This year we would like to highlight one professor in particular who has taken on multiple research assistants, whose work with him has resulted in several co-authored publications. Professor Alex Filippenko (who was also featured in the technology section, above) has a team of six undergraduates working to identify supernovae in images obtained with a robotic telescope. The software employed in the automated supernovae search is incapable of flagging all the potential candidates, so he employs a team of undergraduates to check all of the images for supernovae. Besides confirming candidates found by the software, the undergraduates actually found one third of the supernovae discovered by his research group–-exploding stars that the software didn’t even register. Professor Filippenko provided the authors of this report with a bibliography listing six refereed publications and seventy-four published abstracts and International Astronomical Union circulars co-authored by his undergraduate apprentices.

In past years we have highlighted SUPERB, the Summer Undergraduate Program in Engineering Research at Berkeley. SUPERB provides research opportunities to successful undergraduate applicants from any university, who come to Berkeley for the summer to work on research projects in our faculty members’ labs. The goal is to encourage more students, especially students underrepresented in engineering fields, to consider graduate school, and to prepare them to succeed there. In the summer of 1999, nine new slots were created in SUPERB, in the emerging field of Bioengineering (where we have also created a new undergraduate major program; see section D below). SUPERB now has the capacity to accept twenty-five undergraduates for its summer program.