SACRAMENTO – Five California scientists were honored among this year’s Nobel laureates, commemorating their groundbreaking contributions in physics, chemistry, and physiology/medicine. Home to more Nobel laureates than any country in the world aside...
John Clarke, an emeritus professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley, was awarded the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on quantum tunneling, one of many strange aspects of quantum mechanics.
Clarke shared the prize with two other physicists, Michel H. Devoret and John M. Martinis, who at the time of their prize-winning research were at UC...
Smoot, a physicist at UC Berkeley and Berkeley Lab, shared the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics for detecting minute temperature variations in the cosmic microwave background, a prediction of the Big Bang theory.
Physicist George Smoot told a packed press conference in 1992, “If you’re religious, it’s...
America is awesome at science. For as long as most of us have been alive, United States scientists have published more research, been cited more often by other scientists, earned more patents, and even won more Nobel Prizes than any other nation.
All that scientific expertise has helped make the U.S. the most prosperous nation on Earth and led to longer and easier lives here and around the world. But until World War II, the U.S...
For UC Berkeley’s Jennifer Doudna, the revolutionary discovery of CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing began 15 years ago with a meeting at the campus’s Free Speech Movement Cafe.
“This is a quintessential story about Berkeley,” begins Doudna, a professor of molecular and cell biology and of chemistry, in a lecture she gave on campus in April. “The research that I’ll talk about today wouldn’t have happened … if I...
The American Chemical Society (ACS) is proud to announce that Jennifer A. Doudna is the recipient of the 2026 Priestley Medal. This award is the highest honor bestowed by ACS, and it annually recognizes an individual for distinguished service to chemistry. Doudna receives the award for “outstanding...
Jennifer Doudna, a UC Berkeley biochemist who shared the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the invention of CRISPR-Cas9 genome editing, has been awarded a National Medal of Technology and Innovation, the nation’s highest honor for technological achievement.
President Joe Biden named Doudna and 10 other technology medalists in a...
Nine of the ten UC Berkeley faculty members holding Nobel Prizes reside in UC Berkeley's College of Letters & Science. L&S has a deep legacy of groundbreaking research and transformative discoveries, and as a result, has generated several faculty members and alumni honored with Nobel Prize awards for their academic contributions. For the 2024 Nobel Prizes, four of the Nobel...
The years 1999 to 2004 were a period of incredible academic creativity and productivity for James Robinson, an economist and political scientist at UC Berkeley. His research and writing were transforming how the world thinks about the development of low-income countries. His teaching was shaping a generation of young Berkeley scholars who would help advance his ideas about why some nations were rich and others poor.
Today, Robinson was named one of the winners of the 2024 Nobel...
This year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry was shared by David Baker, a biochemist who received his Ph.D. from UC Berkeley in 1989 working with Randy Schekman, a professor of molecular and cell biology who won the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
At Berkeley, Baker conducted research primarily on protein transport and protein trafficking in yeast, the field in which Schekman received the prize. But after a postdoctoral fellowship at UCSF, he joined the biochemistry...
For UC Berkeley’s Jennifer Doudna, the revolutionary discovery of CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing began 15 years ago with a meeting at the campus’s Free Speech Movement Cafe. 
Jennifer Doudna, a UC Berkeley biochemist who shared the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the invention of CRISPR-Cas9 genome editing, has been awarded a National Medal of Technology and Innovation, the nation’s highest honor for technological achievement.
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