hurricane and raised funds to help with their expenses, while 50 undergraduate students and 20 law students were offered an opportunity to attend classes at UC Berkeley this fall. At the welcome for the new undergraduates, Chancellor Robert Birgeneau expressed his sorrow for their losses, and his hope that their home campuses would recover as quickly as possible. In the meantime, he said, the entire Cal community was determined "to make your transition as seamless as possible."

MacArthur "genius grants"

Lu Chen, an assistant professor of neuroscience and of molecular and cell biology, Nicole King, assistant professor of integrative biology and of molecular and cell biology, and Michael Manga, associate professor of earth and planetary science, are the campus's three new MacArthur fellows—an exclusive club of creative and original thinkers who receive $500,000 over five years to use however they wish.

This year, more new MacArthur fellows came from Berkeley than from any other institution. Since the fellowships were first presented in 1981, 39 campus researchers have been honored. Twenty-eight of them are still at Berkeley, including chemistry professors Carolyn Bertozzi and Michael Marletta.

Record year for campus fundraising

The campus reported a record fundraising year, raising $318.3 million in private support from alumni, parents and friends in the 2004-2005 fiscal year. This amount represents a nearly 83 percent increase from the year before, and reflects a record number of gifts to the university — 80,234 gifts from 54,128 donors. It includes the largest international gift ever received by the campus, $40 million for health sciences research from the Li Ka Shing Foundation in Hong Kong to support innovative research, including stem research, as part of the UC Berkeley Health Sciences Initiative.
Compared to last year, giving by alumni and foundations showed the most dramatic increases of any donor segment. Alumni giving jumped by 69 percent to $124.6 million, while giving by foundations increased 194 percent to $129 million.

Memory loss? What memory loss?

Outside distractions, and not the lack of focus, may be behind the common short-term memory loss that increases with age, according to a study by UC Berkeley researchers. Although older patients often report difficulty tuning out distractions, this is the first hard evidence from functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies of the brain to assess the impact of normal aging on the enhancement and suppression of sensory processing in the brain.

"The degree that older patients suppressed unnecessary information correlates with the degree that they remembered the relevant information," said Adam Gazzaley, adjunct assistant professor of neuroscience at UC Berkeley and assistant professor of neurology and physiology at UC San Francisco. "The deficit in suppression seems to let in information that is irrelevant and causes interference with the information that they have to remember."

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