Mercury

Last Saturday was the Commencement Day here at UC Berkeley. Many of you probably know better than me that when it comes to the Graduation Days, there are actually two phases: firstly there is a smaller ceremony organized by each department where diplomas are delivered to every single student, and then there is a campus-wide big ceremony which takes place at the Campus “football field”… which is indeed a 62k-seat stadium! During this ceremony, diplomas are symbolically delivered to the…

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Last weekend I did not do anything special, as I mostly dedicated myself to my domestic chores and to relaxing (in addition to going to the cinema with the Italian group, though!). So it is good that I had not talked about the previous Sunday yet! On that day, i.e. the day after my naturalistic adventures at the Tilden Park, I had gone to San Francisco – or better said, to South San Francisco, which is formally a different city…

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Last weekend, also due to the very nice weather, I dedicated myself to nature: in the past weeks I had been told that the Tilden Park – the regional park located on the hills sorrounding Berkeley – is a very good destination for an excursion, so I thought that a hike in the afternoon could be a good idea. My plan was to spend a couple of hours there, just to give a look at the place and understand if…

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Sometimes you have empty weekends, sometimes you have weekends with a super full agenda: in my case, last Saturday surely belonged to the latter category! I spent the morning in the Campus: in fact it was the Cal Day, i.e. the university open day for the young guys who are starting their undergrad course in the next academic year. By the way, “Cal” is not just a generic diminutive to recall California, but rather it is the official nickname of…

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… to the very local interview! Last Friday the BergamoPost journal published the interview that I had given them some weeks ago. BergamoPost is a weekly publication covering the Italian province of Bergamo, where my village of origin is located, whose peculiarity is to give a lot of room to facts or events occurring in the villages of the province: this time I was the “celebrity” of Mozzo, which is precisely my hometown. Obviously the interview is in Italian, so…

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Last Sunday I had in agenda a political event in San Francisco (apparently I can’t go without politics even on the other side of the Atlantic… or on the Pacific indeed!) and of course it was a good occasion to sightsee a little bit in the City. I didn’t have too much time, actually, so I planned a very short program: lunch at the Ferry Building’s Marketplace – which I had talked about in my previous post – and then…

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More than once I wondered about how many Marie Curie researchers are based here in Berkeley. In the absence of publicly available official data, I could simply try a personal assessment: about 150 Global Fellowships are awarded every year, and about one hundred of them regard the United States (quite unsurprinsigly, indeed). Then we cannot know where those researchers actually go, but I think it is quite sensible to guess that the most important universities (Harvard, MIT, Berkeley or Stanford,…

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Another quite special day yesterday in my open space here in Berkeley! I am working with my laptop when I notice that something is going on around Nikki’s desk (she’s a colleague of mine). Microphone, video camera, interviewer… Before I can even start investigating, Nikki has finished her interview and has started introducing the other RAEL members to the interviewer: apparently other researchers are welcome! While the ball is passed to Chris (another colleague of mine), I manage to get…

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Last weekend I finally managed to visit San Francisco for the first time! The weather was perfect this time, so I could enjoy one day to discover The City (this is how San Francisco is called here, very simply). My initial program was indeed quite vague: my idea was to start from the Financial District (which is the skyscrapers area) and then head North, towards the Golden Gate, with no additional rigid details. I knew that I could count on…

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In the past days, in the News section I posted about the launch of the Enel Innovation Hub at the University of California here in Berkeley (Enel is the Italian biggest player in the power sector), in collaboration with the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS) and Banatao Institute. The goal is to build synergies with the most innovative and promising startups here in the Bay, and naturally I guess I don’t have to spend many…

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