Congratulations to Sonia Travaglini for winning another teaching award! The Teaching Effectiveness Award is designed to recognize a small number of outstanding GSIs who have identified a particular teaching problem or issue in their own classes, sections, or laboratories and have developed, implemented, and assessed an appropriate and effective response to the problem or issue.

Sonia Travaglini’s research was also recently in the Berkeley News  along with her Fiat Vox podcast episode: “There are more than 5 million species of fungi, and each one likes a particular food. Some like sawdust. Others like plastic. Some can even digest heavy metals. After the fungi eat their meal, what was once waste turns into a new, natural and compostable material that can just be left to decompose or be used in all sorts of practical ways, from cleaning up oil spills to fashioning faux leather handbags to building houses. Sonia Travaglini, a Ph.D. candidate in mechanical engineering at UC Berkeley, tells us all about it.”

Read full transcript of the podcast.

Featured Image Caption: Ph.D. candidate Sonia Travaglini, whose research is all about developing and testing novel mushroom materials, measures a mushroom brick. (UC Berkeley photo by Anne Brice).