There’s been a long standing debate why living standards are so different around the world. Even with talented workers, labor and capital investment, for example, there are clear economic disparities between East Africa and the United States.
UC Berkeley economics Professor Miguel’s research indicates that part of the answer could be something called “slack.” This occurs when workers or resources are underutilized due to low or inconsistent customer demand.
The National Academy of Sciences has added eight UC Berkeley faculty members to its esteemed ranks of scholars and experts who advise governments and other organizations on subjects in academic fields ranging from chemistry and physics to psychology and economic policy.
UC Berkeley’s Social Sciences Division recently celebrated its faculty and staff at Social Sciences Fest, an annual gathering dedicated to recognizing the remarkable contributions and accomplishments of the Berkeley Social Sciences community.
Berkeley Social Sciences Dean Raka Ray welcomed guests by first acknowledging the current challenges facing higher education, while commending faculty and staff for remaining dedicated to Berkeley’s core values during these uncertain times.
By Jessica Park
Asian American Studies alumna Betty Duong’s time at UC Berkeley fostered free thinking and honed in the skills she uses today as a Santa Clara County supervisor. Cal opened her world to diverse perspectives, helping her realize that anyone could participate in political and civic engagement.
As tariff policy in the U.S. continues to rapidly evolve, UC Berkeley faculty weighed in on how these changes could impact trade, the economy, employment and international relations.
Six UC Berkeley faculty members from a diverse range of fields are among nearly 250 newly elected members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the organization announced in a recent press release. The new Berkeley electees include leading experts in mathematics, statistics, computer science, molecular biology, neurobiology and comparative literature.
Héctor Muñoz-Guzmán is a first-year MFA student from South Berkeley. Captivated by art at an early age, he strives to represent his immigrant family and community in the world of fine art. UC Berkeley writer Alexander Rony interviewed Muñoz-Guzmán at an open studio event where he displayed his paintings from the past year.
Political analyst Yuval Levin will discuss how a deeper understanding of the Constitution can help unite Americans in a free society during the Berkeley Liberty Initiative's (BLI) 2025 Ambassador Frank E. Baxter Lecture this week.
UC Berkeley’s ethnic studies graduate program, the oldest program of its kind in the nation, has turned 40.
Early in Stephanie L. Canizales’ recent book about unaccompanied migrant children in L.A., she introduces a boy named Tomás. When he was 2, Tomás lived in poverty in Guatemala and helped his sister shine shoes. Abandoned at 10, he dreamed of having clothes, food and shelter. He joined his sister in the U.S. at 14, but soon left when she feared his undocumented status might draw attention from authorities and risk her U.S.-born child’s future.
Philosopher Hannah Ginsborg will use the award to write a book about the relation between norms and reasons, while chemical engineer Markita del Carpio Landry will try to find molecules in little-studied plants that could treat neurological disorders.
Imagine a SlusheeTM composed of ammonia and water encased in a hard shell of water ice. Now picture these ice-encrusted slushballs, dubbed “mushballs,” raining down like hailstones during a thunderstorm, illuminated by intense flashes of lightning.
Planetary scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, now say that hailstorms of mushballs accompanied by fierce lightning actually exist on Jupiter. In fact, mushball hailstorms may occur on all gaseous planets in the galaxy, including our solar system’s other giant planets, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.
The academic year 2013-14 changed the direction of Wendy Ingram’s life. Over the course of a few months, four members of the UC Berkeley department in which she was a graduate student died by suicide: an undergraduate student, a doctoral student, a post-doctoral fellow and a faculty member.
Eleni Berg is an interdisciplinary artist whose work explores themes of nature, immigration, consumerism, and indigeneity.
Berg spoke with UC Berkeley writer Alexander Rony at a recent open studio event for MFA (master’s in fine arts) students. At the time, Berg was hosting a workshop where visitors were sculpting clay filled with native seeds.
In recent years, data-driven tools such as artificial intelligence have become embedded in our daily lives. But do they shape the human condition for the better?
On Sundays, I used to stand in front of my Mormon congregation and declare that it all was true.
I’d climb the stairs to the pulpit and smooth my long skirt. I’d smile and share my “testimony,” as the church calls it. I’d say I knew God, Jesus Christ, the Holy Ghost, prayer, spirits and miracles were all real. I’d express gratitude for my family and for my ancestors who had left lives in Britain, the Netherlands, New Zealand and Norway to pull wagons across America and build a Zion on the plains. When I had finished, I’d bask in the affirmation of the congregation’s “amen.”
When most people hear about a fishing expedition in Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula, they might picture researchers snorkeling through coral reefs in the Caribbean Sea or diving into crystal-clear cenotes, surrounded by postcard-perfect scenery.
UC Berkeley African American Studies Alumna J Finley began her career researching reparations and the legacy of slavery. But after studying how Black people navigate and resist oppression, she was eventually drawn to a subject – and a form of resistance – that was personally meaningful to her: comedy. As someone long drawn to comedy shows, Finley committed herself to collecting and honoring the stories Black women tell about themselves by becoming an audience member, critic and comedian herself.
The Museum of Vertebrate Zoology has one of the largest collections of eggs in North America, and it's vital to researchers worldwide.
It’s the season for egg hunts, whether you’ll be searching for the plastic, candy-filled kind or — due to the avian flu outbreak — an affordable dozen at the grocery store.
On March 27, President Trump signed “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” a directive mandating that the Smithsonian Institution and the Department of the Interior, which oversees national monuments, memorials and statues, rectify “divisive narratives that distort our shared history.” This is just one of several actions aimed at changing how arts and humanities organizations tell the story of the country’s past and present.
Stephanie Pau remembers the moment she knew she wanted to study biogeography, when she first saw a satellite map of a section of the earth that was brightly color coded. The colors didn’t correspond to states or countries, but instead represented a diversity of plant life based on light reflectance not visible to the human eye.
According to a January report from Inside Higher Ed, nearly three in four college students now turn to social media as an important, if not primary, source of news. As algorithm-driven platforms deliver ever more news content, fewer than half of students surveyed thought their universities were robustly training their peers in digital media literacy.
Amy E. Lerman, professor of public policy and political science and director of the Possibility Lab at UC Berkeley has been awarded a Carnegie Fellowship by the Carnegie Corporation. The prestigious fellowship grants $200,000 in support of a book or major project to each member of the cohort of scholars, authors, journalists, and public intellectuals who focus on political polarization in the United States.
What do human movement, climate variability and social structures have in common? They are all essential components in understanding the spread of infectious diseases, according to UC Berkeley Demography Professor Ayesha Mahmud.
Mahmud’s research uses data-driven modeling and behavioral analysis to investigate how diseases spread in different environments — urban and rural, humid and dry, connected and isolated.
UC Berkeley Geography students, faculty and alumni were recognized for their groundbreaking work in the field of geography at the 2025 Annual Meeting of the American Association of Geographers (AAG).
At its core, Michael Burawoy believed the science of sociology was, even when encased in the stodgy halls of academia, a study of possible solutions to improve the world. As such, it was natural for theories from the profession to be used to advocate for social change.
Not all of his colleagues believed sociologists should be personally on the picket lines or protesting.
But Burawoy was different because that’s exactly what he was doing toward the end of his life.
On a sunny Saturday in March, dozens of onlookers watched Jasmine Nyende charge, pull, twist, and duck under ropes held by six other performers. Nearby, portable speakers blared punk rock. Nyende’s performance — titled “Sankofa Moshpit” — was a joyful memorial to her late friend, Láwû. It was also one of the featured events during UC Berkeley’s MFA Open Studios.
Astronomers tallying up all the normal matter — stars, galaxies and gas — in the universe today have come up embarrassingly short of the total matter produced in the Big Bang 13.6 billion years ago. In fact, more than half of normal matter — half of the 15% of the universe’s matter that is not dark matter — cannot be accounted for in the glowing stars and gas we see.
We often assume that the decision to go to war is a carefully calculated process – one in which political leaders methodically weigh the risks and benefits before taking escalatory action. However, this belief is not supported by cognitive science and is becoming increasingly outdated.
Incoming Cal Psychology Professor Jasmin Brooks Stephens was named in the Forbes 30 Under 30 list for her achievements in healthcare. Stephens conducted the first known study that revealed discrimination was associated with the development of suicide capability — one’s ability to act on suicidal thoughts or intentions — among Black adults.
This article originally appeared on April 1, 2025 at Division of Arts & Humanities.
UC Berkeley’s graduate programs maintained their premier-level rankings in a 2025 surveyreleased today (Tuesday, April 8) by US News & World Report, with elite scores achieved in disciplines ranging from the social sciences and engineering to computer science and business.
A remarkably diverse set of Berkeley schools and programs achieved top rankings in the magazine’s annual assessment of graduate programs nationwide.
UC Berkeley's College of Letters & Science is proud to announce the recipients of the 2025 L&S Faculty Awards. This distinguished award recognizes each awardee's exceptional scholarship, service to the College and community, and transformational teaching. These extraordinary individuals not only embody the excellence of the College of Letters & Science, but they also serve as an inspiration to the entire campus community. The recipients will be honored at a private ceremony on Wednesday, May 14.
As UC Berkeley Global Studies chair, Elora Shehabuddin promotes a strong and supportive academic community for her faculty colleagues and students. From learning about foreign policy decisions to climate change and resource conflicts, Global Studies students gain in-depth knowledge about the world around them.
It’s hard to pinpoint when synesthesia, the rare neurological condition where a stimulus that affects one sense prompts a response in a different sense, was first documented. Scientific literature marks its beginning in 1812, when it appeared as an aside in a Bavarian medical student’s dissertation. Toward the end, there’s a small section where he detailed how he associated musical tones and letters with colors.
UC Berkeley Cognitive Science Assistant Director for Student Services MacKenzie Moore began her journey at Cal as an American History graduate student, where she fell in love with the campus environment and student culture. She went on to become a lecturer in the History Department, which deepened her passion for working with students and led her to her current role.
This month, The Berkeley Center for New Media (BCNM) at the University of California, Berkeley, launched the Certificate in Global Digital Infrastructure(link is external), the first and only program of its kind in higher education.Created and led by internet infrastructure expert and Professor Nicole Starosielski(link is exte
In the early 2000s, UC Berkeley rhetoric professor Winnie Wong visited Dafen village in China, where artists painted replicas of famous pieces like the Mona Lisa and Starry Night. It dramatically changed how she thinks about art and those who make it.
When Winnie Wong first saw Dafen Oil Painting Village in 2006, it was nothing like she’d imagined.
As she nears graduation at UC Berkeley, ASUC President Shrinidhi Gopal is hopeful the initiatives she implemented — such as expanding student accessibility and engagement — will leave a lasting impact on Cal students. With just a few months remaining in the academic year, Gopal, a senior double majoring in economics and data science, is focused on assuring that the proposals she has put forth receive approval and continue to thrive long after her graduation.
A new map co-created by scholars from UC Berkeley’s Geography Department challenges the way we look at the Bay Area by reimagining it through Indigenous perspectives. It highlights the cultural revitalization of Indigenous people and connects it to ongoing efforts for rematriation.
On Tuesday, March 18, the College of Letters & Science Administrative Advisory Committee (AAC) hosted a conversation between Professors David Nadler and Shannon Steen on the topic “What is Creativity?” at its second L&S Lunch and Learn convening. Moderated by Aileen Liu, Director of Curricular Engagement Initiatives, this discussion afforded L&S staff the opportunity to thoughtfully engage with the scholarship of the College and connect with their colleagues.
Seven UC Berkeley faculty members from a broad range of fields are among the 2024 class of fellows elected to the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), one of the world’s largest general scientific societies and publisher of the Science family of journals.
The campus's highest honor for teaching excellence, the Distinguished Teaching Award underscores the profound impact instructors have on their students’ learning experiences and future careers.
The pleasure we get from eating junk food — the dopamine rush from crunching down on salty, greasy French fries and a luscious burger — is often blamed as the cause of overeating and rising obesity rates in our society.
If you haven’t heard of Fred Ross before, you’ve likely heard of the legendary activists he helped train, like Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta. Drawing on organizing tactics still used today, such as house meetings and voter registration campaigns, Ross helped secure pivotal racial justice victories, like the election of Los Angeles’s first Latino council member in 1949 and the desegregation of schools in California’s Citrus Belt in 1947. Born in 1910, he was a behind-the-scenes force for civil rights and labor organizing throughout much of the 20th century.
Engineers have designed robots that crawl, swim, fly and even slither like a snake, but no robot can hold a candle to a squirrel, which can parkour through a thicket of branches, leap across perilous gaps and execute pinpoint landings on the flimsiest of branches.
In the 2024 book, nominated for The Story Prize, English Professor Fiona McFarlane tells 12 short stories that look past a serial killer's crimes and focus on the lives of those still living.
Photo design by Neil Freese/UC Berkeley
Nataliia Goshylyk is a lecturer in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, where she teaches Ukrainian. Dr. Goshylyk received her M.A. in Philology from Lesya Ukrainka Volyn State University, and her PhD in linguistics from Kharkiv National University. She is the recipient of the Berkeley Language Center Summer Fellowship in 2022, as well as a U.S. Fulbright Scholarship from 2021-2022, and she was an Erasmus Mundus Ianus II recipient in 2015, where she did research in Graz, Austria.
In mid-March five years ago, President Donald Trump tweeted about the threat of a “Chinese virus.” That month marked the official beginning of a pandemic that went on longer and took a larger toll in the U.S. — on lives, the economy, mental health and our social fabric — than a naive public could anticipate.
Consider the guitar leaning against the wall over there—you got it because you wanted to look cool, sure, but notice that it is unlike a piano (where you press one key and you get one note) and also unlike a violin (where you can press anywhere, and you look less cool). The guitar is somewhere in between because its frets are positioned where they are for a reason, not arbitrarily, but you can still make tiny changes to notes, as tiny as you like. It’s kinda digital at the same time it’s kinda analog.
In their multimedia project, por vida // for life, UC Berkeley Geography and Conservation Studies senior Jacqueline Canchola-Martinez documents the lived experiences of Latinx communities facing environmental injustice in the Central Valley. The College of Natural Resources Travel Grant, a LIFT Arts Development Grant, and the Brian Gialketsis SERQueer Scholarship helped make the project possible.
Permafrost is a major actor in the slow-motion disaster movie that we are all trapped inside. It contains vast amounts of carbon. As our planet warms permafrost thaws, releasing greenhouse gases that enter a feedback loop which accelerates climate change. How bad is that? Literally—quantify the danger so we can decide how to respond. We need to dig into the character of permafrost and learn its desires and habits and upbringing, understand what causes it to turn to the dark side. As the saying goes, keep your friends close and your enemies closer.
It is widely believed that receptive listening, or demonstrating openness to someone’s point of view, is key to political persuasion.
But a new study co-led by UC Berkeley Political Science Professor David Broockman suggests that signalling receptiveness during a persuasive conversation may not be as important as previously thought.
Editor's Note: The work of UC Berkeley Social Sciences faculty helps shape California public policy. In this series, learn more about their research and projects and how they resonate with state policymakers and address solutions to the most pressing issues facing California, from food access to homelessness.
In Dec. 2024, Prof. Alex Filippenko was interviewed by Dr. Brian Greene for the World Science Festival. They discussed the accelerating expansion of the Universe, dark energy, and especially the current "Hubble tension" -- the discrepancy between the measured and predicted current expansion rate.
When Gašper Beguš began studying linguistics, he spent his time deciphering ancient, largely dead languages. “Nobody cared about linguistics,” he says in this episode of 101 in 101, a series from UC Berkeley that challenges professors and other experts to distill the basics of their field of study into only 101 seconds.
After graduating from Cal with a double major in political science and rhetoric in 1982, Walter Brown went straight to law school and has been practicing law for the past 40 years. While he has supported UC Berkeley in various ways since then, he realized last year that he wanted to give back more meaningfully.
Group photo with kids, staff and volunteers on their last day in Ghana.
Few plants are more celebrated in Egyptian mythology than the blue lotus, a stunning water lily that stars in some of archaeology’s most significant discoveries. Researchers found its petals covering the body of King Tut when they opened his tomb in 1922, and its flowers often adorn ancient papyri scrolls.
It is with profound sadness that we share the passing of our dear colleague and friend, Ben Dillon. Ben, our dedicated marketing and communications manager, passed away the morning of March 4, 2025 after a sudden and intense battle with cancer.
This story was originally published by NPR.
Like many Americans, Pittsburgh-area resident Josh Lucas wishes the time change didn't have to happen.
"You get acclimated to a way of being, and then all of a sudden the sky is a different color, and you have to still function in the normal way," said Lucas.
And it's not always easy to keep functioning normally. In fact, most sleep researchers and clinicians say that the spring-forward time change is bad for our health.
The career coaching and mentorship provided by the UC Berkeley Social Sciences Career Readiness Internship Program (SSCRIP) helps students like political economy major Uzair Pasta explore their interdisciplinary interests and prepare for diverse careers after graduation.
Economics and Cognitive Science junior Pilar Capdevila gravitated towards the UC Berkeley Social Sciences Career Readiness Internship Program (SSCRIP) seeking mentorship and valuable industry insights. The program prepares Social Sciences students for meaningful careers through professional development training and paid summer internships.
Professor Graburn began his academic journey at King's School, Canterbury from 1950 to 1955. He earned his B.A. in Natural Sciences and Social Anthropology at Clare College in 1958 and his M.A. in Anthropology at McGill University, Montreal in 1960. He completed his Ph.D. in anthropology at the University of Chicago in 1963.
For over two decades, the Goldmans have nurtured a community of scholars from disadvantaged backgrounds who might otherwise never have found their way to academic success. These “diamonds in the rough,” as Ruth calls them, often arrive feeling like imposters but graduate as leaders. With Ruth’s experience as a Holocaust survivor and first-generation college student guiding their approach, the Goldmans have created a program that offers funding, mentorship, emotional support, and lifelong connections.
On the campaign trail, President Trump made his promise to drastically slash immigration a rallying cry. Since taking office, he’s issued a flurry of executive orders aimed at achieving those goals, from ending birthright citizenship to freezing funding for refugee resettlement and migrant legal aid organizations.
For Skyelar Montgomery, receiving the African American Initiative Scholarship in 2021 heavily influenced her decision to attend UC Berkeley.
UC Berkeley Economics Professor Chen Lian has recently been awarded a two-year, $75,000 fellowship from the Sloan Foundation. Since 1955, the prestigious fellowship has been awarded annually to U.S. and Canadian researchers excelling in “creativity, innovation, and research accomplishments.”
UC Berkeley students have photographed California’s most elusive mammal alive for the first time.
A small, cute and elusive mammal native to sub-alpine regions of the Sierra Nevadahas been captured alive on camera for the first time by a team of UC Berkeley students.
This year marks the 40th anniversary of UC Berkeley’s Ethnic Studies Ph.D. program, the oldest in the country. Since its founding in 1984, the program has graduated over 170 students, who have gone on to become professors, artists, elected officials and other leaders.
Rooted in activism, the program emerged from student-led protests in 1968, when a coalition of Black, Indigenous, Asian American and Chicano students advocated for UC Berkeley to take questions of race and racism more seriously.
Inspired by UC Berkeley Professor Frances Hellman and started at UC Berkeley and UC San Diego, the Hellman Fellows Fund(link is external) provides much needed support to pre-tenure assistant professors who have served for at least two years. Established in 1995, the Hellman Fellows Program has since expanded to include all ten UC campuses and a handful of private institutions.
The old adage goes: It’s better to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all. But is it?
For many people mourning lost love, “the one that got away” lingers, with constant questions of “what-if” coursing through their brain. In the psychology of love, the concept of “the one that got away” refers to a former romantic partner who maintains a significant role in one’s memory.
Categorized by ending at a — perceived — premature point in the relationship, this lost love can leave an individual fixated on what could have been.
Amid a government freeze on funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and other federal agencies, two California representatives paid a visit to the the University of California, Berkeley’s Innovative Genomics Institute on Friday, Feb. 21, to hear about the importance of NIH-funded basic research. Both Democratic representatives vowed to contest the Trump administration’s attempts to drastically cut biomedical funding.
In fields ranging from AI to health care to Hollywood and beyond, 20 UC Berkeley students, faculty and alumni have been recognized for their achievements on this year’s edition of Forbes’ 30 Under 30 list.
Have you ever seen letters from the 1800s? Aside from the pristine penmanship and grammar, the way friends expressed their fondness for each other is remarkable.
“Letters sent between friends are often full of the kinds of loving and affectionate language that today we would only associate with romantic or sexual relationships: ‘My darling,’ ‘I love you,’ ‘I can’t wait to be near you,’” said UC Berkeley historian Sarah Gold McBride, who in 2022 created the course, Friendship in America, with Berkeley anthropologist Christine Palmer.
Mars today is a cold, dry, dusty planet with its only obvious water locked up in frozen polar ice caps. But billions of years ago, it appears to have had sandy beaches lapped by waves along the shoreline of a vast ocean.
The evidence for beaches on Mars comes from a Chinese rover, called Zhurong, that landed on the planet in 2021. During its short life it detected evidence of underground beach deposits in an area thought to have once been the site of an ancient sea, bolstering the idea that the planet long ago had large bodies of water.
UC Berkeley’s Men’s Swimming and Diving Team has won its first ACC Championship, with several Berkeley Social Sciences students on the team, including Economics student Robin Hanson (Swimming/Free/Fly/IM); Psychology students Colby Hatton (Swimming/Free), Hank Rivers (Swimming/Breast/Free/IM) and Jacob Soderlund (Swimming/Breast); and Political Economy student Jack Alexy (Swimming/Free/Back), who also picked up a win in the 100 freestyle.
If someone asked you to describe democracy in one word, what would you say? An October 2024 survey by the Political Psychology of American Democracy Policy Project, led by UC Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy Dean David Wilson, asked people just that. Many respondents said, “freedom,” but a lot of others said, “broken.”
UC Berkeley Political Science Professor Terri Bimes was recently awarded the James A. Thurber Article of the Year Award from the journal Congress & the Presidency for her co-authored piece, “Hyperpartisanship and the First Hundred Days.” The award recognizes exceptional scholarship on Congress, the presidency, their interactions and national policymaking, with a particular focus on pressing issues in current affairs.
UC Berkeley Anthropology Professor Christine Hastorf was awarded the Pomerance Award for Scientific Contributions to Archaeology.
Each year, the Archaeological Institute of America—the oldest and largest professional archeology association in North America—chooses one scholar to honor with the prestigious Pomerance Award for Scientific Contributions to Archaeology.
The UC Berkeley Social Sciences Career Readiness Internship Program (SSCRIP) was designed to equip students with the practical knowledge and real-world experience they need to succeed in their future careers. Nohemi Aguilar, a senior who is majoring in sociology and pursuing a human rights minor, is already seeing the program's impact after her first semester.
As a student at UC Berkeley, Helen Kirkby was no stranger to the libraries.
Kirkby, who studied political science and history, remembers digging through the Free Speech Movement papers for a research project, poring over old newspaper articles on a microfiche reader, and studying medieval manuscripts from The Bancroft Library.
Morrison Library, tucked within Doe, was her “hidden gem” — a favorite place to visit between classes or catch up on work.
Trier Mortlock used the libraries in a slightly different way.
As a student at UC Berkeley, Helen Kirkby was no stranger to the libraries.
Kirkby, who studied political science and history, remembers digging through the Free Speech Movement papers for a research project, poring over old newspaper articles on a microfiche reader, and studying medieval manuscripts from The Bancroft Library.
Editor's Note: The work of UC Berkeley Social Sciences faculty helps shape California public policy. In this series, learn more about their research and projects and how they resonate with state policymakers and address solutions to the most pressing issues facing California, from food access to homelessness.
Dear Berkeley Social Sciences Community,
During this Black History Month, let's celebrate the profound contributions of our Black community members at UC Berkeley Social Sciences, who inspire us to imagine and create a more inclusive world, even when that seems hard to do.
Learn more by watching my video
Warm regards,
Our beloved colleague, Michael Burawoy, was killed the evening of February 3, 2025 when he was hit by a car while walking near his home in Oakland. Michael was a pillar of our community for decades, an intellectual giant, a dedicated mentor and educator, and a dear friend. Indeed, he played a central role in defining who we are as an intellectual and human community.
Even in the face of overwhelming evidence, false narratives can be incredibly sticky. Many people insist that the earth is flat, that childhood vaccines cause autism, or that climate change is a hoax, despite ample scientific evidence to the contrary.
AAS is launching a new section of our newsletter, Departmental Spotlights, organized by Graduate Student Endria Richardson. Our first spotlight features an interview with graduate student Karina Karbo-Wright.
Omer Sharon, a postdoctoral fellow at UC Berkeley, has been awarded a $75,000 grant from the 2024 Glenn Foundation for the Medical Research Postdoctoral Fellowship in Aging Research. Sponsored by the American Federation for Aging Research (AFAR), this prestigious fellowship supports research aimed at advancing our understanding of human aging.
Photo: Thomas Naef, 2022
As insect populations decrease worldwide in what some have called an “insect apocalypse,” biologists are desperate to determine how the six-legged creatures are responding to a warming world and to predict the long-term winners and losers.
Against her mom’s warnings, UC Berkeley political scientist Marika Landau-Wells watched Arachnaphobia as a kid. Ever since, she has been terrified of spiders. But over the years, she has learned to reason with her quick fear response — No, that spider is not 8 feet in diameter — and calmly trap them and put them outside.
Roxana (Qinhong) Wang, a recent graduate of the UC Berkeley class of 2024, has been awarded a 2025-26 Schwarzman Scholarship. Wang, who studied Comparative Literature and Ancient Greek and Roman Studies in the College of Letters & Science, was selected as one of 150 scholars from a pool of nearly 5,000 candidates. She is Berkeley’s twentieth recipient of the award since its inception in 2013.
The wrong tariff for the wrong reason.
The incoming Trump administration is gearing up towards imposing substantial tariffs on all US imports. The new Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessent, has used the optimal tariff argument to justify such actions. The new head of the Council of Economic Advisors, Stephen Miran, citing our own work, proposes 20% as a "benchmark" for the US optimal tariff. We think this is a very bad idea.
The optimal tariff argument
In Berkeley Talks episode 217, john a. powell and Stephen Menendian, director and assistant director of UC Berkeley’s Othering and Belonging Institute, discuss their 2024 book, Belonging Without Othering: How We Save Ourselves and the World
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Stuart D. Bale has been awarded the 2025 Arctowski Medal for "revolutioniz[ing] our understanding of the energization of and heat transport in the solar wind." The Arctowski Medal is presented every two years to recognize outstanding contributions to the study of solar physics and solar terrestrial relationships. The Medal is presented with an award of $100,000, plus $100,000 to support research in solar physics and solar terrestrial relationships at an institution of the recipient’s choice.
It may be a “train wreck,” in the words of astronomer Dan Weisz, but it’s a beautiful train wreck.
Weisz, an associate professor of astronomy at the University of California, Berkeley, is referring to the Andromeda galaxy, the nearest large galaxy to our own Milky Way and the closest one that astronomers can study for clues to our galaxy’s evolution.
As a Native American, McKalee Steen said she often has felt “misunderstood or not seen” in college and in search of community among students who often “are ignorant to what your background might be.”
But on Wednesday in Albany, at a celebration of UC Berkeley’s newest graduate student residence, the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma citizen and Berkeley’s Graduate Assembly president expressed pride in the name of the housing complex — xučyun ruwway (HOOCH-yoon ROO-why) — that’s spelled out above the main entrance.
Astronomer Calvin Leung was excited last summer to crunch data from a newly commissioned radio telescope to precisely pinpoint the origin of repeated bursts of intense radio waves — so-called fast radio bursts (FRBs) — emanating from somewhere in the northern constellation Ursa Minor.
Editor’s Note: The work of UC Berkeley Social Sciences faculty helps shape California public policy. In this series, learn more about their research and projects and how they resonate with state policymakers and address solutions to the most pressing issues facing California, from food access to homelessness.
The UC Berkeley Social Sciences Dean’s Office recently launched the Social Sciences Young Alumni Council to create an early-stage volunteer leadership opportunity for recent graduates and for them to benefit from the perspectives and guidance of these committed alumni. The council provides guidance on student- and young alumni-focused programs and ways the university may be a better resource for alumni.
President Donald Trump and the state of California engaged in low-grade conflict almost continually during his first term in the White House, and hostilities flashed into the headlines again this week as horrifying wildfires brought death and destruction to Los Angeles. Rather than offer words of consolation and support, Trump attacked Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom — and blamed him for the fires.
At least 11 people have been killed and over 10,000 structures burned in and around Los Angeles since a series of wildfires erupted on Tuesday.
UC Berkeley Psychology alumna Britt Sellin says the social science theories she learned as a Berkeley Social Sciences student — such as researching how people think and behave — have been essential to her 30-plus-year career as a human resources leader in the tech industry.
This is an opinion essay written for The New York Times by Daniel Aldana Cohen, an assistant professor of sociology at the UC Berkeley and Thea Riofrancos, an associate professor of political science at Providence College.
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.
In a world overflowing with choices — from what to eat for breakfast to which career path to pursue — decision-making has become an ever-present obstacle for most. Research from UC Berkeley’s Department of Psychology has demonstrated a new way that people can overcome this obstacle, by changing the way they approach their decisions.
Stephan and I met in 1989 as undergraduates at UC Berkeley’s Social Sciences Division, just before the destructive Loma Prieta earthquake struck. It’s an easy anniversary to remember.
He was a political science major, and I was studying history. Stephan had plans to attend law school, but I was uncertain about my path after graduation. People often asked me, "What will you do with a history degree?" Back then, it seemed like people assumed history majors could only go into teaching.
Was the T. rex brightly colored with feathers? Did it run as fast as movies make it seem? How new discoveries challenge our long-held beliefs about the world of paleontology.
Key takeaways
Studying the physics of atomic particles takes a lot of room. The Large Hadron Collider at CERN, the biggest particle accelerator, is in a ring tunnel 27km (17 miles) long buried about two football fields deep underground. It serves as the factory, or artisanal manufacturer, of bespoke subatomic particles like quarks. But where is the design studio for these rare particle models?
The sketch of modern physics’ conundrum that we in the general public have a hazy picture of hasn’t changed for a hundred years. The cat is both kicking and has kicked, the electron is zipping around but we can’t know both where it is and how quick it is going, the particles are mysteriously linked in ways that appear faster than the speed of light, God does play dice, and so on. If Einstein couldn’t figure it out, what hope do we have?
Berkeley, CA — UC Berkeley’s Center for Interdisciplinary Critical Inquiry (CICI) and the International Consortium of Critical Theory Programs (ICCTP) have been awarded $2.6 million to support a groundbreaking multi-year initiative titled “A Counter-Imaginary in Authoritarian Times.” Through collaborative workshops, conferences, performances, publications, and a dynamic, open-ended digital platform, this project brings together academics, artists, activists, and other community members to develop concrete strategies, tools, and proposals to create a counter-ima
The Cognitive Science program’s Berkeley Accelerator & Startup Incubator in Cognitive Science (BASICS) class, which fuses cognitive science and entrepreneurship, hosted a Pitch Day recently for students to present their business plans. The event marked the culmination of months of brainstorming and hard work in the class.
Editor’s Note: The work of UC Berkeley Social Sciences faculty helps shape California public policy. In this series, learn more about their research and projects and how they resonate with state policymakers and address solutions to the most pressing issues facing California, from food access to homelessness.
UC Berkeley Social Sciences and other Cal alumni offer students helpful tips on navigating the job market and advice on breaking into a diverse array of fields.
The past decade has seen historic challenges for U.S. democracy and an intense focus by scholars on events that seem to signal democratic decline. But new research released today (Dec. 17) finds that a bias toward pessimism among U.S. political scientists often leads to inaccurate predictions about the future threats to democracy.
My Brilliant Friend, by the pseudonymous Italian author Elena Ferrante, is the New York Times’ No. 1 book of the century. This recognition, and the recent adaptation of Ferrante’s four-novel Neopolitan Quartet into an HBO series, underscores this writer’s profound influence.
This article originally appeared on the Division of Arts & Humanities on December 6, 2024.
Eli Glickman, a senior Political Science major and Public Policy minor in the UC Berkeley College of Letters & Science from Bethesda, MD, has been named a 2025 Marshall Scholar, the university’s first since 2022. As a Marshall Scholar, Glickman will be funded for two years of graduate study in the United Kingdom. Glickman is Berkeley’s 34th recipient of the Marshall Scholarship since its inception in 1953.
A new analysis of DNA from ancient modern humans (Homo sapiens) in Europe and Asia has determined, more precisely than ever, the time period during which Neanderthals interbred with modern humans, starting about 50,500 years ago and lasting about 7,000 years — until Neanderthals began to disappear.
That interbreeding left Eurasians with many genes inherited from our Neanderthal ancestors, which in total make up between 1% and 2% of our genomes today.
Mathematician Ken Ribet is well known for a 1990 paper that paved the way, five years later, for a historic proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem, one of the most famous unsolved mathematical problems of modern times.
Watch this video to learn how biologists like Victor Ortega Jiménez use high-speed cameras to record fascinating slow motion footage of animals in the wild.
Several studies at UC Berkeley’s Psychology Department have emerged that promise to reshape our understanding and treatment of bipolar disorder. From securing a $4.5 million grant to launching a diet-focused study, UC Berkeley psychology researchers are determined to improve the lives of those suffering from this complex disorder.
Ellin and Ned Purdom grew to appreciate astronomy later in life. Neither took astronomy courses in the 1970s while at UC Berkeley, where the two met. Now, they look forward to the Department of Astronomy’s Evening with the Stars lecture every year, and in February, the couple pledged $500,000 and a portion of their estate to advance student access and diversity in astronomy.
It’s a question that has puzzled thinkers for centuries: Are we humans alone in our pursuit of fairness and the frustration we feel when others get what we want?
In recent years, evolutionary psychologists have suggested that we’re not all that special. Animals, from corvids to capuchin monkeys, express what humans might recognize as jealousy when, for example, they are passed over for a sought-after snack. Many argue this is evidence we are not alone in our aversion toward unfairness.
Sixty years after UC Berkeley's Free Speech Movement ignited a wave of campus activism, the university’s Ethnic Studies Department is one of its enduring legacies. Born from the demands of student activists who, like those in the Free Speech Movement (FSM), sought to reshape academia, the department symbolizes the intersection of free speech, academic freedom and social justice.
Over the past few years, raging wildfires in Italy have become a common and deadly occurrence. In Southern Italy, intense, record-breaking heat waves and dry scirocco winds create the perfect conditions for wildfires—both natural and coordinated.
Lark (they/them) With over 20 years of experience in finance and qualifications in business administration and cost engineering, Lyazzat excels in supporting TDPS’s creative mission. Lyazzat thrives on solving financial challenges, collaborating with faculty and staff, and applying her expertise to ensure smooth operations.
Myrtha Ortiz Villar is a Senior Manager of Data Strategy and Insights in the non-profit sector, as well as a consultant and career coach. With a professional journey that spans roles as an immigrant rights activist, college student support professional, and higher education specialist, Myrtha has emerged as a skilled data practitioner. In this capacity, she collaborates with college access and success professionals to enhance their services through data-driven insights.
Like millions of other Americans, UC Berkeley Professor Poulomi Saha watched a lot of docuseries about cults during the COVID-19 pandemic. The more Saha watched, the more they felt a kind of change within themself. “I was absolutely enthralled,” said Saha. “My reaction no longer fit that old script, the script that I had internalized. I wasn’t just having a passing interest. I wasn’t sort of mildly terrified. I was thinking, “Oh, wow, that makes good sense.’” Saha wanted to understand why.
Thanksgiving is a holiday all about food — and gratitude, of course — that creates sensory memories: rosemary-scented stuffing, a well of warm gravy threatening to spill out of its mashed potato seat, tart goops of cranberry sauce, triangles of pie and a massive bird at the center of it all.
Professor Joel Fajans, distinguished plasma physicist, celebrated researcher, and devoted mentor at the University of California, Berkeley, passed away on November 17 at the age of 66, after a battle with cancer. Joel was internationally renowned for his pioneering contributions to nonneutral plasma physics and antimatter research. He was locally famous for his challenging but rewarding Physics 111A Instrumentation Laboratory course, as well as for his expertise in the classical mechanics of bicycles.
While Jupiter’s Great Red Spot has been a constant feature of the planet for centuries, University of California, Berkeley, astronomers have discovered equally large spots at the planet’s north and south poles that appear and disappear seemingly at random.
Diamond rain? Super-ionic water?
These are just two proposals that planetary scientists have come up with for what lies beneath the thick, bluish, hydrogen-and-helium atmospheres of Uranus and Neptune, our solar system’s unique, but superficially bland, ice giants.
UC Berkeley’s Council on Advising and Student Services and awards planning committee recently announced the recipients of the 2024 Excellence in Advising & Student Services Awards, which recognize the recipients' positive and innovative impacts on student learning, eng
The search for the universe’s dark matter could end tomorrow — given a nearby supernova and a little luck.
This story originally appeared on research.berkeley.edu on November 6, 2024.
Editor’s Note: The work of UC Berkeley Social Sciences faculty helps shape California public policy. In this series, learn more about their research and projects and how they resonate with state policymakers and address solutions to the most pressing issues facing California, from food access to homelessness.
UC Berkeley Economics and Public Policy Professor Hilary Hoynes uses her expertise in child poverty and the social safety net to influence California public policy and develop solutions to the state’s economic issues.
Editor’s Note: Berkeley Social Sciences faculty are turning their research into action, tackling Oakland’s most urgent challenges — from public safety to affordable housing. In this 3-part series, learn how they are partnering with the community to create lasting and meaningful change by addressing concerns from residents.
For a long time, Berkeley’s African American Studies department had a vision of increasing the scope of the department’s work outside of the classroom and into local communities.
While some of her peers were relaxing over summer vacation, Eythana Miller was reviewing music and art exhibitions and conducting interviews for METAL Magazine. It was a dream internship for college students who, like Miller, are interested in pursuing a career in journalism.
Katie Suwalkowski, a U.S. Army veteran and psychology major at UC Berkeley, has a straightforward approach to life: if you want something, you go for it. When she was 19, Katie wasn’t sure what to do next. She wanted to go to college, but didn’t feel ready mentally or academically. “I didn’t have much going for me,” she recalls.
Tell us about you.Preeya Khanna(link is external)(link is external), assistant professor of neuroscience and electrical engineering and computer sciences, has won a National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director’s New Innovator Award.
As California schools prepare for a future in which high school seniors must complete an ethnic studies course to graduate, many educators are seeking guidance on how to implement this new curriculum. For schools across the Bay Area, the UC Berkeley History Social Science Project has become an important partner in navigating this challenge.
Richard Chan was hosting a Hong Kong dinner with other UC Berkeley alums when he heard a startling fact: the state of California covers just 14 percent of the public university’s budget. Chan, a serial entrepreneur and investor, decided to investigate how his skills could be of service to his alma mater.
This story originally appeared on research.berkeley.edu on November 6, 2024.
Princess K. AllenNiklaus Largier is Chair in the department of Comparative Literature, is a professor in the departments of German and Comparative Literature, and is affiliated with the Programs in Medieval Studies, Religious Studies, and the Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory.
The Doreen B. Townsend Center for the Humanities will boost its fellowship and Art of Writing programs thanks to a generous gift from Matt and Margaret Jacobson. The couple pledged $750,000 to create the Paul Alpers Memorial Fund, honoring the founding director of UC Berkeley’s renowned nexus of humanities research and events.
In a commentary(link is external) published on October 17 in the journal Cell, UC Berkeley postdoctoral fellow Angelo Forli and faculty member Michael Yartsev argue that recent technological and theoretical breakthroughs finally set the stage for a much-needed paradigm shift in how neuroscience studies behavior.
Former President Donald Trump has decisively won reelection to the White House, a political outcome that began reverberating around the globe in the hours after the polls closed Tuesday. After polling for weeks had shown a too-close-to-call race that might take days to conclude, Trump’s clear win struck many as a shock.
Doris Tsao(link is external), professor of neuroscience and member of the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute at UC Berkeley, has been awarded the 2024 António Champalimaud Vision Award along with Margaret Livingstone (Harvard Medical School), Nancy Kanwisher (MIT), and Winrich Freiwald (Rockefeller University) for their groundbreaking discoveries about how the brain recognizes faces.
There’s a scene in Pixar’s hit film Inside Out 2 when teen Riley, the human protagonist of the Inside Out world, senses that one of her 13-year-old friends isn’t telling her everything. The audience zooms in to Riley’s mind, where her emotions are trying to figure it all out. Disgust is on top of it. She pulls up a screen and starts examining Riley’s friend’s furrowed brow. “Enhance,” Disgust barks, as the view pushes into the telltale corrugator muscle that controls our eyebrows.
Saagar Asnani is a graduate student in Musicology and Medieval Studies. He focuses particularly on the regions of France, Italy, Occitania, and Catalonia. He works mainly with the relationship between language and music, as his research bridges sociohistorical linguistics with musicology. Saagar earned his MA from UC Berkeley in 2022, and BA in Music, French and Biology from University of Pennsylvania.
It is common knowledge that the human gut is home to hordes of bacteria, most of which seem essential for good health. But there is another component of the gut microbiome that receives less attention: viruses.
California’s critical role in shaping the 2024 election took center stage recently as experts gathered at UC Berkeley’s Institute of Governmental Studies (IGS) Library for the "California and the 2024 Election" panel.
With the U.S. presidential election now just days away, worrisome signals are flaring on the political radar: Election officials in the battleground state of Pennsylvania sought to impede studentsfrom registering to vote. Ballot drop boxes were set ablaze in Washington, Oregon and Arizona.
You know that uncle whose political takes threaten to turn family gatherings into food fights? Don’t decline his Thanksgiving invitation just yet. When it comes to support for democracy, left and right in America are much closer than you might think.
We asked L&S alums to share their favorite winter memories as UC Berkeley students, and the range of responses was heartwarming. Thank you to everyone who shared a memory! Here are just a few of the memories our alums shared.
While few would have expected this year’s presidential campaign to be tame, the run-up to Nov.
In a June 2024 study, UC Berkeley psychology professor Keanan Joyner and his colleagues found that by using a combination of methods tailored to the multidimensional nature of psychopathy, we could transform how we identify and understand this personality disorder. “I think that it goes toward having a functional and positive society,” Joyner said. “Our collaboration is the substance of what makes humans so wonderful as a species.”
As the 2024 Election nears, UC Berkeley Social Sciences conducted informal surveys on whether students plan to vote and their top issues.
This year's election is pivotal for young voters — many of whom are voting in their first election. As college students become more engaged in issues, those who cast a ballot could help determine the outcome of many races and initiatives.
For UC Berkeley Political Science graduate student Dinah Lawan, April 14, 2014, was a night she will never forget. Lawan went through the terrifying ordeal of being a kidnapping victim of Boko Haram, and later escaped to pursue higher education in the U.S.
Today, as she works towards her doctorate to help those suffering in conflict zones, Lawan recalls how the kidnapping changed her life forever.
A new UC Berkeley study has uncovered a possible solution to reduce low voter turnout among people who dislike their choices on the ballot by changing the way voting decisions are framed. The research shows that encouraging voters to vote against the worst options, rather than voting for the best one, could significantly reduce the number of people opting not to vote, especially in elections between unpopular candidates.
Imagine you decide to write a short story about a protagonist who creates an artificial human and then falls in love with it. What gender is your protagonist? What about the artificial human? Would you write a moving love story? A cautionary dystopian tale?
Would your story be more compelling than one written by ChatGPT?
Obsessively scrolling through the latest polling averages? Overwhelmed by campaign ads about threats to democracy? Paralyzed with nerves about Election Day and what comes next?
In this first-person narrative, Yesenia Ochoa, a first-year student at UC Berkeley, tells UC Berkeley News about her experience being a student from a migrant family and her educational aspirations.
“I grew up in Yuba City. My parents immigrated there from a little village on the side of a hill called Las Estacas in Michoacan, Mexico, when they were 23. They work in the fields — agriculture is a huge industry in the region — so they leave really early in the morning to harvest peaches, walnuts, tomatoes, almonds, almond fields, things like that.
“Sociology is sort of a perfect Berkeley degree,” says Raka Ray, the dean of sociology at UC Berkeley. “So many students come to Berkeley from so many different backgrounds, and what unifies them is they all want to make the world a better place.”
Raised in farming communities, Adriana P. Ramírez is keenly aware of the challenges migrants face on a daily basis and the struggles they encounter with the U.S. immigration system. The UC Berkeley Sociology graduate student, who is a Berkeley Institute for the Study of Societal Issues (ISSI) Fellow, wants to raise the visibility of these challenges and help find solutions to obstacles migrants face when they return to Mexico.
MCB postdoc Akanksha Thawani (Nogales & Collins Labs) was selected as a 2024 STAT Wunderkind. This award recognizes Thawani as an outstanding early-career scientist and is for her research on unraveling the mysteries of ‘the next CRISPR’.
Neuroscience faculty member Markita del Carpio Landry has been included in The Atlas of Inspiring Hispanic/Latinx Scientists(link is external).
As soon as you put starch in your mouth — whether in the form of a dumpling, a forkful of mashed potatoes or a saltine — you start breaking it down with an enzyme in your saliva.
Editor’s Note: Berkeley Social Sciences faculty are turning their research into action, tackling Oakland’s most urgent challenges — from public safety to affordable housing. In this 3-part series, learn how they are partnering with the community to create lasting and meaningful change by addressing concerns from residents.
As many traditional approaches to Oakland’s complex issues continue to be ineffective, the city is in need of innovative solutions that address the real needs of its residents.
“Altruistic” doctors who prioritize patient care over income and profit achieve dramatically better health outcomes with older patients, a finding that has powerful implications for U.S. health care systems and policies, according to a new study co-authored at UC Berkeley.
The research, published today in JAMA Health Forum, found that when thousands of Medicare patients were treated by such doctors, they were far less likely to need preventable hospital admissions and emergency room visits. In addition, the patients’ annual medical payments were nearly 10% lower on average.
During the 2020 vice presidential debate, then-Sen. Kamala Harris took the floor back from an interrupting Vice President Mike Pence with two words that soon became a slogan: “I’m speaking.”
When Harris speaks, there’s one person who is listening very intently: Nicole Holliday, acting associate professor of linguistics at UC Berkeley.
Alejandra Colon, a proud Latina and 2018 graduate of UC Berkeley, has continued to honor her heritage through her work and community involvement. She remains an active member of the UC Berkeley Chicanx Latinx Alumni Association, and has served on the executive boards of both the Orange County and Los Angeles chapters.
In an era when online misinformation is seemingly everywhere and objective facts are often in dispute, UC Berkeley psychologists in a new study have presented a somewhat paradoxical partial solution: Expose young children to more misinformation online — not less.
UC Berkeley is the No. 1 public university in the U.S and the eighth-best university in the world, according to the Times Higher Education’s 2025 World University Rankings, released on Oct. 8. Berkeley has held the ranking of top U.S. public university for nine of the past 10 years.
Did you know?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.
What role do the humanities play in a world challenged by climate change, rising authoritarianism, censorship, racism, wars and collapsed economies?
The humanities and their forms of historical, visual and cultural literacy are critical to understanding and addressing the human experience and the planet’s survival, says Sara Guyer, dean of the Division of Arts and Humanities in UC Berkeley’s College of Letters and Science.
Political Economy alumnus Larry Kao got his first taste for working in entertainment during his time as a Berkeley Social Sciences student. That meaningful experience led him to his current role as a special projects supervisor for The Walt Disney Company.
Berkeley Economics alumnus Roy Tan credits his time as a Social Sciences student with inspiring his lifelong passion for learning and education.
Today, Tan leverages his successful career as an insurance agent for New York Life in San Mateo to give back to the Economics Department to help students prepare for meaningful careers in public and private sectors and tackle society's biggest challenges.
It may not seem like UC Berkeley Social Sciences alumna Sandra Lo's Ethnic Studies degree directly relates to her 25-year career in tech. But she says much of the knowledge, communication skills and ability to think critically she gained in this field at Berkeley Social Sciences have been essential to her success in the tech industry.
UC Berkeley’s Department of Music unveiled the new Helen and Thomas Wu Performance Hall in September, following an extensive renovation that was years in the making. The reopened space includes a larger stage, new seats, and state-of-the-art sound, lighting, and digital technology upgrades.
UC Berkeley History Professor Emeritus David Hollinger is one of a small handful of people on the UC Berkeley campus today who participated in the Free Speech Movement (FSM) of 1964. In a recent conversation, Hollinger reflected on his experience in the FSM and its connection to his career as a scholar and teacher.
These reflections draw on his autobiographical essay, “A View from the Margins,” in Robert Cohen and Reginald Zelnik, THE FREE SPEECH MOVEMENT (University of California Press, 2002).
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.
From a hard-scrabble pioneer apple farm in Boulder Creek, California, nestled in the Santa Cruz Mountains, Carla and Renata Hesse’s great-aunts planted the seeds for their family’s extensive ties to UC Berkeley. Spanning four generations and more than 100 years, 10 members of the Hesse family have earned degrees from Berkeley, including eight in the College of Letters & Science.
Two UC Berkeley computational biology and neuroscience scholars received the New Innovator Award from the U.S. National Institutes of Health, the agency announced today.
UC Berkeley alumnus Gary Ruvkun has been awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Ruvkun, a 1973 graduate with a B.A. in biophysics, shares the prize with Victor Ambros, a professor at the UMass Chan Medical School, for their discovery of microRNA and and its role in post-transcriptional gene regulation. MicroRNA are tiny pieces of genetic information that play critical roles in helping cells regulate gene expression and control what types of proteins they produce.
The MacArthur Foundation announced the Class of 2024 MacArthur Fellows on Tuesday, October 1. MacArthur Fellowships, often called ‘genius grants,’ provide each recipient with an $800,000 stipend, a "no-strings-attached award to extraordinarily talented and creative individuals as an investment in their potential," according to the MacArthur Foundation website.
This fall, UC Berkeley’s College of Letters & Science launched its first-ever L&S Staff Achievement Awards to recognize and celebrate outstanding Letters & Science staff members. Awardees were selected for their exceptional commitment to the College’s shared mission of teaching, research, and public service. Each of these individuals has excelled in areas such as collaboration, goal accomplishment, inclusion & belonging, innovation, and mastery of their work, and their steadfast dedication and hard work serve as an inspiration to the entire campus.
UC Berkeley alumna Ruha Benjamin, “a transdisciplinary scholar and writer,” has been awarded a 2024 MacArthur Fellowship for “illuminating how technology reflects and reproduces inequality and championing the role of imagination in social transformation,” the MacArthur Foundation announced this week.
It was a time of historic change, and society was buckling under the stress. There had been a war, then a deadly pandemic. Economic crisis was constant: Racing inflation, unemployment and changes in technology provoked extreme economic insecurity.
Despite our society’s collective addiction to scrolling through social media, many of us can’t help but feel a twinge of dread when seeing notifications we’ve missed. For every clever meme, scintillating fact or adorable animal that crosses our feeds, we’re just as likely to encounter a snarky attack, racial slur or hate-filled comment.
From the U.S.’s first Black theater in New York to today's Broadway stages, there’s been “a kind of de facto censorship” of diverse stories throughout the country's history, says Professor Shannon Steen.
By digitally mapping the whole brain of a fruit fly, scientists hope to gain insight into human brain disorders.
As a large team of scientists recently completed the assembly of a complete wiring diagram of the adult fruit fly brain, Phil Shiu decided to simulate that massive circuit — 139,255 neurons and 50 million connections — in a computer.
The UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies Poll is a go-to source for cutting-edge, non-partisan insights into California's public opinion. As the oldest public policy research center in the state, IGS tackles the most pressing issues, from immigration to abortion, that are shaping America today.
Hear Randy Schekman, a UC Berkeley professor of Molecular and Cell Biology, explain his Nobel Prize-winning work in just 101 seconds.
Paul L. Richards, an experimental physicist who built some of the first highly sensitive detectors to probe the faint radiation left over from the birth of the universe, died peacefully at his home in Berkeley on Monday, Sept. 16. A professor emeritus of physics at the University of California, Berkeley, Richards was 90.
At first glance, Amissa Anima: A Book of the Dead looks like a traditional hardback volume. Open the cover, however, and you find something unexpected: a kit for contacting the dead.
The 2024–25 cohort of Berkeley’s Social Sciences Career Readiness Internship Program (SSCRIP) has officially begun their fall course, the start of a year-long journey that will equip students with the practical skills and essential knowledge to succeed in a variety of professions.
The discovery of an Earth-like planet 4,000 light years away in the Milky Way galaxy provides a preview of one possible fate for our planet billions of years in the future, when the sun has turned into a white dwarf, and a blasted and frozen Earth has migrated beyond the orbit of Mars.
Income and wealth inequality in the U.S.
This fall, two UC Berkeley centers are gearing up for the election by hosting a variety of events to help others make informed voting decisions. The Institute of Governmental Studies (led by Sociology Professor Cristina Mora and Political Science Professor Eric Schickler) and Social Science Matrix (led by Sociology Professor Marion Fourcade) have partnered in various events and panels spanning over the next two months that will cover the national and state implications of this election year.
A surge of scholarly interest across the country in Ukrainian studies is far exceeding American universities’ capabilities, but UC Berkeley is positioning itself to fill that gap.
As UC Berkeley celebrates the 60th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement, it is emerging as a national leader in developing science-based practices that nurture constructive dialogue. The goal: Cool tensions, promote understanding and ease polarization.
Even before David Z. arrived at UC Berkeley, he had a strong, uneasy sense that he would not fit in. His family is conservative, and so is he. He’s not doctrinaire: He supports Donald Trump, but he believes in climate change, too. Even so, he suspected that at Berkeley, so famously progressive, he might be an outsider.
The world is witnessing unprecedented threats to democracy. The financial crisis of 2007 exposed deep vulnerabilities in democratic institutions, leading to a wave of populist movements and the rise of authoritarian regimes.
Yet amid this uncertainty, a powerful wave of grassroots activism has surged, with people mobilizing across the world to confront pressing issues such as economic inequality, climate change, systemic racism, gender injustice and the ongoing struggle for human rights.
UC Berkeley Psychology Professor Emerita Christina Maslach was awarded the Association for Psychological Science’s (APS) 2025 James McKeen Cattell Fellow Award in recognition of her lifetime achievement and groundbreaking work on occupational burnout that led to developing the Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI), a measurement of burnout that has been long considered the “gold standard” in the field.
UC Berkeley Psychology Professor Dacher Keltner was awarded the Association for Psychological Science's 2025 APS Mentor Award in recognition of his exceptional mentoring, and innovative research on compassion and awe, cultural influences on emotion and the dynamics of human hierarchies and power abuses.
Chancellor Rich Lyons and Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost Ben Hermalin announced today that Interim Dean Richard Harland has been appointed as dean of the Division of Biological Sciences:
Dear Campus Community,
Assistant Professor of Earth & Planetary Science Penny Wieser has been named AGU’s 2024 Hisashi Kuno Award recipient. This award is presented annually to an early career scientist for outstanding contributions to the fields of volcanology, geochemistry, and petrology. It is named to honor the life and work of Hishashi Kuno, an exceptional volcanologist and petrologist of the mid-twentieth century.
Fareed Zakaria GPS takes a comprehensive look at foreign affairs and global policies through in-depth, one-on-one interviews and fascinating roundtable discussions.
On the September 2, 2024 episode: Reengineering Life: The Next Frontiers in Science
Fareed examines two emerging technologies that are already changing life as we know it—CRISPR gene editing and artificial intelligence—in interviews with two women who pioneered them: UC Berkeley’s Jennifer Doudna and Stanford’s Fei-Fei Li.
When biochemist Jennifer Doudna and her research partner, Emmanuelle Charpentier, published a paper in Science 12 years ago, they had a hunch that their findings would transform how genomics is used in medicine. The paper outlined a method they’d developed for editing DNA that used an RNA-based system known as CRISPR-Cas9.
Berkeley Social Sciences has welcomed 17 new faculty for the 2024–2025 academic year, including new professors of psychology, sociology, economics, gender and women’s studies, history, political science, linguistics, African American studies, geography and demography.
They bring insight, expertise and dedication to the Social Sciences. Learn more about them here
Curators of Berkeley is a series of interviews with Berkeley alumni from a range of disciplines in the arts and humanities who work across curatorial practices and fields. Patricia Cariño Valdez is an art consultant, independent curator, and manager of the Olivia Collection.
In Berkeley Talks episode 208, three UC Berkeley professors from a wide range of disciplines — psychology, biology and ethnic studies — broach a deep question: What is understanding?
UC Berkeley's Division of Social Sciences announced today the establishment of an endowed program and chair in Palestinian and Arab Studies, which will usher in a new era of research and scholarship in this critical field of study.
In her 2016 bestselling book Strangers in Their Own Land, UC Berkeley sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild proposed that everyone has a “deep story” — a narrative about one’s life and the world that’s based more on emotion than facts, a story that feels true.
The inaugural cohort of UC Berkeley Social Sciences’ one-year Master of Computational Social Sciences (MaCSS) program has officially begun their studies, marking a new era that blends the technical power of data science with the societal depth of the social sciences.
Professor Joshua Simon Bloom first joined the Astronomy Department in 2005. By then he had already bounced between the US and the UK, between the ivy-covered brickwork at Harvard and the sun-drenched courtyards at Caltech, and there would still be many career ricochets to come before he landed in the Chair’s desk at UC Berkeley. In 2020. Just as the pandemic lockdown was unfolding. Perfect. He ran the department during COVID the same way he aims to in all the projects he leads: by striving to provide the best tools and right support so that everyone involved can do their best work.
Bill Boos started out as a physics guy at a big public institution (SUNY-Binghamton) and that’s the way he still sees himself. He’s a professor in Earth & Planetary Science here at UC Berkeley now, but “earth science is physics, just with a particular focus.” Boos’ research focuses on large-scale climate dynamics—how atmospheric circulations, ocean interactions, radiative transfer, and land surface processes control regional and global climate.
Particle physics research is spinning its wheels, trying to gain traction on a very basic problem. Thirteen billion years ago, the Big Bang produced equal amounts of matter and antimatter. Theory holds that every particle has an antimatter companion that is virtually identical to itself, but with the opposite charge. But there are a lot more ‘ordinary’ particles than antiparticles – you reading this right now is clear evidence – so where is all the missing antimatter?
Stanford alumnus (Honors BS ’15) Michael Lindsey chose UC Berkeley for his PhD program largely because he wasn’t sure what areas of mathematics he was interested in pursuing – the Berkeley department encompasses a very broad range of theoretical and applied topics, and therefore afforded him a lot of flexibility. Lindsey wasn’t certain about a lot of things, actually. Most Stanford STEM majors assumed they would end up as engineers in Silicon Valley, him included.
In the last hundred years, particle physicists have developed a fine-grained understanding of how the building blocks that make up the universe fit together, called the Standard Model. The concrete and steel are basic particles like protons, neutrons, and electrons, and the energies that weld them together are divided into three or four forces: strong, electromagnetic, weak, and sometimes gravity. Testing shows that the Standard Model is very accurate, but it’s not quite perfect.
A new Berkeley Psychology research study suggests that worrying too much about happiness can actually make you feel less happy and even more depressed.
While the 2024 Games may have drawn to a close, there are still student athletes in the College of Chemistry who daily display the same kind of discipline and resilience as any Olympian. “Being a student athlete at the University of California, Berkeley, presents a unique set of challenges and opportunities,” says gymnast and recent College of Chemistry student Jaxon Mitchell(link is external).
Mono Lake in the Eastern Sierra Nevada is known for its towering tufa formations, abundant brine shrimp and black clouds of alkali flies uniquely adapted to the salty, arsenic- and cyanide-laced water.
University of California, Berkeley, researchers have now found another unusual creature lurking in the lake’s briny shallows — one that could tell scientists about the origin of animals more than 650 million years ago.
Associate Professor and Herst Chair in Physics Shimon Kolkowitz has been named a member of the third annual cohort of the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation Experimental Physics Investigators, to achieve remarkable physics insights and open new frontiers. This new cohort of 19 researchers will each receive a five-year, $1.25 million grant to enable them to pursue their research goals and try new ideas.
UC Berkeley Economics and Public Policy Professor Hilary Hoynes, an expert on child poverty and the social safety net, has been awarded the 2024 Daniel M. Holland Medal by the National Tax Association (NTA). The NTA’s most prestigious award recognizes Hoynes’ pioneering research into child poverty and the social safety net, which has influenced the field by offering new insights into the long-term benefits of social welfare programs.
It was a March afternoon in 2023 and I was waiting on the fifth floor of Evans Hall. I don’t remember what day of the week it was, or if it was sunny outside. I do remember eyeing the history of Berkeley Economics on display in front of me. “1875 – Bernard Moses is appointed Professor of History. He is the first faculty member to teach political economy on the Cal campus.” Thinking of the Economics department’s roots in political economy and history, I hummed. What are the odds? I mused.
Over the course of nearly five months in 2022, NASA’s Perseverance rover collected rock samples from Mars that could rewrite the history of water on the Red Planet and even contain evidence for past life on Mars.
But the information they contain can’t be extracted without more detailed analysis on Earth, which requires a new mission to the planet to retrieve the samples and bring them back. Scientists hope to have the samples on Earth by 2033, though NASA’s sample return mission may be delayed.
UC Berkeley psychology professor Alison Gopnik studies how children learn. She also studies artificial intelligence systems. That might sound counterintuitive, but as she explains in this video about her work for UC Berkeley News, there’s much overlap between what we are learning about how babies explore the world and how we might create better AI systems.
Berkeley’s Social Sciences students and alumni made a resounding impact at the Paris Olympics, securing eight medals in total. Their impressive haul includes two golds, four silvers and two bronze medals in sports such as rowing, discus, swimming, hammer throw, water polo, etc. Twenty athletes from Social Sciences competed in the 2024 Olympics, highlighting the Division’s extraordinary talent.
Top philosophy graduate students from around the world are finding their way to UC Berkeley thanks to a recently established fellowship that enriches the discipline with new approaches.
The fellowship honors Carol Lee Price, a Berkeley alum who led a curiosity-driven life. Price was born in Cleveland to a Jewish family that emphasized education as an object of value that no one could take away. Whenever she moved, she took the knowledge she had gained with her.
Using seismic activity to probe the interior of Mars, geophysicists have found evidence for a large underground reservoir of liquid water — enough to fill oceans on the planet’s surface.
The data from NASA’s Insight lander allowed the scientists to estimate that the amount of groundwater could cover the entire planet to a depth of between 1 and 2 kilometers, or about a mile.
Every now and then, a scholar’s niche expertise lines up with a cultural or political moment and finds an audience hungry for the details. Nicole Holliday is having one of those moments.
Holliday is an acting associate professor of linguistics at UC Berkeley who studies what politicians say, how they speak and what their speech reveals about their identity. Perhaps more than any other scholar, Holliday has spent years examining the speaking style of a politician who is also having a moment: Kamala Harris.
There’s a scene toward the end of the new Pixar film Inside Out 2 where the main character, 13-year-old Riley, is having a panic attack in the penalty box at a hockey match.
UC Berkeley Psychology Professor Mahesh Srinivasan began his journey in academia after receiving his bachelor’s degree in Symbolic Systems from Stanford and his Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology from Harvard. Throughout his career at Berkeley, Professor Srinivasan has taught and inspired many undergraduate and graduate students.
Shrinidhi Gopal, a senior majoring in economics and data science, is the incoming president for UC Berkeley's undergraduate student government.
A groundbreaking study led by UC Berkeley Psychology Postdoctoral Research Fellow Aakash Chowkase showed the official number of COVID-19 deaths in Pune, India may be significantly underreported.
Many organisms react to the smell of deadly pathogens by reflexively avoiding them. But a recent study from the University of California, Berkeley, shows that the nematode C. elegans also reacts to the odor of pathogenic bacteria by preparing its intestinal cells to withstand a potential onslaught.
To transcribe the information contained in our genes or to repair the dozens of breaks that occur daily in our DNA, our enzymes must be able to directly access the DNA to perform their functions. However, in the cell nucleus, this access is limited because the DNA strands are often tightly coiled and packed around proteins like threads around spools.
Glaciers are retreating around the world as the planet warms, but scientists have debated how severe the shrinkage is compared to periodic glacial advances and retreats since the end of the Ice Age about 12,000 years ago.
Already known as a leader in quantum science and a testbed for quantum computing, the University of California, Berkeley, is expanding its footprint with the hiring of four early-career experimental physicists who use quantum systems to explore new frontiers in physics.
We are saddened to share the following news from our department of African American Studies:
U.S. wins first gold medal at Paris Olympics with win in men's 4x100m freestyle relay
New Jersey's Jack Alexy joined Caeleb Dressel, Hunter Armstrong and Chris Guiliano to capture the United States' first gold medal at the Paris Olympics
The United States earned its first gold medal of the Paris Olympics with a resounding win in the men's 4x100m freestyle swimming relay Friday.
Team USA came in first with a time of 3:09:28 followed by Australia in second with a time of 3:10:35, with Italy taking the bronze with a time of 3:10:70.
Twenty Berkeley Social Sciences students and alumni are going for gold at the Paris 2024 Summer Olympic Games. They are competing for 12 countries and one city in seven sports.
Imagine trying to binge all 11,000 hours of broadcast video from the upcoming Paris 2024 Olympics. It would take more than 458 sleepless days and nights to see all 329 medal events and three dozen sports.
In Greece, and about 2,000 miles from the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris, UC Berkeley is celebrating 100 years of archaeological excavation at a site of the ancient Panhellenic Games, a religious and athletic event that inspired the modern Olympics.
Michael Yartsev, an associate professor of neuroscience and bioengineering at UC Berkeley, is the campus’s newest Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) Investigator, the HHMI announced today.
In a new study, researchers were able to predict a person’s response to emotionally charged scenes using brain imaging and computer modeling alone — gauging not only whether the person’s reaction was positive, negative or neutral, but also how strong the reaction was.
Professor Whitney Davis (History of Art) was granted the 2024 NOMIS Distinguished Scientist and Scholar Award in recognition of his outstanding contributions to the advancement of science and human progress through their groundbreaking, innovati
In Berkeley Talks episode 203, Alisha Gaines, a professor of English and an affiliate faculty member in African American studies at Florida State University, discusses why it’s important for Black America to “excavate and reconsider” its relationship to the plantation.
The plot of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1948 film, Rope, is a disturbing one:Two men in their shared apartment strangle a former classmate to death. Then, they host guests — including the victim’s family — at a dinner party. It’s an attempt to prove their superiority by committing the “perfect murder.”
Although the killers — Brandon and Phillip — live together, it’s never acknowledged openly that they’re a couple. (At the time, the Motion Picture Production Code prohibited the depiction of “sex perversion,” which included homosexuality, on the big screen.)
The following message was shared with the UC Berkeley community on June 27, 2024.
Dear Colleagues,
The search for the next dean of the Division of Biological Sciences is ongoing; we remain optimistic that we will be able to share news regarding the dean search in the coming weeks. In the meantime, we are grateful to Senior Associate Dean Richard M. Harland, who has graciously agreed to step into the dean role on an interim basis effective July 1, 2024.
Dark energy — a mysterious force pushing the universe apart at an ever-increasing rate — was discovered 26 years ago, and ever since, scientists have been searching for a new and exotic particle causing the expansion.
William Carter was in a National Archives reading room in the United Kingdom staring at a box of tattered pages covered in cursive writing, sea water stains and smears of blood. It smelled musty, and his hands became smudged turning the soot-covered pages.
Carter, a UC Berkeley Ph.D. candidate in geography, was mining these centuries-old slave ship logs in 2020 as part of his research into the transatlantic slave trade and what lessons from then might apply to our own understandings about race, literacy and power today.
In his spare time between classes, fourth-year student Gabriel Alexander Juarez ’24 plays guitar in two punk bands. The political science major started one
In Berkeley Talks episode 202, New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik discusses liberalism — what it means, why we need it and the endless dedication it requires to maintain.
William Carter was in a National Archives reading room in the United Kingdom staring at a box of tattered pages covered in cursive writing, sea water stains and smears of blood. It smelled musty, and his hands became smudged turning the soot-covered pages.
Carter, a UC Berkeley Ph.D. candidate in geography, was mining these centuries-old slave ship logs in 2020 as part of his research into the transatlantic slave trade and what lessons from then might apply to our own understandings about race, literacy and power today.
In an announcement today (Wednesday, June 12), the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters named two University of California, Berkeley, faculty members — Doris Ying Tsao, professor of molecular and cell biology, and Armand Paul Alivisatos, professor emeritus of chemistry — winners of 2024 Kavli Prizes in the fields of neuroscience and nanoscience, respectively.
Jeff Davis’ workspace is rare: It’s UC Berkeley’s iconic Campanile, one of the world’s tallest clock-and-bell towers and home to 20 tons of ancient fossils, a famous falcon family and its centerpiece — a 61-bell grand carillon.
UC Berkeley Ethnic Studies Continuing Lecturer Pablo Gonzalez is a first-generation Chicano scholar-activist and anthropologist, and the recipient of the 2022 Distinguished Teaching Award. His research is focused on the political and cultural impact of indigenous social movements, particularly their resonance with Chicanxs and communities of color in the United States. Gonzalez teaches courses on Chicanx history, culture, ethnography, migration and criminality.
We are delighted to announce that Raka Ray has been reappointed as dean of the Social Sciences Division for a second five-year term, beginning July 1, 2024.
Congratulations to our recent and upcoming Neuroscience PhD Program graduates: Matthew Davis, Erin Aisenberg, Katie Cording, Marisa Denkinger, Julian Bieber-Dishart, Xue Lily Gong, Madeline Klinger, Sylvia Madhow, Hayley Bounds, and Jacob Ziontz!
Read our Q&A below with some of the graduates to learn about their most interesting discoveries, future plans, and words of advice.
Since 1979, when Jupiter’s moon Io was found to be pockmarked with volcanoes, astronomers and volcanologists have been excited by what the reddish satellite could tell us about the evolution of the Jovian system and Earth’s early volcanic history. Yet, studies of eruptions and lava flows on Io have been hampered by fuzzy images from Earth-bound and space-borne telescopes and far too few closeups from flyby spacecraft.
A sharp new camera recently installed on a telescope in Arizona could remedy that.
UC Berkeley History and Law Professor Dylan Penningroth began his journey in academia after receiving his bachelor’s degree in history from Yale and his Ph.D. in history from the Johns Hopkins University. Throughout his career at Berkeley, Professor Penningroth has taught, mentored and inspired countless undergraduate and graduate students.
UC Berkeley Anthropology Professor Kent G. Lightfoot received the 2024 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Society for American Archaeology for his innovative approach to combining archaeology with contemporary social justice issues which contributes new understandings of the Anthropocene era.
Political Economy graduates. Photo by Emily Yang.
Monica Garcia, Supervisor
Ziva Armstrong, Senior College Advisor
Luís González, College Advisor
Joanna King, College Advisor
Daunte Marshall, College Advisor
Marisol Silva, College Advisor
Brittany Kulusich, College Advisor
Kelsey Owyang, College Advisor
Scherane Kinney, College Advisor
History Professor Dzovinar Derderian began on her journey to become an academic because of her strong desire for an American education (having grown up in Armenia) and her interest in the social sciences and humanities through the conversation with her family and friends. Sharing her Armenian heritage and history has become a focal point in her research, teaching, and relationship with her students.
Ten years ago, Johnny Smith sat in a prison cell with no hope and no future. And that’s when he decided to dream big and "reinvent" himself.
As a student competing in track and field at his Parlier high school, Robert Leija was obsessed with how to improve his performance and, in particular, prevent the buildup of lactic acid in his muscles during training. Like many athletes, he blamed it for the performance fatigue and muscle soreness he experienced after intense workouts.
Mellony Palma, a Berkeley senior majoring in Sociology, was recently selected for Berkeley’s Robert J. and Mary Catherine Birgeneau Recognition Award for Service to Underrepresented Students for her efforts to help young children and adults navigate the foster system. The award honors individuals whose work betters the lives of those in underrepresented communities.
This article was originally featured on the Berkeley Light the Way website.
Somdeng “Danny” Thongsy knows what it’s like to be dealt a bad hand in life.
A refugee from Laos, he grew up in a tough neighborhood, living in poverty and surrounded by gangs. His brother was murdered when Danny was a teenager. This led Danny to commit a serious crime that landed him a 27-years-to-life sentence in state prison.
Truman Scholars demonstrate outstanding leadership potential, a commitment to public service, and academic excellence. Selected from 709 candidates nominated by 285 colleges and universities, this year's 60 new scholars will receive $30,000 for graduate studies, leadership training, career counseling, and internship opportunities within the federal government.
The College of Letters & Science Advisory Board has announced the recipients of the second annual L&S Faculty Awards, which recognizes and celebrates exceptional faculty in the College of Letters & Science. Awardees were selected for their exceptional scholarship, service to the College and community, and transformational teaching.
This first-person narrative was written from an interview with Daniella Lake, who will graduate this May with a degree in media studies.
Growing up in San Francisco's West Portal neighborhood, Christopher Ying had vague plans to become a lawyer and began prepping by joining the speech, debate and mock trial teams at Lowell High School.
But he credits the University of California, Berkeley, and the opportunities it provided — in particular, to report and edit for the Daily Californian and to tutor inmates at the former San Quentin State Prison — with helping him find his true passion in the legal field: giving a voice to marginalized members of society.
Graduating with a degree from UC Berkeley, the world’s top public university, is impressive. Two degrees is unbelievable. Three degrees is almost unheard of. Four, well, that’s in the league of its own.
Meet Vitto Resnick, a UC Berkeley senior who will achieve an extremely rare feat next week when he’ll graduate with four bachelor’s degrees in psychology, chemical biology, nutritional science–physiology and metabolism, and molecular and cell biology–neurobiology.
Berkeley History Professor Christine Philliou uses her experience of having lived abroad immersed in other cultures and educational systems to enrich the learning experience for her students.
She received her bachelor's degree from Columbia University in Labor History and Modern Greek studies and received her master's and Ph.D. from Princeton University in Near Eastern Studies and History. She came to UC Berkeley in 2015 after teaching Ottoman and Modern Turkish history at Columbia University.
At the conclusion of its annual gathering this week, the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) announced the election of 120 new members and 24 new international members, among them UC Berkeley's Abby Dernburg, professor of molecular and cell biology and a senior scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab).
A physicist, a philosopher and a psychologist walk into a classroom.
At the conclusion of its annual gathering this week, the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) announced the election of 120 new members and 24 new international members, among them UC Berkeley’s Abby Dernburg, professor of molecular and cell biology and a senior scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab).
Are inventors born or made? Berkeley engineers explore that question in the award-winning documentary “Pathways to Invention,” set to premiere in May on PBS stations nationwide. The 60-minute special follows eight “modern inventors of diverse backgrounds and their journeys as they develop life-changing innovations.”
The fearsome, saber-like teeth of Smilodon fatalis — California's state fossil — are familiar to anyone who has ever visited Los Angeles' La Brea Tar Pits, a sticky trap from which more than 2,000 saber-toothed cat skulls have been excavated over more than a century.
Though few of the recovered skulls had sabers attached, a handful exhibited a peculiar feature: the tooth socket for the saber was occupied by two teeth, with the permanent tooth slotted into a groove in the baby tooth.
Much as ChatGPT generates poetry, a new A.I. system devises blueprints for microscopic mechanisms that can edit your DNA.
UC Berkeley Political Science Professor Amy Lerman was recently awarded the Chancellor’s Award for Research in the Public Interest, which honors “individuals and groups for their exceptional commitment to advancing social change through public service.” An educator and researcher, Professor Lerman is passionate about her research in equity, public opinion and civic engagement.
Hayley Bounds, a graduate student in the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute, has been awarded a prestigious 2024 Schmidt Science Fellowship. This fellowship, renowned within the scientific community, seeks out the “world’s best emerging scientists who have completed a Ph.D. in natural sciences, computing, engineering, or mathematics and places them in fellowships in a field different from their existing expertise.” The program not only provides funding for the scientists’ training and research endeavors, it also fosters a community of interdisciplinary leaders.
UC Berkeley History Alumnus Jefferson Cowie, who is a history professor at Vanderbilt University, was awarded a prestigious 2024 Guggenheim Fellowship
UC Berkeley Geography Professor Brandi Summers began her journey in academia after receiving her Ph.D. in sociology from UC Santa Cruz and a masters degree in social sciences from the University of Chicago. Throughout her career at Berkeley, Professor Summers has taught, mentored and inspired countless undergraduate and graduate students.
Seven UC Berkeley scientists — including a chemist, a psychologist, an engineer, two biologists and two physicists — are among 250 new members elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences today.
The Academy recognizes excellence and convenes leaders from every field of human endeavor to examine new ideas, address issues of importance to the nation and the world, and to work together to cultivate art and science.
Standing on Asilomar State Beach just west of Monterey, Marius Castro talked with dozens of his fellow UC Berkeley students for hours under the moonlight. The moment felt special to Castro, like he was in a movie. In actuality, he was attending the first annual MPS Scholars retreat.
The Berkeley Staff Assembly recently announced the recipients of the 36th annual Excellence in Management Award, who are recognized for leading their teams and team members to meaningful accomplishments this past year. This year’s award theme, “Cultivating Staff, Harvesting Success: Recognizing Excellence in Management" highlights leaders who excel in cultivating their staff, leading to overall success for the team and the organization.
How does a Film degree prepare you to launch a company that became a household name?
As part of Creative Careers week in the Division of Arts & Humanities, Jill Foley (Film ‘00) returned to campus on April 3 to speak with Dean Sara Guyer. Foley explained how the skills she learned at Cal have served her every step of the way: from her first post-college job with a North Bay theater company to co-founding and serving as VP of Apparel for Peloton.
A new statistical analysis of the interaction between El Niño and rising global temperatures due to climate change concludes that the approaching summer in the tropics has nearly a 7 in 10 chance of breaking records for temperature and humidity.
The prediction, by climate scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, applies to a broad swath of the world straddling the equator, including India and the bulk of Africa, Central and South America and Australia, but also includes Florida and Texas.
Six UC Berkeley researchers have been elected 2023 Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the world’s largest general scientific society and publisher of the Science family of journals.
The honorees, announced today (Thursday, April 18), are among 502 scientists, engineers and innovators recognized for their scientifically and socially distinguished achievements.
Yuno Iwasaki has been awarded a 2024 Paul and Daisy Soros New American Fellowship and will pursue a Ph.D. in physics at UC Berkeley. As a Fellow, Yuno will receive up to $90,000 to support her graduate education.
Linguistics Professor Peter Jenks was named a recipient of the 2024 Distinguished Teaching Award (DTA), UC Berkeley’s highest honor. DTA recognizes faculty who consistently do an outstanding job teaching and inspiring their students. These faculty members not only make learning exciting but also help their students and fellow faculty see how classroom lessons connect to the real world.
Growing up in the East Bay, Michael Cerda-Jara faced adversity throughout his hardscrabble childhood. He joined a gang at the age of 13. He got into fights in school and faced expulsion multiple times.
He was lost academically because of the trouble he got into and lack of support from those around him, including his teachers. One of them, his 6th-grade teacher, once told him he “wasn’t going to end up anywhere except for prison or dead.” No one expected Cerda-Jara to amount to much and he had low expectations for himself.
When Nathanael Stephen Payne ’23 was developing Wrestle with Jimmy for UC Berkeley’s “Introduction to Playwriting” class, he had no idea where the project would take him. His answer came several years later, when he crossed the stage at graduation as one of two students to receive the Larry Belling Promising Writers’ Award.
Ethnic Studies Continuing Lecturer and American Cultures Program Director Victoria Robinson was named a recipient of the 2024 Distinguished Teaching Award (DTA), UC Berkeley’s highest honor. The DTA recognizes faculty who consistently do an outstanding job teaching and inspiring their students. These faculty members not only make learning exciting but also help their students and fellow faculty see how classroom lessons connect to the real world.
UC Berkeley History Professor John Connelly has been awarded a prestigious 2024 Guggenheim Fellowship. Connelly, who serves as the Sidney Hellman Ehrman Professor of European History, has made significant contributions to the field of European history through his extensive research and publications.
This past weekend, Hollywood stars and academic luminaries alike gathered at the 10th annual Breakthrough Prize Awards ceremony. Hosted by performer James Corden, this illustrious event cast a spotlight on the 2024 Breakthrough Prize laureates alongside a select group recognized from 2020-2023.
Viet Thanh Nguyen emerged from UC Berkeley with more than a diploma.
In fact, he earned three (but who’s counting?) — dual bachelor’s degrees in English and ethnic studies in 1992, and a doctorate in English in ’97.
But his education wasn’t confined by the walls of a classroom.
Nguyen became steeped in activism, leaving Berkeley with “four misdemeanors, three diplomas, two arrests, and an abiding belief in solidarity, liberation, and the power of the people and the power of art,” he recalls in his memoir, 2023’s A Man of Two Faces.
In today’s job market, a college degree is often seen as a pathway to success, promising greater opportunities and higher chances of employment. But for individuals with a criminal record, the reality can be starkly different.
Rich Lyons, an established economist, former dean of the Haas School of Business and the campus's current leader for innovation and entrepreneurship, will become the next chancellor at the University of California, Berkeley, the UC Board of Regents announced today (Wednesday, April 10).
The 2024 U.S. News & World Report graduate rankings are out. Several departments in Berkeley Social Sciences continue to top the list. Sociology ranked No. 1, Psychology No. 1, History No. 1, Economics No. 4 and Political Science No. 4.
Some companies discriminated against Black applicants much more than others, and H.R. practices made a big difference.
I am honored to stand with books that celebrate the complexities of our state: opportunity, preservation, and memory. And who wouldn’t want to stand next to our extraordinary Anna May Wong?
Focusing her research on the effects of monetary and fiscal policy on the economy, Chancellor's Professor of Economics Emi Nakamura brings her distinguished academic background to UC Berkeley’s Department of Economics.
One hundred thousand years ago, you live in a small tribe preparing for the day’s hunt when suddenly a shadow crosses the sun, and all goes dark. For long terrifying minutes you ask yourselves: Is this the end? How can we survive? What will we eat? The sun returns, but the terror remains: What did we do to provoke the wrath of the gods?
An extensive CO2 monitoring network set up around the San Francisco Bay Area by an atmospheric chemist from the University of California, Berkeley, has recorded the first evidence that the adoption of electric vehicles is measurably lowering the area's carbon emissions.
A research collaboration between UC Berkeley Psychology and Neuroscience Professor Steve Piantadosi and Carnegie Mellon University Psychology Professor Jessica Cantlon recently led to a rethinking of what makes human intelligence unique.
Starting in the 2025-26 academic year, by law, California’s public high schools must begin teaching ethnic studies, and students in the Class of 2030 can’t graduate without passing a class on the subject.
UC Berkeley’s African American Studies (AAS) Department launched a groundbreaking project this week with a $100,000 Affirming Multivocal Humanities grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The Banned Scholars Project is a direct response to increasing restrictions on academic freedom, particularly in the fields of critical race theory, DEI and gender studies. It was spearheaded by AAS professors Michael M. Cohen, Tianna S. Paschel and Ula Taylor; department chair Nikki Jones; and managed by staffer Barbara Montano.
American Studies is proud to announce that Emma Gerson, a graduate of our program (class of 2023), has won the 2023 American Cultures Student Prize!
This prize recognizes exemplary student projects developed in American Cultures courses "that promotes understanding of U.S. race, ethnicity, and culture and exemplifies a standard of excellence in scholarship." Emma's award-winning submission, "Alcatraz: A Carceral-Colonial Space," was the capstone project she created in my class, American Studies 102AC (Beaches in Mind: The Beach in American Culture), in Fall 2021.
Anatomical skeletal remains have been used in science and medical classrooms around the world for centuries. But students don’t know the names or any information about the individuals, let alone the dark history of their origins.
Sarah Gold McBride, a lecturer in American Studies, has been awarded the 2023 American Cultures Excellence in Teaching Award, which "recognizes individual faculty members ’ exemplary teaching in the American Cultures curriculum. Instructors are recognized for their inspiring and sustained commitment to creating a learning space that holds the challenges and opportunities that teaching AC content requires." Recipients receive a $2,500 award and are honored at a public award ceremony.
American Studies Director, Andy Shanken, shared the news below:
In 2013, the University of California, Berkeley, debuted a course to teach undergraduates the tricks used by scientists to make sense of the world, in the hope that these tricks would prove useful in assessing the claims and counterclaims that bombard us every day.
It was launched by three UC Berkeley professors — a physicist, a philosopher and a psychologist — in response to a world afloat in misinformation and disinformation, where politicians were making policy decisions based on ideas that, if not demonstrably wrong, were at least untested and uncertain.
An orbiting space telescope approved by NASA last month and scheduled for launch in 2030 will conduct the first all-sky survey of ultraviolet (UV) sources in the cosmos, providing valuable information on how galaxies and stars evolve, both today and in the distant past.
UC Berkeley Psychology Professor and former Department Chair Serena Chen began her almost three decades journey in academia after receiving her Ph.D. in social psychology from New York University. Throughout her long tenure at Berkeley Social Sciences, which began in 2000, Professor Chen has taught, mentored and inspired countless undergraduate and graduate students. In addition to shaping the lives of her students, Chen has produced new knowledge in the field of self-compassion and authenticity.
What’s a good job for formerly incarcerated people?
You often hear this mantra from people in corrections: Get a job, any job. Work will reduce your risk of going back behind bars. As a result, people coming out of prison feel pushed to take jobs that have difficult schedules, low pay, no benefits or poor working conditions.
UC Berkeley Sociology graduate student Ángel Mendiola Ross’ curiosity about using big data and computational methods to try and tackle perpetuating inequities in the criminal justice system led them to apply to the Berkeley Social Sciences’ multidisciplinary Computational Research for Equity in the Legal System (CRELS) Program.
Neutrinos and antineutrinos are nearly massless particles produced in many nuclear reactions, including the fission of uranium in nuclear power plants on Earth and the fusion reactions at the core of the sun.
But they are devilishly hard to detect — most pass through Earth without stopping — making it difficult to study the nuclear reactions taking place at the core of stars or in stellar explosions or to monitor nuclear power plants for illicit production of bomb material.
This year, the Berkeley Letters & Science community stepped up in a big way to support our university's 10th annual Big Give fundraising drive. We could not be more grateful to the 2,029 donors who generously raised $863,130 for the College and those who cheered us on every step of the way. Your support will help uplift the outstanding student experience, faculty excellence, and essential research opportunities core to L&S.
BERKELEY, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--The University of California, Berkeley Molecular Therapeutics (MTx) division of the Molecular & Cell Biology department today announced the launch of a new initiative to accelerate drug discovery at the interface of academia and biotech.
Five UC Berkeley faculty members have been awarded the 2024 Bakar Prize, which is designed to give a boost to campus innovators as they translate their discoveries into real-world solutions.
This year's winners are trying to engineer probiotics to treat skin disease, improve treatments for heavy metal contamination, design ultra-compact lasers and spintronic computer memory and find ways to use bark as a construction material.
While many people may think satellites are responsible for telecommunications as we know it, the global subsea cable network actually carries more than 99% of the internet traffic between continents. Because of their marginal carbon footprint, subsea cables have often been excluded from internet sustainability studies, yet they have the most potential for providing sustainable communications infrastructure.
In late January, seven engineers from the Berkeley Seismological Laboratory helicoptered into the Farallon Islands, a windswept, nearly treeless chain of islands 30 miles off San Francisco's Golden Gate, on an eight-day mission to upgrade one of the lab’s most remote — yet most critical — seismic stations.
In her many years of fieldwork in rural central India, UC Berkeley Anthropology Professor Aarti Sethi pondered what could make a real difference in the lives of people there.
Serving nearly two-thirds of the undergraduates on campus, the College of Letters & Science (L&S) stands as the cornerstone of undergraduate excellence at UC Berkeley.
A UC Berkeley-led study revealed that disparities in the share of Black and Latino students admitted to America’s elite colleges and universities have endured and even widened over the last 40 years.
Will Sieving didn’t expect to discover something new in the text of a 2,000-year-old fragment of papyrus, especially one that had been pored over by scholars for the better part of a century.
Sylvie Thode is a graduate student for the English department, whose work focuses on gender and sexuality studies, textual criticism, and drama.
UC Berkeley will refurbish the Bancroft Dance Studio thanks to a generous gift by Daniel Hitchcock ’69, a mathematics and physics alum. Hitchcock provided the crucial funding to make the studio space safer and more accessible. The enhancements will include re-sanded floors, repaired windows, and a new water filtration system.
UC Berkeley Anthropology Professor James Holston and Public Health immunologist Dr. Josefina Coloma have been awarded a $3.1 million, 5-year grant from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease of the National Institutes of Health to combate dengue virus in Peru.
The UC Berkeley Women in Leadership Circle (WILC) is a vibrant and supportive community committed to empowering alumnae of Cal who are in leadership roles across various sectors. At the heart of WILC's mission are the core values of democracy, equity, inclusion, mentorship, and networking. Through monthly activities, workshops, and networking events, WILC fosters both personal and professional growth, encouraging members to reach new heights.
In 1968, when Harry Edwards was working toward his sociology Ph.D. at Cornell University, he also witnessed the crescendo of one of the most politically violent eras since the Civil War. Racists and government authorities were gunning down prominent Black activists. Churches were being firebombed.
As a sign of the University of California, Berkeley's ability to attract the most promising early-career researchers, nine young assistant professors have been named 2024 Sloan Research Fellows, the largest number from any institution.
The recent approval of a CRISPR-Cas9 therapy for sickle cell disease demonstrates that gene editing tools can do a superb job knocking out genes to cure hereditary disease. But it's still not possible to insert whole genes into the human genome to substitute for defective or deleterious genes.
A new technique that employs a retrotransposon from birds to insert genes into the genome holds more promise for gene therapy, since it inserts genes into a "safe harbor" in the human genome where the insertion won't disrupt essential genes or lead to cancer.
On January 22, 2024, Chancellor Carol Christ hosted a reception at University House honoring 2023 Prytanean Faculty Enrichment Award recipient Samantha Lewis, Assistant Professor of Cell Biology, Development and Physiology. Lewis received the Prytanean Faculty Enrichment Award and $35,000 grant in recognition of outstanding scholarship, teaching, mentoring, and service to UC Berkeley.
Many neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases, are characterized by the accumulation of protein clumps, or aggregates, in the brain, which has led scientists to assume that the protein tangles kill brain cells. The search for treatments that break up and remove these tangled proteins has had little success, however.
Photographer Brandon Sánchez Mejia, whose cohort is part of UC Berkeley's Department of Art Practice's 100th year, showcased his senior thesis project, "A Masculine Vulnerability," in the campus's Worth Ryder Art Gallery last semester.
The Women in Leadership Club (WILC) at UC Berkeley is a forerunner in empowering the next generation of female leaders. Established in 2019 to bridge the gender gap in leadership roles, WILC provides a dynamic platform for ambitious women to hone their leadership skills, foster professional growth, and advocate for gender equality across various industries.
Gül Dölen became a scientist because she loved solving puzzles that drew on neuroscience, medicine, biology and philosophy. But a decade ago, her spirits were waning, and a string of funding rejections brought her lab to the brink of folding.
Then came the octopuses, all seven of them, and a curiosity-driven experiment.
The Arts Research Center—a think tank for the arts at UC Berkeley—will gather 19 fellows chosen to participate in the 2023 Spring/Fall Poetry & the Senses program for a series of readings, conversations, and workshops, hosted at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, and led by the year's faci
For our next interview, I will be speaking with Professor Atreyee Gupta of the History of Art Department. Professor Gupta’s area of focus is on Global Modernism, and Modern and Contemporary South and Southeast Asian art.
I am a third-year Political Science major, and I speak Spanish and English. Spanish is my first language, and I started speaking English once I started grade school. I also just completed my first year of Italian here at Berkeley.
UC Berkeley Geography Professor Emeritus Michael J. Watts was recently awarded the prestigious Ester Boserup Prize for his outstanding contributions to the field of development research. The Copenhagen Centre for Development Research, a leading institution known for its interdisciplinary approach, awarded the prize to Watts for his substantial contributions to the understanding of development studies.
Most approved gene therapies today, including those involving CRISPR-Cas9, work their magic on cells removed from the body, after which the edited cells are returned to the patient.
This technique is ideal for targeting blood cells and is currently the method employed in newly approved CRISPR gene therapies for blood diseases like sickle cell anemia, in which edited blood cells are reinfused in patients after their bone marrow has been destroyed by chemotherapy.
The evidence that Homo sapiens and Homo neanderthalensis lived side by side is consistent with genomic evidence that the two species occasionally interbred. It also feeds the suspicion that the invasion of Europe and Asia by modern humans some 50,000 years ago helped drive Neanderthals, which had occupied the area for more than 500,000 years, to extinction.
As the battle to control what students read continues in K-12 schools across the country, policies backed by U.S. legislators have contributed to a recent rise in the banning of books that include the history and experiences of people of color.
The UC Berkeley Women in Leadership Circle (WILC) is a community of Cal alumnae leaders fostering support and growth among its members since WILC's inception in 2019. With over 75 members from fields as varied as law, tech, medicine, and government, WILC is dedicated to monthly engagements that enrich professional and personal development. The Circle is committed to advancing democracy, equity, inclusion, mentorship, and networking.
"Yeah, I proved Hawking wrong," says Geoff Penington, assistant professor of physics at UC Berkeley. That got him an early career award from the American Physical Society. Check out this video about his work on the entropy of a black hole.
The temperate climate of the San Francisco Bay Area has always attracted immigrants — animals and humans — that have had unpredictable impacts on those already living in the area.
For the bay's Savannah sparrow, a subspecies that lives in salty tidal marshes, increased immigration of its inland cousins over the past century has definitely been bad news.
Children and adults with rare, deadly genetic diseases have fresh hope for curative therapies, thanks to a new collaboration between the Innovative Genomics Institute (IGI) and Danaher Corporation, a global life sciences and diagnostics innovator.
The new Danaher-IGI Beacon for CRISPR Cures center will use genome editing to address potentially hundreds of diseases, including rare genetic disorders that have no cure. The goal is to ensure treatments can be developed and brought to patients more quickly and efficiently.
With so much brilliance at UC Berkeley — from headline-grabbing research to stellar faculty members across disciplines — it’s impossible for undergraduates, many scouting for their academic passions, to sample it all while on campus.
One of the most explosive volcanic eruptions ever witnessed by humans took place 3,600 years ago, around 1,600 B.C.E., off the island of Santorini in the Eastern Mediterranean.
On February 28, the Berkeley Language Center and the Language and AI working group at the Townsend Center for the Humanities will be hosting a half-day conference Language and AI: Generating Interdisciplinary Connections and Possibilities(link is external).
The unique underwater kelp forests that line the Pacific Coast support a varied ecosystem that was thought to have evolved along with the kelp over the past 14 million years.
But a new study shows that kelp flourished off the Northwest Coast more than 32 million years ago, long before the appearance of modern groups of marine mammals, sea urchins, birds and bivalves that today call the forests home.
Sebastian Cahill, class of '23, is a recent graduate of UC Berkeley, where he received a B.A. in English and Comparative Literature. Currently, he works as a news reporter for Business Insider. He hopes to return to graduate school in the coming years to do a Ph.D.
We may be able to find out what happens to matter that falls into a black hole, something previously thought impossible. This is because some parts of a black hole’s interior, called “islands”, may actually poke far enough outside the hole for us to measure them. If we can do this, then Stephen Hawking’s long-standing black hole paradox might finally be resolved.
SAN ANTONIO, TX (10 Jan 2024) – The American Economic Association (AEA) bestowed its Award for Outstanding Achievement in Diversity and Inclusion to the Center for Effective Global Action (CEGA), a research hub at the University of California, Berkeley that generates evidence decision-makers use to reduce global poverty.
Dear Friends of The Division of Biological Sciences,
I am excited to announce that UC Berkeley’s Division of Biological Sciences is launching its first new department in more than three decades. The Department of Neuroscience will create a holistic center for students and researchers to examine the brain and the rest of the nervous system.
With this move, we will be able to begin accepting undergraduate students into a new neuroscience major. We are also planning to expand our cluster of graduate students.
Neuroscience is in a historic era of major discovery, according to Dan Feldman, a professor of neurobiology at UC Berkeley.
The late History Professor Natalie Zemon Davis, who passed away this year, taught at UC Berkeley for six years. But in this short period of time, she made a lasting impact on many scholars. “In particular, for the students with whom she interacted,” says a Berkeley History alum, who recently donated seed money to start an endowment in Professor Davis’ name.
Researchers led by a University of California, Berkeley, comparative psychologist have found that great apes and chimpanzees, our closest living relatives, can recognize groupmates they haven't seen in over two decades — evide
Why do we leave Santa a cookie to eat the night before Christmas? UC Berkeley professor Jeroen Dewulf says we can thank the Dutch for that.
The Fifth National Climate Assessment, whose authors include UC Berkeley Georgraphy Professor Tianna Bruno, is the U.S. Government’s preeminent report on climate change impacts, risks and responses.
Berkeley Social Sciences alumnus Peihang “Marshall” Li, who recently graduated with a degree in political economy and Vishwaa Sofat, a senior double majoring in political science and science, technology and society, have been named as 2024–2025 Schwarzman Scholars. They will be heading to Tsinghua University in Beijing in Fall 2024 to enroll in a fully funded one-year M.A.
In Berkeley Talks episode 186, a panel of UC Berkeley scholars from the College of Letters and Science discusses the transformative potential of artificial intelligence in academia — and the questions and challenges it requires universities and other social institutions to confront.
It’s almost unheard of for a first-year college student to curate an exhibition at a prestigious art institution. Yet, on a recent December afternoon, three new undergraduates at UC Berkeley — Raena Chan, Emma Cusimano and Caitlyn Liao — guided visitors around Five Tables of Art & Climate Change, a one-day pop-up show they helped curate at the campus’s Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA).
Astronomy students who grew up building telescopes for backyard stargazing sessions could hardly find a better instructor than Jessica Lu. An associate professor in the Department of Astronomy, Lu studies black holes and helps design adaptive optics that sharpen images taken with major telescopes like the one at the Keck Observatory in Hawai‘i.
This year, Lu began her first stint as astronomy chair, a role she accepted with surprise.
Peihang "Marshall" Li ('23, Political Economy) and Vishwaa Sofat ('24, Political Science and Science, Technology & Society) have been named as 2024–2025 Schwarzman Scholars and will be heading to Tsinghua University in Beijing in Fall 2024 to enroll in a fully fund
Julia Schaletzky is executive director of the Center for Emerging and Neglected Diseases, Drug Discovery Center, at UC Berkeley, which co-founded the Alliance of Global Health and Science several years ago to integrate research at UC Berkeley with Makerere University in Uganda.
Two UC Berkeley Department of Psychology researchers recently published a commentary that provided insights into the way we understand and define gender.
The shimmering green, red and purple curtains of the northern and southern lights — the auroras — may be the best-known phenomena lighting up the nighttime sky, but the most mysterious are the mauve and white streaks called Steve and their frequent companion, a glowing green "picket fence."
How did a class about the history of hand-printed books get so popular?
Because it leaves an impression.
In the 1920s, when football fans first packed California Memorial Stadium, thousands of people also lined the Oakland Estuary, eager to spectate the campus's original sport.
Like many students, Michelle Tran entered college unsure of what path she wanted to pursue academically and professionally. When she learned more about the Cognitive Science Program at Berkeley Social Sciences, she realized it would be the perfect opportunity to explore a variety of interdisciplinary fields. Now, as a third-year student at UC Berkeley, Michelle’s journey with Cognitive Science has nurtured her passion for information science, human-computer interaction and human-centered design technology.
Ethnic Studies student Angelica Garcia shares her story of why studying at Berkeley Social Sciences is so unique.
Formaldehyde, a toxin and carcinogen found in construction materials, carpets, car exhaust, cigarette smoke and even permanent press clothing, turns out to play an important role in the body — one that may explain why the chemical causes cancer.
In this interview, David Henkin recalls his experience collecting and conducting research for his book, The Week: A History of the Unnatural Rhythms That Made Us Who We Are. Henkin's book explores the emergence of the "natural" ordering of weeks, revealing how our current devotion to the weekly rhythms emerged during the first half of the nineteenth century in the United States.
In the last several years, a cult industrial complex has emerged to capitalize on Americans’ fascination with groups such as Jonestown, the Manson Family, the Branch Davidians, and the Rajneeshpuram community in Wasco County, Ore., argues UC Berkeley professor Poulomi Saha. But in her highly sought-after class called Cults in Popular Culture, they emphasize that it’s important to look beyond the sensational examples and recognize how cult-like behavior shows up in many facets of our lives and society.
Do a quick review of the top news for any day in the past 10 years and you’ll likely find that disinformation — barely disguised and often overt — has been a constant, powerful driver of political and social conflict in the U.S. and worldwide.
Dozens of documentaries about cults are currently available on Netflix, Hulu, and Max, along with countless podcasts on Spotify, Apple, and other platforms. What's driving this trend? What's behind our collective fascination with communities and spiritualities that offer total belonging and total enthrallment?
Phi Beta Kappa Chapter Alpha of California is celebrating the 125th anniversary of its charter with two noteworthy initiatives: a public lecture series and the compilation of an Honor Roll of members of Phi Beta Kappa among faculty, staff, and graduate students.
Andrew F. Jones(link is external), Louis B. Agassiz Professor in Chinese, teaches modern Chinese literature and media culture.
An intense international effort to improve the resolution of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) for studying the human brain has culminated in an ultra-high resolution 7 Tesla scanner that records up to 10 times more detail than current 7T scanners and over 50 times more detail than current 3T scanners, the mainstay of most hospitals.
The dramatically improved resolution means that scientists can see functional MRI (fMRI) features 0.4 millimeters across, compared to the 2 or 3 millimeters typical of today's standard 3T fMRIs.
Dear friends,
It is with deep sadness that I share news of the death of John L. Heilbron, Professor Emeritus of History of Science and former Vice Chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley. John passed away in Padua, Italy, on Sunday morning, November 5, 2023, at the age of 89.
On November 15, the University of California, Berkeley and Harvard University announced a new, collaborative initiative that will expand psychedelic research across the arts, humanities and social sciences. Called “Psychedelics in Society and Culture,” the joint effort between the nation’s foremost public and private universities will foster new ways of thinking and partnering to answer some of the most pressing and intriguing questions surrounding psychedelics and society.
Most birds that flit through dense, leafy forests have a strategy for maneuvering through tight windows in the vegetation — they bend their wings at the wrist or elbow and barrel through.
Carolyn Smith is a new assistant professor of anthropology at UC Berkeley and an enrolled descendant of the Karuk tribe. Her life’s work forever changed years ago after a trip to the Klamath River.
UC Berkeley Professor Dave Wahl and Quaternary Paleoecology Lab researcher Marie Champagne co-authored a new paper in Science titled "Independent age estimates resolve the controversy of ancient human footprints at White Sands," which rewrites the history of humans in the
Heidi Kühn is the Founder and CEO of Roots of Peace. She founded the humanitarian non-profit organization with a vision of turning Mines to Vines. After winning her own battle with cancer, Kühn was inspired to remove an insidious ‘cancer of the earth’—replacing remnants of war with bountiful farmland worldwide. Since 1997, her farmer-focused development model that restores farmland, food security, livelihoods and resilience after devastating conflicts has transformed war-torn lands worldwide.
UC Berkeley’s Council on Advising and Student Services and awards planning committee recently announced the recipients of the 2023 Excellence in Advising & Student Services Awards, which recognize the recipients' positive and innovative impacts on student learning, engagement, and belonging on the Berkeley campus.
Svetlana Jitomirskaya, UC Berkeley professor of mathematics, has been awarded the American Academy of Sciences and Letters' inaugural 2023 Barry Prize for Distinguished Intellectual Achievement.
Samantha Lewis, Ph.D., UC Berkeley assistant professor in cell biology, development, and physiology, has been honored with a $500,000 grant from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI)
The Prytanean Honor Society Alumnae Board recently announced the selection of Dr. Samantha C. Lewis, UC Berkeley assistant professor of cell biology, development and physiology, as the recipient of the 2023 Prytanean Faculty Enrichment Award, along with a $35,000 grant.
Michal I. Shuldman has returned to her alma mater here in Integrative Biology Department at UC Berkeley. She began her role as Assistant Teaching Professor in July 2023. As a graduate student in the Dawson Lab, she examined the influence of ecotypic variation in response to heatwaves in California native shrubs. She has expertise in plant ecology, plant ecophysiology, soil science, and stable isotopes.
As an evolutionary biologist, Noah Whiteman knows that many chemicals humans abuse — cocaine, heroin, caffeine, alcohol — originated in the continual arms race between plants, fungi or microbes and the animals that want to eat them.
Congratulations to assistant professors Lilla Balint (German), Fumi Okiji (Rhetoric), and Nathaniel Wolfson (Spanish and Portuguese) on being named 2023 Hellman Fellows(link is external)!
This semester we were pleased to welcome Cathy Park Hong to the UC Berkeley Department of English as Professor and Class of 1936 First Chair in the College of Letters and Science. We spoke to her about poetry, AI and UC Berkeley as an intellectual homecoming.
The Berkeley Language Center (BLC) announced that it received a $150,000 grant from the Department of Education’s International Research and Studies Program to develop instructional materials on critically utilizing machine translation technology in language acquisition.
Russian social science professors Ilya Matveev and Ilya Budraitskis, renowned for their expertise on authoritarianism, fled their country after Russia invaded Ukraine. A faculty and staff coalition helped give them a safe harbor at UC Berkeley.
The campus's first social justice theater professor, Timmia Hearn DeRoy, talks about how Trinidad and Tobago’s Carnival practice, rooted in emancipation, drives her work today. Read a transcript of Berkeley Voices episode 114: 'Theater as power: New professor brings Caribbean performance practice to Berkeley.'
Chancellor Carol Christ sent to the following message to the Berkeley campus community Thursday afternoon.
UC Berkeley Economics Professor Emmanuel Saez has been awarded the 2023 Wihuri International Prize for his work on specializing in tax policy and economic inequality, the Wihuri International Prizes Fund announced on Monday.
The standard story of the peopling of the Americas has Asians migrating across a land bridge into Alaska some 14,000 years ago, after Ice Age glaciers melted back, and gradually spreading southward across a land never before occupied by humankind.
But the claim in 2021 that human footprints discovered in mud in what is now New Mexico were between 23,000 and 21,000 years old turned that theory on its head.
This video delves into the acclaimed teaching practices of Professor Alexander Paulin: a mathematics professor at UC Berkeley. With a “5/5” rating on RateMyProfessor and accolades that include teaching awards from UC Berkeley and The Daily Californian editorial board, we explore the factors that have contributed his widespread popularity and success of in teachings.
Launched in 2003, Disability Studies, though formally housed in the Division of Undergraduate Studies, is now present in departments across Berkeley, from art practice to linguistics to sociology.
When Ann Wai-Yee Kwong entered UC Berkeley as a student, she had never heard of disability studies, an interdisciplinary field that examines the social structures and cultural depictions that shape — and are shaped by — the experiences of people with disabilities.
Ruixiang Zhang, Assistant Professor, University of California, Berkeley, USA will be awarded with the 2023 SASTRA Ramanujan Prize for his outstanding contributions in mathematics.
The culture and spirit of innovation at UC Berkeley throughout history can be seen in the changemakers — the Berkeley students, researchers, entrepreneurs, faculty members and alumni — who have helped in countless ways to improve our lives and our world.
I speak English, Hindi, French, Korean, Catalan, German, and Italian, and I can read Latin and Old French. Out of these, the languages I have studied at Berkeley are Latin, Old French, Catalan, German, and Italian. I highly recommend all of these classes.
A Q&A with Hannah Larson, a recipient of the 2024 Maryam Mirzakhani New Frontiers Prize
On September 19, the HHMI Hanna H. Gray Fellows Program awarded fellowships to 25 early-career scientists. Each fellow receives up to $1.5 million in support for up to eight years.
UC Berkeley Economics professors Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman have been named 2023 Citation Laureates, Clarivate and its Institute for Scientific Information announced on Tuesday. This distinction recognizes that both Saez and Zucman are among the world's top economists whose work is considered to be of Nobel-prize class.
"I feel very honored to be in the role of ASUC president," said Sydney Roberts, a fourth-year student from Long Beach who is double-majoring in political science and African American studies. "My first goal ... is to increase students' sense of belonging, especially students who have historically felt excluded from higher education."
In partnership with On the Same Page(link is external), the Division of Arts & Humanities sponsored a student essay and video contest.
The Breakthrough Foundation announced its 2024 Laureates on September 14, recognizing two Berkeley researchers affiliated with the Division of Mathematical and Physical Sciences: Hannah Larson and John Cardy.
UC Berkeley CRISPR pioneer Jennifer Doudna is one of 60 Nobel Prize winners captured by renowned German photographer Herlinde Koelbl in striking black and white portraits that spotlight on the palms of the scientists' hands their discoveries and insights.
Summer camp is a rite of passage for many kids in the United States. Swimming. Arts and crafts. Long conversations in the bunkhouse. And maybe even some precious memories to carry with you for a lifetime.
For the campers and counselors at Camp Jened that experience meant even more. Jened was a sleepaway camp for people with disabilities that originally operated in upstate New York from 1951 to 1977. Amid the modest buildings and overgrown fields, the young people encountered something radical: a world that was built to include them, rather than ignore them.
2023 Recipient: Xuebiao Yao, University of Science and Technology of China, Cell Dynamics
“Eggtooth,” Jesse Nathan’s debut poetry collection, is alert to the wonderful and terrible things that happen beneath our feet.
In a poem titled “In a Churchyard After Dark, with Ruth,” friends “lounge in a burr oak’s buttress-root couch.” In “Between States,” the “grass sea” of the 19th century Midwest is stolen from Indigenous Americans. In “Boy With Thorns,” a locust tree’s spike — “evolved to ward off long gone / mammoths” — pierces “my plantar fascia’s rivers / of tissue.”
Gary Firestone, a professor of the Graduate School Division of Cell Biology, celebrated his retirement in July 2023. Dr. Firestone originally joined the Department of Physiology & Anatomy at UC Berkeley in 1983, later becoming a member of Molecular and Cell Biology (MCB) when the department was established in 1989. Dr.
California voters are broadly opposed to paying the state’s Black residents to compensate for the longstanding harms of slavery, with opposition extending across party lines, according to a new poll released by the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies.
The department of East Asian Languages and Cultures(link is external) (EALC) is excited to announce a new major in East Asian Humanities. "This major will open doors," says Chair Robert Ashmore.
Berkeley Social Sciences recently announced the appointments of 11 new department chairs and directors. They include:
It doesn’t take long for a conversation about artificial intelligence to take a dark turn.
There is a reason why UC Berkeley consistently ranks as one of the top universities for entrepreneurship. The 2023 Spark Award recipients are a prime example of the power of breakthrough research combined with an entrepreneurial campus ecosystem.
This year, the Spark Award call expanded to include UC San Francisco faculty who are collaborating with UC Berkeley faculty, springing forth a robust group of health tech innovators who are ready to take on today’s challenges.
Marié Abe, Department of Music: Marié Abe joins the division as an associate professor in the Department of Music and focuses on the intersection between improvisation and composition.
An undergraduate-only literary journal, scholarships for sub-Saharan refugees, the debut of two undergraduate majors, centennials for California Memorial Stadium and the Department of Art Practice, a wider audience for Berkeley’s African language courses, and automated devices that dispense free games and mini manicures are among what’s new at UC Berkeley as fall semester 2023 gets underway.
The Henry Wheeler Center for Emerging and Neglected Diseases (CEND) is co-hosting a dynamic art show featuring captivating portraits of 60 groundbreaking Nobel Prize winners and scientists, including UC Berkeley's Jennifer Doudna:
The biological sciences, encompassing fields from genetics and ecology to microbiology and bioinformatics, have long been the frontier of understanding life’s intricacies. What is now emerging as an equally crucial aspect is the emphasis on inclusivity within these scientific pursuits. By fostering diverse voices, perspectives, and talents, the biological sciences are not only enriching its intellectual landscape but also embracing the concept that innovation thrives in environments where everyone’s voice is heard and valued.
All incoming UC Berkeley students watched Crip Camp, a documentary about a summer camp in New York's Catskill Mountains, as part of the program On the Same Page.
It was summertime in the early 1970s in New York City. Fifteen-year-old Jim LeBrecht boarded a school bus headed for the Catskill Mountains, home to Camp Jened, a summer camp for people with disabilities. As the bus approached the camp, he peered out the window at the warm and raucous group below.
Launch a free online class about the science and history of hallucinogenics? Check.
Draw thousands of readers to The Microdose newsletter for the latest on psychedelics research, policy and culture? Check.
UC Berkeley researchers launched a pioneering interdisciplinary training program this week that will blend criminal justice and computer science in ways that experts say will help reduce long-standing, systemic inequities in the criminal legal system.
The Department of Art Practice within the Division of Arts & Humanities is celebrating its 100th anniversary. The department’s two-year MFA program, which supports on average a dozen graduate students, is also welcoming its 100th MFA class this fall with increased resources for students.
UC Berkeley History Professor Christine Philliou has been awarded a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) for a 3-year research project to create a comprehensive, public-facing website to build new types of knowledge and raise public awareness about Istanbul and its constituent Orthodox Christian communities in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Two groundbreaking research papers by UC Berkeley Anthropology Professor Andrew Wooyoung Kim reveal transformative insights into mental health, focusing on the intergenerational effects of mental well-being in Uganda and resilient coping mechanisms during the COVID-19 pandemic in metro Johannesburg, South Africa.
The largest storm in the solar system, a 10,000-mile-wide anticyclone called the Great Red Spot, has decorated Jupiter's surface for hundreds of years.
A new study now shows that Saturn — though much blander and less colorful than Jupiter — also has long-lasting megastorms with impacts deep in the atmosphere that persist for centuries.
Sharon Mueller, a longtime director of advising, has been appointed the inaugural assistant dean of advising in the College of Letters & Science (L&S). Mueller begins her service on August 1, 2023.
With its sensitive infrared cameras and high-resolution spectrometer, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is revealing new secrets of Jupiter’s Galilean satellites, in particular Ganymede, the largest moon, and Io, the most volcanically active.
In two separate publications, astronomers who are part of JWST’s Early Release Science program report the first detection of hydrogen peroxide on Ganymede and sulfurous fumes on Io, both the result of Jupiter’s domineering influence.
Alison Gopnik, a University of California, Berkeley, psychology professor whose research has transformed our understanding of how children learn and what they can teach us about ourselves, is
Established in July 2013, the California Government Operations Agency (GovOps) is a nerve center of state government, tasked with supporting all of California’s public agencies to streamline operations, promote efficiency, and foster collaboration across diverse departments.
The story behind the summer blockbuster movie Oppenheimer, which opens across the nation on Friday, July 21, began at the University of California, Berkeley.
A 25-year-old J. Robert Oppenheimer arrived at UC Berkeley in fall 1929 as an assistant professor, and over the next dozen years established one of the greatest schools of theoretical physics in the U.S. — one that continues to this day. He made UC Berkeley’s physics department the center of American thought about the new field of quantum mechanics and how to apply it to atoms, nuclei and even neutron stars.
Scientists have devised a new technique for finding and vetting possible radio signals from other civilizations in our galaxy — a major advance in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) that will significantly boost confidence in any future detection of alien life.
Groundbreaking research from UC Berkeley’s Department of Psychology is shifting the understanding of human decision-making processes by highlighting the importance of goal-oriented rewards. Conducted by Berkeley Psychology Professor Anne Collins and Berkeley Psychology doctoral student Gaia Molinaro, the study suggests that the value people attribute to outcomes is subjective, and heavily influenced by their personal goals and the context of the decision.
Researchers have known that a lack of quality sleep can increase a person’s risk of diabetes. What has remained a mystery, however, is why.
Now, new findings from a team of sleep scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, are closer to an answer. The researchers have uncovered a potential mechanism in humans that explains how and why deep-sleep brain waves at night are able to regulate the body’s sensitivity to insulin, which in turn improves blood sugar control the next day.
Rhea Senthil Kumar did not have prior research experience at UC Berkeley before applying to the Undergraduate Research Apprenticeship Program, or URAP, during her freshman year. Though she did have a love for learning; she knew that the space sciences fascinated her.
Like Senthil Kumar, Karoline Almeida knew she wanted to pursue research. As a transfer student, she said she was introduced to URAP through her counselors whilst looking for opportunities to explore politics and law.
BERKELEY, Calif. — Jessi Fernandez joined a street gang at 13. By his 20s, he had been shot at more times than he could count. He got busted for methamphetamine possession and spent time in Los Angeles County jail for carrying a loaded gun. Yet the persistent danger didn’t wash away a street kid’s dream — that he would get rich as a drug kingpin, then turn legit.
In support of queer doctoral economics students nationwide, Berkeley Social Sciences recently hosted the inaugural American Economic Association Queer Economics Ph.D. Student Mentoring Conference.
In his new book In the Shadows of the Big House: Twenty-First-Century Antebellum Slave Cabins and Heritage Tourism in Louisiana (Univ. Press of Mississippi, 2023), UC Berkeley African American Studies Professor Stephen Small sheds light on over 60 heritage sites in Louisiana's former slave plantations. Amid debates about Confederate monument removal, Small's work focuses on the less obvious remnants of slavery throughout the region.
The universe is humming with gravitational radiation — a very low-frequency rumble that rhythmically stretches and compresses spacetime and the matter embedded in it.
Public education in the United States is profoundly unequal. Many public school systems are highly dependent on local revenues generated by local property taxes, meaning that areas with higher home values have better-funded schools. Wealthier people self-sort into areas with higher property values and better schools, while poorer communities have poorly funded schools. As a result, policymakers have asked: how can we solve the problem of inequality among school districts?
Sex work is considered one of the oldest professions in history. But in contemporary American culture, it is still a taboo topic. And due to the criminalization and stigma that surrounds the industry, the lives and stories of sex workers often get lost and devalued.
Knowledge may be power. But what if the information that leads to that knowledge is wrong?
To Celeste Kidd, assistant professor of psychology at UC Berkeley, the answer is simple: It’s dangerous and perhaps the most concerning aspect of generative AI’s rapid expansion.
A strange and mysterious plant is on the rampage, causing people to break out in itchy purple blotches!
The premise of a new sci-fi movie or dystopian video game?
From the 20-foot-long jawbones of the filter-feeding blue whale to the short, but bone-crushing, jaws of the hyena and the delicate chin bones of a human, the pair of lower jawbones characteristic of mammals have evolved with amazing variation.
But at first glance, having a single bone on each side of the head — which creates a stiff lower jaw, or mandible — doesn’t appear to give mammals an advantage over other vertebrates, which have at least two and as many as 11 bones comprising each side of the lower jaw.
You may not realize it, but that backyard hummingbird feeder filled with sugar water is a natural experiment in fermentation — yeast settle in and turn some of the sugar into alcohol.
The same is true of nectar-filled flowers, which are an ideal gathering place for yeast — a type of fungus — and for bacteria that metabolize sugar and produce ethanol.
Cal classmates, faculty, family, and others share what makes John Mather Ph.D. ’74 — Physics Nobelist and senior astrophysicist at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center — so very special.
Despite steady improvements in quantum computers, they’re still noisy and error prone, which leads to questionable or wrong answers. Scientists predict that they won’t truly outcompete today’s “classical” supercomputers for at least five or 10 years, until researchers can adequately correct the errors that bedevil entangled quantum bits, or qubits.
But a new study shows that, even lacking good error correction, there are ways to mitigate errors that could make quantum computers useful today.
UC Berkeley’s Division of Biological Sciences hosted a series of immersive outings to expose alumni, supporters, and friends to some of Berkeley’s top researchers and most memorable research subjects, including rare wildlife, famous brain samples, fluorescent worms, and experimental produce.
Sandra Eder is a history professor at UC Berkeley. In 2022, she wrote How the Clinic Made Gender: The Medical History of a Transformative Idea, a book that explores the history of how the concept of gender emerged out of the medical sector and influenced society. Eder was interviewed during Pride Month 2023 as issues surrounding gender expression and identity were at the forefront of public discussion.
Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost Ben Hermalin shared the following announcement on May 31, 2023:
Dear Colleagues,
After what will be eight years of service, including one year as interim dean, Michael Botchan will be stepping down as the Dean of the Division of Biological Sciences next summer on June 30, 2024.
Eva Nogales, a senior faculty scientist in Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s (Berkeley Lab) Biosciences Area, has won the 2023 Shaw Prize in Life Science and
UC Berkeley Social Sciences Associate Dean Khatharya Um was recently named a laureate of the distinguished
The campuswide spring ceremony took place on May 13, 2023, at the California Memorial Stadium. UC Berkeley alumnus and co-founder of Apple Inc. Steve Wozniak gave this year's keynote address.
If you look at enough dinosaur fossils, you’ll see that their skulls sport an amazing variety of bony ornaments, ranging from the horns of Triceratops and the mohawk-like crests of hadrosaurs to the bumps and knobs covering the head of Tyrannosaurus rex.
The year was 2020, just a few weeks before the presidential election, when Republican gubernatorial candidate Spencer Cox and Democratic opponent Chris Peterson teamed up to make an unconventional campaign ad.
Benjamin Coleman has always loved being on a team.
The UC Berkeley senior, one of more than 10,000 graduating students walking in Saturday’s commencement ceremony, grew up in Calgary, Canada. At age 5, he joined his first hockey team, the Glenlake Hawks. He played with the same teammates until he graduated from high school. Although he played a lot of other sports growing up — badminton, soccer, skiing, swimming — hockey was his favorite.
Each year, nine seniors in the Department of Art Practice are selected to receive an honors studio for their final semester. Each student receives their own studio space with 24/7 access. The studio space allows students to work on longer-term projects and explore new mediums alongside their cohort. Arts & Humanities had the opportunity to interview three of the nine students in this year's honors studios as they completed their final projects for Professor Stephanie Syjuco's Art + Archive class. Jacob Li Rosenberg is a multi-media artist who is graduating this spring.
There are super-commuters who drive for hours in bumper-to-bumper traffic. Living far from where they work or go to school, they plan their lives around rush hours and delays.
Then, there’s Hatcher Parnell.
Twice a week, Parnell rises before 5 a.m. in Whittier, about 25 miles east of downtown Los Angeles. He takes a quick shower, hops in his car and drives 35 minutes to the Long Beach airport. He breezes through TSA precheck and, with coveted “A group” boarding status, claims a seat near the front of the morning Southwest Airlines flight bound for Oakland.
The UC Berkeley Class of 2023 may be known to history as the COVID class — the students’ first year on campus was cut short by the pandemic, and the virus roiled their lives, wave after wave.
But for University Medal winner Catherine Vera, and for finalists Aaron P. Hill, Rohith Sajith, Andrea Sandoval and Rosie Ward, the pandemic was just one challenge on an often profound voyage of discovery.
When Jeff Nathan (BA 2013, MCB) received his undergraduate degree with a concentration in immunology and pathogenesis, he assumed he’d pursue a predictable path in research or medicine. A decade later, he’s carved out a very different kind of career for himself: as an acquisition professional for the U.S. Department of Defense.
In the afternoon sunshine at the storied Greek Theatre, more than 700 students from UC Berkeley’s Department of Economics gathered this week for their commencement. The momentous occasion marked not just the end of their academic journey, but also the beginning of their new roles in the academic, public and private sectors. Before receiving their degrees, they heard words of encouragement and inspiration from Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, a distinguished Berkeley alumna who received her Ph.D. in economics.
Susan Marqusee, a biophysical chemist who headed the UC Berkeley arm of the California Institute of Quantitative Biosciences (QB3) for 10 years, until 2020, has been chosen to lead the Directorate for Biological Sciences of the National Science Foundation (NSF) — the major funder of basic life sciences research in the United States.
With each passing year, more undergraduate and graduate students in the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology (MCB) are choosing to pursue professions in the biotech industry, and MCB’s research has increasingly found its way into clinical applications. In response to these trends, in July 2023 the department will launch a new division, Molecular Therapeutics (MTx), to better prepare students for careers in biotechnology and to support Berkeley’s science with the potential to develop new therapeutic modalities.
UC Berkeley is renowned for its vast array of engaging and diverse academic offerings, but for new students, the task of selecting the right courses can be overwhelming. With this in mind, L&S has designed an innovative new program launching in fall 2023: L&S First-Year Pathways. L&S Pathways will guide first-year undergraduate students in the College of Letters & Science through their breadth requirements while introducing aspects of community and thematic learning.
UC Berkeley African American Studies Professor Leigh Raiford and Berkeley Law Professor Saira Mohamed are among the 26 win
The Undergraduate Research Apprentice Program (URAP) has been selected to receive the2023 Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Education.
UC Berkeley alumnus Jefferson Cowie, an American historian and scholar, was awarded the 2023 Pulitzer Prize in the history category on Monday, May 8, for his book Freedom’s Dominion: A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power.
Hua Hsu, who graduated from UC Berkeley in 1999, is a 2023 Pulitzer Prize winner in the category of memoir or autobiography for his book, Stay True, Columbia University announced Monday, May 8, on the recommendation of the Pulitzer Pr
As commencement season kicks off across the U.S., UC Berkeley’s Department of African American Studies is preparing to host the annual Black Graduation ceremony on May 20, 2023, at Zellerbach Hall. Black Grad, as it is affectionately called, honors and celebrates Black-, African-, and African American-identifying students upon completion of their undergraduate, master’s, Ph.D., J.D., and professional degree programs from departments all over campus. Black Grad is more than just a ceremony; it is a celebration of resilience, perseverance, and achievement.
Researchers from the University of California, Berkeley have uncovered a significant breakthrough in the fight against Alzheimer's disease. According to their latest study, deep sleep can help protect against memory loss in older adults who are at a heightened risk of developing the disease. The researchers found that deep, non-REM slow-wave sleep can act as a "cognitive reserve factor" that may increase resilience against a protein called beta-amyloid, which is linked to memory loss caused by dementia.
This summer, the Ethnic Studies Department is partnering with the AC Center and the Berkeley History-Social Science Project to run a series of workshops for high school teachers preparing to offer Ethnic Studies classes. Called the High School Ethnic Studies Initiative, the series will be running from June 12 to 16 and will bring over 25 teachers to Berkeley, to support them in building from the wealth of insight and resources Berkeley Ethnic Studies has to offer.
Join us in congratulating Maurice Obstfeld who has been recently elected as this year's Distinguished Fellow by the American Economic Association.
Gabriel Zucman, a UC Berkeley economist, has won the prestigious John Bates Clark Medal for his influential research on tax avoidance and economic inequality. The medal is awarded annually by the American Economic Association to an economist under the age of 40, and several past winners have gone on to win the Nobel Prize in economics. Zucman’s innovative research and wide-ranging influence over the past decade were cited in the award, as was his “revolutionary” work on the drivers of wealth inequality and policies to reduce it.
Five individual staff members from the College of Letters & Science were recipients of the Chancellor's Outstanding Staff Awards (COSA) this spring.
At the annual Excellence in Management awards ceremony on Tuesday, May 2, the Berkeley Staff Assembly recognized outstanding university staff employees from across campus. The 2023 theme, "Everyday Heroes: Leading the Path to Excellence," paid homage to individuals whose leadership demonstrated and encouraged mentorship, dignity, respect, and belonging. Nominees were selected and evaluated based on three main criteria:
UC Berkeley's Division of Social Sciences recently held its annual celebration, Social Sciences Fest, which highlighted the faculty and staff's remarkable achievements over the past year. From winning various awards to receiving grants and launching new programs, the event showcased the division's continued commitment to producing research that matters and nurturing its students. In addition, two faculty members received the Distinguished Teaching Award, and the department managers were recognized with the Distinguished Service Award.
The College of Letters & Science is thrilled to congratulate the five L&S faculty members (Marla Feller, Tyrone Hayes, Hilary Hoynes, Donald Rio and Emmanuel Saez) and their campus colleagues recently elected to the National Academy of Sciences.
wo months before NASA unveiled the first images from the James Webb Space Telescope to the world last summer, some 50 astronomers and engineers anxiously gathered in the mission’s control room at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore for the moment of truth. Finally, after a 35-year-long, seemingly insurmountable journey through technological adversity, threatened cancellations, anda pandemic, the newly calibrated $10 billion observatory was about to reveal how well it worked—or didn’t.
The jersey hijab Ro’aa Alkhawaja wore in high school drew ire and ill-informed questions from her classmates who sometimes assumed she was a refugee displaced from war, and the headscarf was an oppressive tool she was obligated to wear out of fear. That it somehow limited her physical and intellectual capabilities — her freedom.
But for Ro’aa, the hijab is an empowering symbol that signifies the love she has for her Muslim faith and the modesty and humility of character “I strive for inwardly.”
Umair Khan’s mission in life, it seems, is to help budding entrepreneurs. “At Folio3 Software, I help entrepreneurs build out their products. At Mentors Fund, I invest in entrepreneurs. At Berkeley, I teach entrepreneurs. And at Zareen's, the restaurant which my wife established, I feed entrepreneurs.”
The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines the word “penguin” as “any of various erect short-legged flightless aquatic birds (family Spheniscidae) of the southern hemisphere.” That description seems simple enough, but definitions are not what people have in mind when they actually use words. Instead people think of concepts: the myriad properties, ideas, examples and associations that spring to mind when we think about a word.
The American Academy of Arts & Sciences announced its new fellows this week, among them six distinguished UC Berkeley faculty members.
This spring, the College of Letters & Science Advisory Board launched its first-ever L&S Faculty Awards to celebrate outstanding Letters & Science faculty. Awardees were selected for their exceptional scholarship, service to the College and community, and transformational teaching. These extraordinary individuals not only embody the excellence of the College of Letters & Science, but they also serve as an inspiration to the entire campus community.
This March, I’ve been thinking about the campus leaders and groups that champion women and their contributions to the Berkeley community.
A new study by UC Berkeley researchers reveals alarming racial disparities in school discipline rates, with Black students facing a 50x higher risk of discipline than their white counterparts. The study highlights the "dynamic" nature of discipline throughout the school year, with rates decreasing before major vacations and increasing when classes resume. This real-time data is critical for educators to intervene before incidents occur and reduce escalating school tension.
Joel Wanek's short film, Passing Through, will have its World Premiere at the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival!
Joel Wanek is a film and audio artist working in the realms of creative non-fiction. Over the years, he has developed a practice that celebrates and investigates spatial poetics, racial dynamics, and the immaterial possibilities of sound and image.
Seen from Earth, the giant elliptical galaxy M87 is just a two-dimensional blob, though one that appears perfectly symmetrical and thus a favored target of amateur astronomers.
Yet, a new, highly detailed analysis of the motion of stars around its central supermassive black hole — the first black hole to be imaged by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) in 2019 — reveals that it’s not as perfect as it looks.
A personal journey of macroeconomic curiosity has led UC Berkeley alum Sandile Hlatshwayo Ph.D. ’17 to the Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) as a senior economist. Hlatshwayo is covering the international portfolio during her year at CEA, which advises the president on trade, inflation, employment, supply chains, and other top economic issues. She is on a temporary leave from the International Monetary Fund, where she began working in 2017.
In Fall 2021, Bryce Wallace (’23, English & Linguistics) was still stunned that he had gotten into Cal as a transfer student from Irvine Valley College, when more UC-related honors started pouring in.
Latinx people, who today comprise roughly one in five U.S. residents, are forecast to soon account for three-quarters of net new workers and are increasingly pursuing higher education.
Wednesday, April 12th | 4:00 - 6:00 P.M. | Sibley Auditorium University of California, Berkeley
The Baxter Liberty Initiative engages high-profile intellectual leaders whose expertise and scholarship focus on the ideal of freedom in political and economic life. Visiting scholars are invited to UC Berkeley for a multi-day visit of public lectures, dialogue with a respondent, and discussions with students centered on the theme of liberty.
Valeria Luiselli, the Spring 2023 Bedri Distinguished Writer, will deliver a public lecture, “Migration Stories,” on Thursday, April 20th at 5 pm in the Maude Fife Room (315 Wheeler).
Matt Jacobson’s loyalty to UC Berkeley began at a young age.
His father, Norman, was a beloved professor who taught political theory at Berkeley for 56 years. Professors and students would drop by their house constantly. Matt recalls his father practicing his lectures on the family at the dinner table. Though there were times when Matt did not appreciate the in-house lessons, he now feels fortunate to have received a college-level experience at that age.
Scott Straus, a UC Berkeley political scientist known for his study of political violence and genocide, has been named the Mahatma M.K. Gandhi Fellow of the American Academy of Political and Social Science (AAPSS).
The Division of Arts and Humanities and the College of Letters & Science are delighted to announce that Les Gorske has accepted our offer to become the next Assistant Dean for Finance and Administration for the Division of Arts & Humanities (A&H). Les has been a crucial and valued member of the Dean’s office staff for the last four years.
The world has been learning an awful lot about artificial intelligence lately, thanks to the arrival of eerily human-like chatbots.
Less noticed, but just as important: Researchers are learning a great deal about us – with the help of AI.
A sci-fi fan since young adulthood, Rixin Li found himself among the many inspired to study planetary science when, in the early 2010s, NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope began detecting thousands of exoplanets. A few years later, he would conduct sophisticated numerical modeling to explain how such planets could form, illuminating their leap from tiny dust and ice particles to planetesimals—or bodies of solid materials, such as asteroids. Using code he developed, Rixin has described how conditions of the protoplanetary disk surrounding a young star influence planetesimal demographics.
Last October, following one of the brightest flashes of gamma rays ever observed in the sky, telescopes around the world captured a wealth of data from an event that is thought to herald the collapse of a massive star and the birth of a black hole.
But that fire hose of data demonstrated clearly that our understanding of how stars collapse and generate enormous jets of outflowing material accompanied by powerful blasts of X-rays and gamma rays — and likely lots of heavy elements — is woefully inadequate.
UC Berkeley student Egbert Villegas was driving his girlfriend, Nelly Elahmadie, to a doctor’s appointment last November when the pair spied an SUV flipped over on the freeway in Oakland.
They were on their way from Walnut Creek to Berkeley; the accident came into view right before the Caldecott Tunnel.
Monday, April 3 | 4:00 - 6:00 P.M. PST | Banatao Auditorium, Sutardja Dai Hall
Congratulations to Josh Kun, a UC Berkeley Ethnic Studies Alum, who has recently been named USC Annenberg’s Vice Provost for the Arts! Josh Kun will partner with USC’s art schools and USC Museums to create universitywide programs, new initiatives, and fundraising to activate the arts across the university and Los Angeles arts community.
“The arts are a really valuable and urgent language for creating little cracks in those armors of division. Globally, we need what artists are bringing more than ever before.” - Josh Kun
The Berkeley chapter of the Phi Beta Kappa Society has made its first round of invitations to Fall 2022 and Spring 2023 graduates to join the liberal arts and sciences honors society founded in 1776. Over 700 seniors, almost all from the College of Letters & Science, are receiving emails notifying them of selection and detailing how to join.
If you are a Berkeley student and receive an invitation, please be sure to consider joining.
The war in Ukraine has highlighted the danger that offshore finance poses to the rules-based global order. Western governments must seize this opportunity to combat tax avoidance and evasion while weakening the ability of autocratic regimes to foment global instability.
Is a dog more similar to a chicken or an eagle? Is a penguin noisy? Is a whale friendly?
Psychologists at the University of California, Berkeley, say these absurd-sounding questions might help us better understand what’s at the heart of some of society’s most vexing arguments.
Multiple Anthropology faculty members have recently published new titles! Celebrate their publications by checking out their phenomenal work below:
On 31 March 1817 the New York legislature decided that enslavement within its borders had to come to an end. Final emancipation would occur on 4 July 1827. Coincidentally, the date of choice was almost exactly two centuries after the Dutch West India Company’s yacht Bruynvisch arrived at Manhattan on 29 August 1627.
The essayist Eddy Harris will be visiting the Berkeley campus during the week of March 20, 2023. Harris’s visit is sponsored by the Robert Hass Chair in English with support from the Lawrence Hall of Science and the recently formed Environmental Arts and Humanities group, in conjunction with the YES/Nature to Neighborhoods social services organization in Richmond.
Restaurants, retail stores and other small businesses, long thought to be vulnerable to increases in the minimum wage, generally do not cut jobs and may actually benefit when governments raise minimum pay, according to a new study co-authored at UC Berkeley.
The Oberwolfach Foundation recently awarded, in cooperation with the Mathematisches Forschungsinstitut Oberwolfach, the John Todd Award 2022 to UC Berkeley assistant professor of mathematics Michael Lindsey for his outstanding contributions in the intersection of numerical analysis, applied analysis, statistical physics and quantum physics.
This is a rather unusual story -- I got a letter from a person I didn't know, who suggested that I write a play. When I responded that I was a poet, not a playwright, the future stage director of this play said: but poetry has so much to do with theatre! At that time I worked with the diaries and letters of two amazing real-life characters, a curator and an artist who worked and lived in the Hermitage museum during the Siege of Leningrad.
In one corner of the mazelike, climate-controlled room at the heart of UC Berkeley, a triceratops horn rests on a shelf a few inches above the floor. The massive skull of a baleen whale that lived some 15 million years ago is fixed to a wooden plank bolted to a nearby wall.
Geography Ph.D.
Andrea Gomez, a 2021 Rose Hill Innovator, is probing how our brains learn and change over time by studying how the compounds found in psychedelic mushrooms influence brain activity.
The human brain has an immense power to change; over our lifetimes we grow and learn and shift our beliefs and preferences about the world. We recover from trauma and develop new skills. With each transformation, our brains forge new connections.
Janelle Scott, professor and the Birgeneau Distinguished Chair in Educational Disparities at the University of California, Berkeley, in the School of Education, has been voted president-elect of the American Educational Research Association (AERA). Scott joins the AERA Council in 2023–2024 as president-elect. Her presidency begins at the conclusion of the association’s 2024 Annual Meeting.
Berkeley News recently interviewed Jovan Scott Lewis, a University of California, Berkeley, associate professor of geography and chair of the geography department, conducting a Q&A on his idea of reparations and its applicability in the current discussions held by California's Reparations Task Force.
Tune in to a new episode of Berkeley Talks Podcast, featuring leading economists Barry Eichengreen, Yuriy Gorodnichenko, Gérard Roland, and Roger Myerson. They discussed what it'll take to rebuild Ukraine's infrastructure, education systems, and institutions one year after Russia invaded Ukraine.
Last December, Hannah Weisman became the first executive director hired by UC Berkeley for The Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life(link is external), one of the preeminent Jewish collections in the world.
All are invited to attend the 39th Annual Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz Memorial Lectureship, featuring Dr. Kori Schake. Dr. Schake is Senior Fellow and Director of Foreign and Defense Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute and Former Director for Defense Strategy and Requirements on the National Security Council.
Event details:
The Mark Foundation for Cancer Research announced twelve outstanding research projects to receive its latest round of ASPIRE awards.
Four UC Berkeley faculty members have been awarded the 2023 Bakar Prize, which is designed to give a boost to innovators as they translate their discoveries into real-world solutions.
The prize is given annually to former Bakar Fellows and provides additional resources to ensure a successful transition of their technology from academic research to industry applications.
When Lenora Lee, an artistic director, dancer and choreographer, debuted Within These Walls in 2017, she had no idea what the impact would be on the audience.
Lenora Lee first debuted Within These Walls in 2017. Now, it’s the 2023 Berkeley Dance Project, presented in conjunction with a Year On Angel Island. (Photo by Hien Huynh)
UC Berkeley alumna and Trustee Maria Cranor (B.A. ʼ68) – who served four concurrent terms on the UC Berkeley Foundation Board of Trustees from 2013 to 2023 – died on January 15, 2023, at the age of 76.
Join us in congratulating Elora Shehabuddin for her amazing accomplishment! Her book, Sisters in the Mirror: A History of Muslim Women and the Global Politics of Feminism was recently awarded the 2023 Coomaraswamy Book Prize by the Association for Asian Studies.
About Elora:
Pulitzer-winning writer Viet Thanh Nguyen ’92, Ph.D. ’97 found at UC Berkeley the intellectual home, identity, and political passion that ultimately led to his creative success. He knows first hand the important part that grad students play in the academic ecosystem, and how hard they have to work to be here.
To provide compassionate support and guidance for students to proactively build upon their academic and personal background, empowering them as they navigate their UC Berkeley experience.
Love. Guidance. Advocacy. Support. Challenging.
UC Berkeley undergraduate Alp Eren Özdarendeli is unable to focus on his studies and stays awake all night hoping to reach friends and family in his hometown of Kahramanmaraş, a Turkish city close to the epicenters of last week’s devastating earthquakes.
As of Tuesday, nearly 38,000 people are reported dead across southeastern Turkey and northwestern Syria, and tens of thousands are injured following the temblors — one a magnitude 7.8, the other, which hit nine hours later, a 7.5. They’re now among this century’s deadliest disasters.
IGI Director of Microbiology Jill Banfield has been awarded the 2023 van Leeuwenhoek Medal for her contribution to the understanding of microbial communities and interactions between microbes and the environment.
Six young UC Berkeley faculty members—three L&S faculty members—have been selected to receive a 2023 Sloan Research Fellowship, the largest number of fellows this year from any one public university.
In all, 126 early-career researchers from 54 U.S. and Canadian institutions were selected, according to an announcement by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
The fellowships honor extraordinary U.S. and Canadian researchers whose creativity, innovation and research accomplishments make them stand out as the next generation of leaders.
Two months ago, it started to rain as I walked back to my dorm from the Recreational Sports Facility. The raindrops were cold and heavy, and I stopped in place to watch them splatter against the sidewalk. Before I knew what was happening, I was crying my heart out through my eyelashes. Standing in the middle of Bancroft Way, I realized this was the first time in my life I’d gone more than a month without rain.
A new UC Berkeley center will convene top scholars and students across a range of disciplines to conduct high-level research on critical social challenges at the intersection of politics and economics.
Join us for "Book Release: Rebuilding Ukraine: Principles and Policies", a lecture featuring three distinguished UC Berkeley Economics Faculty: Yuriy Gorodnichenko, Barry Eichengreen, and Gérard Roland.
A major grant from the Hewlett Foundation will support a new hub for research and teaching focused on the intersection of economics and government.
California's wet weather in the past few months has been nothing short of astonishing. So, what exactly has been going on with the weather lately? Check out this short video from Earth & Planetary Science Associate Professor Bill Boos as he explains the nature of the recent storms that have slammed into California.
BERKELEY BOOK CHAT: The Everyday Life of Memorials
In this session, Andrew Shaken (Architecture and American Studies) and David Henkin (@UCBHistory) will explore the relationship of memorials to the pulses of daily life, and their place within the development of modern cities.
Wednesday, Feb. 15, 2023
12:00 p.m. PST
Berkeley Psychology graduate students recently created the Research Experience Pathways (REP) in the Psychology program to provide greater opportunities for underrepresented students and to increase diversity and inclusion in research and academia.
Burnout is among the most significant on-the-job hazards facing workers today.
Christina Maslach, an American social psychologist and Professor Emerita of Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, and Michael P. Leiter, an organizational psychologist and Professor of Organisational Psychology at Deakin University, co-authored The Burnout Challenge. In their book, they've identified at least six areas in which a bad fit – or mismatch – between the job and the person can increase the risk of burnout.
Felwine Sarr: Music, Freedom, Africa
Join us TOMORROW for "Caught Caring: (Un)freedom and the Costs of Service Labor in the University", a panel discussion about the costs that Black people face for caring in the university.
Panelists
Maria Boone Cranor — luminary female rock climber, co-founder of Black Diamond Equipment, and lecturer in physics at The University of Utah — died of cancer on Jan. 15, 2022, at the Salt Lake City home of her great friends April and Dale Goddard. She was 76 years old.
Astrophysicists and space buffs worldwide erupted into cheers after the perfect launch of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) on Christmas Day 2021. Days later, they held their collective breaths as sections of the telescope’s mirrors and sunscreen, folded inside like highly intricate origami, were deployed, concluding in full deployment on Jan. 8, 2022.
Meg Parker graduated from UC Berkeley in 2010 with a double major in French and Rhetoric, then went on to earn her JD from Georgetown University Law Center.
In a study I conducted with collaborators Yang Bai and Maria Monroy (under review), we provided people with the definition of awe—“being in the presence of something vast and mysterious that transcends your current understanding of the world”—and then they wrote their own stories of awe.
The Arts Research Center–a think tank for the arts at UC Berkeley–is partnering with AlterTheater to present a rolling world premiere of an award-winning new comedy, Pueblo Revolt by Dillon Chitto. Pueblo Revolt will run from February 2-12, 2023 at the Arts Research Center (ARC) and February 13-26 at Art Works Downtown in San Rafael.
In Berkeley Talks episode 159, Adriana Green, a Ph.D. student in the Department of African American Studies and African Diaspora Studies at UC Berkeley, and Nadia Ellis, an associate professor in the Department of English, discuss Sarah Broom’s The Yellow House, winner of the 2019 National Book Award for Nonfiction. The memoir, set in a shotgun house in New Orleans East, tells a hundred years of Broom’s family and their relationship to home.
This I’m a Berkeleyan was written as a first-person narrative from an interview with Sierra Edd, a graduate student in the Department of Ethnic Studies whose research focuses on Native American studies and music, and sound in politics.
My current academic career started when I first listened to the Indigenous Futurisms Mixtape in 2014.
In Berkeley Talks episode 157, Hilary Hoynes, a UC Berkeley professor of economics and of public policy, and Haas Distinguished Chair in Economic Disparities, discusses the emerging research that examines how the social safety net in the United States — a collection of public programs that delivers aid to low-income populations — affects children’s life trajectories.
Compared to other countries in the world, she says, the U.S. spends less on anti-poverty programs and, consequently, has higher child poverty rates.
Less-educated U.S. workers often face a lifetime of financial challenges, but some among them are more disadvantaged than others: Young Asian and white men without college education are paid more — sometimes far more — than both Black men and women of all racial groups, according to a new study co-authored at UC Berkeley.
With the world’s population topping 8 billion last year, it’s clear that humans have achieved a unique status in Earth’s history. We are the only creature that dominate all other organisms on the planet, from animals and fungi to plants and microbes.
It remains to be seen whether humans can retain this dominance as we push the global climate to extremes while driving to extinction the very organisms that we climbed over to get to the top.
The National Academy of Inventors (NAI) announced today that UC Berkeley engineer and physicist Ramamoorthy Ramesh has been elected to the 2022 class of NAI Fellows, the highest professional distinction awarded to academic inventors.
Dr. Gillian Hart, Geography Professor Emerita, has won the AAG Presidential Achievement Award, which recognizes individuals who have made long-standing and distinguished contributions to the discipline of geography.
A surprising number of acclaimed women artists have come out of Berkeley, working in a wide array of mediums and styles and hailing from different backgrounds. Here are a few we’d like to draw your attention to because their work was/is startlingly original and their messages carry a lasting urgency. And of course, they have a good story to tell.
Note: These artists are also L&S alumnae who studied in the Division of Arts & Humanities.
Tara Madhav, a first-year Ph.D. student studying history, was recently awarded the Raymond J. Cunningham Prize for her essay, "We Had to Do the Educating Ourselves."Competition for top graduate students is fierce, and competitive financial fellowships make a crucial difference in convincing them to study at Berkeley. The Dr. Saul and Gordon Kit Fellowship will enable promising graduate students to pursue advanced education in animal virology, including virus pathogenesis and cellular antiviral defenses, virus-associated tumor biology/biochemistry, and viral vaccines.
Kim Cotton, 48, started earning her UC Berkeley degree in the early 1990s. She withdrew in 1995, a few credits short of graduation, resigning herself, she said, to “live my life as a perpetual senior at UC Berkeley.”
But Cotton didn’t want to stay a senior. She said that getting her degree was “unfinished business,” a task that was eating at her, demanding to be completed.
Dr. Urnov is a professor of molecular and cell biology at the University of California, Berkeley, and a gene editor at its Innovative Genomics Institute.
The parents of a 2-year-old girl write that their daughter “could die within the next year” because a genetic mutation is causing her heart to fail.
“Time is quickly running out for me,” writes a man in his mid-30s whose DNA harbors a genetic mistake certain to destroy his brain within a matter of years.
The UC Berkeley Council on Advising and Student Services and its awards planning committee recently announced the recipients of the 2022 Excellence in Advising and Student Services Awards.
For such a complicated subject, the leaders of the Quantum Computing at Berkeley (QCB) club articulate a very straightforward mission: “Our goal is to promote quantum computing in a diverse population of students—different majors, different people—and also to educate the campus community about what quantum computing is and how it will affect the fu
John Kuriyan’s love of nature is self-evident after a glance at the vivid feathers displayed on his Flickr gallery. He has photographed dozens and dozens of different bird species, each with a unique set of characteristics that allow it to thrive in its natural habitat. This fascination with nature’s diversity led Kuriyan, professor of chemistry and molecular and cell biology at UC Berkeley, to both study proteins and realize how to share his love of science with students.
Gazing at stars during nighttime parties, dinners with “family,” getting creative in a machine shop, and long philosophical discussions with peers might not seem like the expected stuff of an undergraduate education in science, but it is all part of a new plan for student-led discovery unfolding in the UC Berkeley Physics and Astronomy (PA) Departments, in the Division of Mathematical & Physical Sciences.
In the two years since nationwide social justice protests followed the murder of George Floyd, California has undertaken the nation’s most sweeping effort yet to explore some concrete restitution to Black citizens to address the enduring economic effects of slavery and racism.
In nature, CRISPR is an immune defense that bacteria and other microbes use to protect themselves against viruses by recognizing and cutting the genomes of invading viruses. In 2020, researchers at the Innovative Genomics Institute found a CRISPR-Cas system in what would seem to be an unlikely place: inside a virus.
“Okay, this is it,” Filipa Rijo-Ferreira thought after hearing some neuroscience presentations. She’d spent a year as a technician in a lab studying sleeping sickness but had never understood why no one studied the way in which the sickness affected the brain. But for this particular disease, it seemed important to study neuroscience and parasitology together. “I’m just going to make my own project.”
Isha Ukani grew up in Simi Valley, California, a first-generation American in a family originally from Gujarat, India. Descended from a long line of farmers, her father taught her about the plant world as he worked in the family garden. By the time she got to high school, Ukani was passionate about science, particularly botany, which led to an interest in molecular biology and biotechnology. Now, that early exposure to nature is already shaping her career.
Think of a large-enrollment class and you might picture a cavernous lecture hall, full of students silently taking notes as the distant instructor imparts wisdom from the front of the room. Learners are expected to absorb knowledge passively; problem-solving and critical thinking are reserved for independent study, or for a few high-stakes exams. It’s not the most thrilling learning environment, nor – as extensive research has shown – is it a particularly effective way for students to learn.
Before the COVID-19 pandemic abruptly shut down labs and sent scientists home to work, female astronomers on average published about nine papers for every 10 published by men — a rate that has remained stagnant for decades.
The pandemic appears to have worsened that gender imbalance.
Eniola Fakile’s creations live in another world.
Fakile is a photographer. A performance artist. A filmmaker. A sculptor. A costume designer. She works in textiles, ready-made objects and assemblage. She’s not constrained by what has been or should be. Instead, she expands outward to see how far she can go. When an idea flashes in her mind, she imagines a new universe in which that idea, that creation, lives.
Do you feel groggy until you’ve had your morning joe? Do you battle sleepiness throughout the workday?
You’re not alone. Many people struggle with morning alertness, but a new study demonstrates that awaking refreshed each day is not just something a lucky few are born with. Scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, have discovered that you can wake up each morning without feeling sluggish by paying attention to three key factors: sleep, exercise and breakfast.
For postdoc Aaron Joiner, academia holds two attractions. One is the chance to explore and discover fundamental biology. The other is the ability to broaden opportunities for future generations of scientists, including those who may not have grown up seeing themselves as researchers.
A sterling silver mezuzah from The Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life now hangs at the official Washington, DC residence of Vice President Kamala Harris and Second Gentleman Douglas Emhoff.
In what Magnes curator Francesco Spagnolo called a “curatorial mission impossible,” the ritual object needed to be anchored in the history of the Jewish American community, have relevance to the second couple, and be suitable for display in the official residence.
Celebrate Berkeley’s involvement with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). This panel discussion features the JWST Senior Project Scientist, and Berkeley alum, John Mather and two faculty members utilizing the telescope in their research. The talk is moderated by Dean of Mathematical and Physical Sciences, Steven Kahn.
Speakers: Steven Kahn Ph.D. ’80, Dean, Mathematical and Physical Sciences (moderator) | 5:34
When Ashley Miller (’15, Interdisciplinary Studies) transferred to UC Berkeley as a junior in Fall 2012, she had two goals in mind: to study abroad (despite the tight timeline) and to go somewhere entirely different than anywhere she had been before. She chose Kenya. With funding from UC Berkeley’s Miller Scholars program, she planned to research the effects of Kenya’s 2003 free primary education policy. Unfortunately, a national teachers’ strike in 2013 made interviewing teachers and families difficult.
UC Berkeley’s Department of Anthropology announced the inaugural recipient of the Sam Dubal Fellowship in Critical Cultural and Medical Anthropology, Carolina Talavera. The fellowship, established in 2021, honors the enduring vision and memory of Dr. Sam Dubal ’15.
When I tell people I’m studying a subject within the humanities, they usually jump to an eyebrow raise coupled with some iteration of the following:
What are you going to use that degree for? How are you going to make any money? Wow, I wish I had an easy major too…
By now, I’ve grown accustomed to the rude comments, the derisive laughter. But the question that never fails to amuse me is this:
What will your parents think?
On Nov. 20, 1969, a group of Indigenous Americans that called itself Indians of All Tribes, many of whom were UC Berkeley students, took boats in the early morning hours to Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay. They bypassed a Coast Guard blockade and took control of the island. The 19-month occupation that followed would be regarded as one of the greatest acts of political resistance in American Indian history.
When UC Berkeley’s African American Studies professors Leigh Raiford and Tianna Paschel launched the Black Studies Collaboratory (BSC) in 2021, their vision centered on creating a space for critical, joyful and generative engagement that would expand beyond the institution and into the surrounding community.
Arlie Russell Hochschild, an esteemed UC Berkeley sociologist and professor emerita of sociology, has been inducted into the California Hall of Fame. Hochschild was recognized for “pioneering new understanding of the emotions that underlie people’s beliefs, actions and social lives.”
Draft up a list of today’s most inventive and respected players in the realm of what tends to be called improvised music (or creative music or free jazz) and you’ll inevitably name the players in the pianist Myra Melford’s Fire and Water Quintet: the saxophonist Ingrid Laubrock, the guitarist Mary Halvorson, the cellist
Xanthia Lam, a senior student in the cognitive science program at UC Berkeley, was unsure of how she would afford some basic supplies for the coming semester. The Oakland-born daughter of two immigrant parents who have experienced homelessness, Lam had been thankful to receive some financial support throughout her undergraduate education, but even that support did not completely cover costs of living in the Bay Area.
Great entrepreneurs can come from anywhere, but some universities have a truly exceptional track record of producing future entrepreneurs.
PitchBook's annual university rankings compare schools by tallying up the number of alumni entrepreneurs who have founded venture capital-backed companies. The undergraduate and graduate rankings are powered by PitchBook data and are based on an analysis of more than 144,000 VC-backed founders.
Around 1870 came a great shift: invention sprinted forward, doubling our technological capabilities each generation, utterly transforming the economy again and again. The possibility of being able in the not-too-distant future of baking a sufficiently large economic pie for everyone to someday have enough came into view. Surely then we would be able to shift governance and politics so that we could collectively build a utopia? Surely it was the baking of the sufficiently large economic pie that was the large problem.
Greg Dunn is an artist with a PhD in Neuroscience, whose work highlights the beauty and complexity of the nervous system.
“One can usually pretend that there is a logic to the distribution of wealth — that behind a person’s prosperity lies some rational basis, whether it is that person’s hard work, skill and farsightedness or some ancestor’s,” writes J. Bradford DeLong. “Inflation — even moderate inflation — strips the mask.”
The Asian American Research Center (AARC) and the Asian American and Asian Diaspora Studies Program (AAADS) at the University of California, Berkeley, will be hosting the 30th anniversary international conference of the International Society for the Study of Chinese Overseas (ISSCO 世界海外华人研究学会) from Nov. 11-12, 2022, at Hotel Kabuki in San Francisco.
As its name implies, the Devil’s Hole pupfish lives in a truly hellish environment.
Confined to a single deep limestone cave in Nevada’s Mojave Desert, 263 of them live in water that hovers around 93 degrees Fahrenheit year-round, with food resources so scarce that they are always on the edge of starvation, and with oxygen levels so low that most other fish would die immediately. The pupfish, Cyprinodon diabolis, live in the smallest habitat of any known vertebrate.
This year, the Peder Sather Center for Advanced Study celebrates 10 years of international research and educational collaboration between UC Berkeley and Norway. On October 26, guests from around the world came together in the Banatao Auditorium at UC Berkeley to honor the many achievements in research stemming from the longstanding partnership. Guest speakers included Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre, Norwegian Ambassador to the United States Anniken Ramberg Krutnes, and UC Berkeley’s Chancellor, Carol Christ.
UC Berkeley professors of physics, chemistry, and electrical engineering and computer sciences highlight the rich ecosystem of basic research, education, and entrepreneurship that makes the university a leader in quantum science and technology and its application for quantum computers and other innovations.
Matthew Rowe wasn’t considering a degree in the humanities when he joined UC Berkeley in fall 2022. Instead, he chose to major in political science, with the goal of preparing for a career addressing the global problem of climate change.
But Rowe has now switched his major to philosophy, in the campus’s Division of Arts and Humanities, realizing, he said, that to approach such a multi-faceted issue would require “going beyond politics and legislation in order to address the apathy people experience when discussing climate change.”
I was raised in Watsonville, California. It’s a small city on the central coast near Santa Cruz that has a big agricultural industry: Driscoll’s, Martinelli’s: Every berry you could think of are picked from those fields.
My dad is from the Philippines, but as a military brat, he left around the age of 11 to live in America. After his father, my grandfather, retired from the U.S. Army, my dad and his four siblings worked in the strawberry and raspberry fields, and apple orchards of Watsonville.
The inaugural cohort of undergraduate interns in the CITRIS Workforce Innovation Program gained real-world experience in areas of tech innovation central to California’s future, while their hosts benefited from sharp minds and fresh perspectives.
While most of us like to think we come by our beliefs independently, new research out of Berkeley suggests otherwise.
In the study, published in Open Mind, some 600 participants were given a series of 30 statements ranging from “the Earth is flat” to “HIV causes AIDS” and asked to rate how strongly they believed them. Then they were shown how many others believed those statements and asked to reevaluate. The study found that subjects tended to adjust their level of certainty in response to what others believed.
First-time visitors to Yosemite Valley gape in awe at the sheer granite wall of El Capitan and the neatly sliced face of Half Dome, aware, perhaps vaguely, that rain and glaciers must have taken a long time to cut and sculpt that landscape. But how long?
For those attending the lecture in person, directions to Alumni House can be found here.
Only a meter or two below our feet dwells a wealth of microbes whose riches remain largely unexplored. It’s a realm where bacteria, bacteria-like organisms called archaea and fungi mingle with viruses and other non-living bits of DNA or DNA — all living with, in or on one another.
In that alien world, researchers have now found large DNA molecules that aren’t quite viruses, which are DNA or RNA wrapped in proteins, but that seem to have infected archaea and acquired along the way a slew of genes from their archaeal hosts.
The national program PBS NewsHour recently visited UC Berkeley and examined how the school is working to repatriate artifacts to Indigenous tribes. Many of the artifacts are held in the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology.
The story examined all the ways the museum — and the campus — have changed their ways of interacting with the many artifacts collected from Indigenous tribes in California.
Not long into “Everything Rises,” which opened at the Brooklyn Academy of Music(link is external) on Wednesday night, the bass-baritone Davóne Tines confronts the audience with an uncomfortable declaration.
“I was the moth, lured by your flame,” Tines, who is Black, sings with disdain. “I hated myself for needing you, dear white people: money, access and fame.”
The Strauss scholarship allows students to create an impact by funding public service projects. Being a low-income first-generation farmworker, I could never have imagined that I would be a Strauss Scholar. I am grateful for the sacrifices and struggles that it took to be able to give back to my farm working community in the Central Valley.
Amid much speculation and research about how our genetics affect the way we age, a University of California, Berkeley, study now shows that individual differences in our DNA matter less as we get older and become prone to diseases of aging, such as diabetes and cancer.
Carolyn Bertozzi, a professor at Stanford University who today shared the 2022 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, spent her formative and most creative years at UC Berkeley.
After graduating from Harvard University in 1988, she earned her Ph.D. in chemistry from Berkeley in 1993 and, following postdoctoral and faculty positions elsewhere, returned to join the chemistry faculty and Berkeley Lab in 1996.
In 1971, graduate student Stuart Freedman and postdoctoral fellow John Clauser took over a room in the sub-basement of Birge Hall at the University of California, Berkeley, and built an experiment that would put to the test one of the most enduring weirdnesses of quantum mechanics, what Einstein called “spooky action at a distance.”
I’m a Southern California Native, born and raised in Huntington Park, a city with a Latinx population of over 95%. In 2013, I applied to work at UC Berkeley because my husband wanted to be closer to his younger brother, who doubles as his best friend. What better place to start a new adventure for our little family of three and to grow my career than at the top public university in the world, right?
The Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet has today decided to award the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine to Svante Pääbo for his discoveries concerning the genomes of extinct hominins and human evolution. Humanity has always been intrigued by its origins. Where do we come from, and how are we related to those who came before us? What makes us, Homo sapiens, different from other hominins?
Berkeley Letters & Science also spoke to Ixchel González-Ramírez, a PhD candidate in Integrative Biology. González-Ramírez is a plant evolutionary biologist who describes her work as being similar to that of a detective: “My work…pieces together the series of events that had to happen for us to have the diversity of plants that we have today. But unlike a detective, I work on much longer time scales - even before the dinosaurs existed!
Timothy Springer, the Latham Family Professor of Biological Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology at Harvard Medical School and Boston Children's Hospital, has been named a recipient of the 2022 Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award, one of the world’s most prestigious prizes for biomedical research.
Dr Saul Perlmutter, a professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley, a senior scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), and a 2011 Nobel laureate in physics, discusses the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the Universe and the essential role of computing in this field of research.
On September 21, the R. K. Cho Economics Prize Steering Committee (Chairman: President Seoung Hwan Suh of Yonsei University) held the "12th and 13th R. K. Cho Economics Prize Award Ceremony and Commemorative Lectures" at the Gakdangheon Auditorium in the Daewoo Hall.
In Berkeley Talks episode 151, novelist Ilija Trojanow discusses why we need to embrace the idea of utopia in order to imagine a better future.
“It’s important to not confuse what does exist with what is impossible, which is how most people use the word “utopian” in everyday parlance,” Trojanow says. “Progress has, at times, been utopia come true. By envisaging differing realities, we are imagining alternatives into existence.
PRESS RELEASE: September 22, 2022
Contact: Professor Christine Philliou at philliou@berkeley.edu ; Chris Gus Kanios at cgkanios@yahoo.com; 415-420-1916
Now that Hispanic Heritage Month has arrived, I’ve realized that this is my second year at Berkeley (a little late for the realization, I know). The past year has really flown by — I remember being an admitted freshman and virtually attending bridges’ Senior Weekendand listening to the Raices members discuss their experiences with being Latinx at Cal.
Mass extinctions litter the history of life on Earth, with about a dozen known in addition to the five largest ones — the last of which, at the end of the Cretaceous Period 66 million years ago, killed off the dinosaurs and 70% of all life on Earth.
A new study, led by scientists at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, concludes that most of these mass extinctions had one thing in common: They occurred after mega-eruptions that spewed volcanic lava and toxic gases for hundreds of thousands of years, and some for as long as a million years.
It’s no surprise that seats in Poulomi Saha’s course, Cults in Popular Culture, fill up fast. Cults have long fascinated Americans, who had no shortage of docu-series about them to binge-watch while isolated during the pandemic. Popular ones include “Wild Wild Country,” on the Rajneeshpuram community in Wasco County, Oregon; “The Vow,” about the Nxivm “self-improvement” group, and “Heaven’s Gate: The Cult of Cults.”
How has climate change become a security issue? Geographer Brittany Meché argues that contemporary anxieties about climate change refugees rearticulate colonial power through international security. Through interviews with security and development experts, her research reveals how the so-called “pragmatic solutions” to climate change migration exacerbate climate change injustice.
Checking off one of its key goals, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) imaged its first exoplanet — a young, gas giant planet six to 12 times more massive than Jupiter orbiting a star 350 light years from Earth.
Amidst the last few weeks of summer break, campus is abuzz with preparation for the start of the fall semester. But in all that bustle, staff, faculty, graduate students and postdocs are taking time for the important work of coming together for inclusiveBio (iBio), a day of conversation about diversity, equity and inclusion in the Departments of Integrative Biology and Molecular and Cellular Biology.
This Q&A is part of a series of new student profiles for our 2022 back-to-school coverage. Have someone you think we should write about? Contact news@berkeley.edu.
I’m a first-year student. I’m Sri Lankan, but I’ve lived my whole life in Dubai, a city in the United Arab Emirates.
Charles Yu, discusses his 2020 book, Interior Chinatown, which goes inside the mind of a young Asian American man trying to make it in Hollywood. Incoming UC Berkeley students read the book over the summer as part of On The Same Page, a program from the College of Letters & Science, so that they’d have something in common to talk about throughout the year — socially, in classes and at events designed to explore the book’s themes.
This Q&A is part of a series of new student profiles for our 2022 back-to-school coverage. Have someone you think we should write about? Contact news@berkeley.edu.
I’m a first-year student from San Jose, California.
This Q&A is part of a series of new student profiles for our 2022 back-to-school coverage. Have someone you think we should write about? Contact news@berkeley.edu.
Clarissa Arceo: I transferred from Cerritos College in Norwalk, California. I grew up in Huntington Park, California.
The latest images of Jupiter from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) are stunners.
Captured on July 27, the infrared images — artificially colored to make specific features stand out — show fine filigree along the edges of the colored bands and around the Great Red Spot and also provide an unprecedented view of the auroras over the north and south poles.
One wide-field image presents a unique lineup of the planet, its faint rings and two of Jupiter’s smaller satellites — Amalthea and Adrastea — against a background of galaxies.
The Division of Arts and Humanities at UC Berkeley is pleased to announce the appointment of Debarati Sanyal(link is external) as director of the Consortium for Interdisciplinary Research(link is external) (CIR) effective July 1, 2022.
It’s entirely possible, maybe even likely, that during some slow day at the lab early in her career, Jennifer Doudna, in a moment of private ambition, daydreamed about making a breakthrough that could change the world. But communicating with the world about the ethical ramifications of such a breakthrough? “Definitely not!” says Doudna, who along with Emmanuelle Charpentier won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2020 for their research on CRISPR gene-editing technology.
This year's recipient of the AC Excellence in Teaching Award is Brandi Summers, Associate Professor for Geography. Prof. Summers won the award for her class 70AC, "The Urban Experience: Race, Class, Gender and the American City".
While still in high school, Xinyi Liu worked briefly in a lab at Beihang University in Beijing and was surprised to see Chinese researchers routinely using Google Translate to generate the first English draft of scientific papers. Translation is a must if scientists want to submit to high-profile journals, almost all of which are in English.
In Berkeley Talks episode 148, Robert Full, a professor of integrative biology and founder of the Center for Interdisciplinary Biological Inspiration in Education and Research at UC Berkeley, discusses how nature and its creatures — cockroaches, crabs, centipedes, geckos — inspire innovative design in all sorts of useful things, from bomb-detecting, stair-climbing robots to prosthetics and other medical equipment.
The University of California, Berkeley’s 2022-23 admissions season was like no other, marked by a lawsuit and subsequent court ruling that threatened to drastically reduce the number of first-year students offered admission for fall 2022.
Ultimately, state legislation signed in March allowed UC Berkeley to offer admission to more than 19,700 prospective freshmen and transfer students for the new academic year — the same target number it had originally planned for.
Over the past two years, the United States has experienced an enormous surge of anti-Asian violence. According to a new report from the Brookings Institute, 1 in 6 Asian Americans reported personally experiencing a hate crime in 2021.
In a stark display of their economic power following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the United States and its allies deployed an array of sanctions aimed at curtailing Russia’s access to global financial markets and industrial supply chains. These unprecedented economic sanctions are intended to diminish the resources Russia has available to prosecute its war. While the moves have demonstrated a high degree of allied cooperation, they have also heightened debate about the relative effectiveness of economic measures aimed to induce peaceful behavior or to deter hostilities vs.
Four UC Berkeley professors have been selected to be the inaugural Matrix Faculty Fellows for the 2022-2023 academic year: Gašper Beguš, Assistant Professor of Linguistics; Puck Engman, Assistant Professor of History; Ethan Katz, Associate Professor of History; and Salar Mameni, Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies.
Scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, have created a new COVID-19 therapeutic that could one day make treating SARS-CoV-2 infections as easy as using a nasal spray for allergies.
The therapeutic uses short snippets of synthetic DNA to gum up the genetic machinery that allows SARS-CoV-2 to replicate within the body.
Sana Desai is a third-year pre-medical student at UC Berkeley studying Integrative Human Biology and English. Here, she shares how her experiences shaped the topics she chose to study and her current projects.
I am a student, a biologist, a writer, a singer, a gender equality advocate, a teacher, a sister, a daughter, and a friend.
When Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was insulted on the Capitol steps in July 2020, it was a brief media sensation. But what does being called an “effing bitch” mean for how we think about political speech?
The last couple of years have been the economic equivalent of driving through a mountain pass in a blizzard. Never mind predicting the next turn — investors and policymakers barely know where they are at any given moment.
Sometimes new economic data only add to the confusion: Preliminary gross domestic product figures released last week showed the US economy contracting at a 0.9% annual rate in the second quarter — while consumers kept splurging on services and workers were enjoying one of the hottest job markets in decades.
In Berkeley Talks episode 147, a panel of scholars discusses UC Berkeley professor Darieck Scott’s new book Keeping It Unreal: Black Queer Fantasy and Superhero Comics, which explores how fantasies of Black power and triumph in superhero comics and other genres create challenges to — and respite from — white suprema
In the catacombs of the Bancroft Library, in a chilled, climate-controlled vault, is a 1,300-page document that tells the horrors of Manuel de Lucena’s life and death as a clandestine Jew during the Spanish Inquisition. In black ink on old parchment, scribes some 400 years ago penned the details of his lengthy imprisonment and his coerced testimony, along with the interrogation and torture of other Jews implicated in the investigation.
Congratulations to Jessica Schirmer for being one of five individuals selected as a 2022 Dissertation Grant winner.
Jessica Schirmer is a doctoral candidate in Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. She studies social policy and inequality in the United States. She is particularly interested in using social science to identify new political and institutional possibilities to advance democratic accountability, opportunity, and mobility through policy reform.
A dense, collapsed star spinning 707 times per second — making it one of the fastest spinning neutron stars in the Milky Way galaxy — has shredded and consumed nearly the entire mass of its stellar companion and, in the process, grown into the heaviest neutron star observed to date.
Weighing this record-setting neutron star, which tops the charts at 2.35 times the mass of the sun, helps astronomers understand the weird quantum state of matter inside these dense objects, which — if they get much heavier than that — collapse entirely and disappear as a black hole.
BERKELEY, CA — Wealth inequality exceeds historic records in the United States, as can be clearly seen in the research done by Gabriel Zucman, Associate Professor of Economics at the UC Berkeley Department of Economics and Faculty Director of The James M. and Cathleen D. Stone Center on Wealth and Income Inequality at UC Berkeley.
IT WAS THE summer of 1942 and a secret group of senior theoretical physicists at the University of California, Berkeley — dubbed the “luminaries” — took the historic first steps toward the design and manufacture of the world’s first nuclear weapon, the atomic bomb.
Armando Lara-Millán, assistant professor in UC Berkeley’s Department of Sociology, has earned the 2022 Distinguished Scholarly Book Award from the American Sociological Association.
In 2019, astronomers observed the nearest example to date of a star that was shredded, or “spaghettified,” after approaching too close to a massive black hole.
That tidal disruption of a sun-like star by a black hole 1 million times more massive than itself took place 215 million light years from Earth. Luckily, this was the first such event bright enough that astronomers from the University of California, Berkeley, could study the optical light from the stellar death, specifically the light’s polarization, to learn more about what happened after the star was torn apart.
I’m an Afro-Latinx, non-binary, queer, trans poet and activist. I want to be a scholar that troubles academia.
I want to reveal social inequities and conduct research that lifts the veil off the nebulous of white supremacy and post-colonial oppression. I want people to care about Central California’s rural areas and the farmers that feed us, because that’s where I’m from.
Oliver O’Reilly, whose 30-year career at UC Berkeley is characterized by a deep passion for teaching and student success, will be the campus’s new vice provost for undergraduate education starting this Friday, July 1, officials announced today. O’Reilly has been interim vice provost for undergraduate education during the past year.
The Great Immigrants is a program created by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, hosted every Fourth of July. The program is meant to honor the legacy of their founder Andrew Carnegie by recognizing an extraordinary group of immigrants who have made notable contributions to the progress of American society. This year Karen Nakamura, Professor of Anthropology, here at UC Berkeley, was selected as one of the 34 honorees.
I was originally born at a refugee camp in Laos that no longer exists today. My parents were refugees from Laos who wanted to come to the states to give my sisters and I a better opportunity than they had growing up. Although I was quite young when we moved to the states, I definitely felt the pressure of coming from a refugee family because I had to pull my weight at an early age so we can have stability.
“Hi, I’m Jazalyn Cruz and I am a third year student at UC Berkeley, studying media studies and design. I come from a tight-knit family of five who has taught me the importance of hardwork, to take advantage of all opportunities, and to prioritize self-care.
The premise is simple, and it seems like common sense: If Republicans and Democrats could come together for good faith dialogue, the conversations would reduce tensions and ease the corrosive polarization that threatens U.S. democracy.
In today’s individualistic and polarized socio-political landscape, public service may not be at the top of everyone’s minds. But two research centers at UC Berkeley are hoping to turn that around, thanks to a $750,000 grant from California Volunteers, a state office tasked with recruiting young Californians to engage in public service.
Coming from a long line of Iowa farmers, David Savage always thought he would do research to improve crops. That dream died in college, when it became clear that any genetic tweak to a crop would take at least a year to test; for some perennials and trees, it could take five to 10 years. Faced with such slow progress, he chose to study the proteins in photosynthetic bacteria instead.
Author and scholar Howard Besser ’75, inspired by UC Berkeley’s enduring legacy of impassioned student movements, has made generous gifts in support of future change makers. In March 2021, Besser donated $1 million to establish the Howard Besser Program for Anti-Authoritarianism and Social Movements. Later that year, Dr. Besser expanded his impact with a $2 million bequest to create The Howard Besser Early Career Chair in Anti-Authoritarianism and Social Movements.
Ten years ago this week, Jennifer Doudna and her colleagues published the results of a test-tube experiment on bacterial genes. When the study came out in the journal Science on June 28, 2012, it did not make headline news. In fact, over the next few weeks, it did not make any news at all.
Looking back, Dr. Doudna wondered if the oversight had something to do with the wonky title she and her colleagues had chosen for the study: “A Programmable Dual RNA-Guided DNA Endonuclease in Adaptive Bacterial Immunity.”
The Division of Arts & Humanities at UC Berkeley is pleased to announce Professor Stephen Best as the new director of the Doreen B. Townsend Center for the Humanities at UC Berkeley, effective July 1, 2022.
Robert Knight, a UC Berkeley professor of psychology and member of the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute (HWNI), and his wife Donatella Scabini have
Note to readers: This story contains historical images of lynchings.
We’d like to wrap up 2021–2022 by congratulating all of the current Cal Bears and recent alums who received nationally competitive scholarships this academic year, as well as those who submitted strong applications for the more than 25 scholarship programs our office supports.
This year’s recipients are:
As a Parkland shooting survivor, Kai Koerber understands the urgency of mental health awareness. As an advocate, entrepreneur and data scientist, he has a vision and a plan to make a difference.
If, as astronomers believe, the death of large stars leave behind black holes, there should be hundreds of millions of them scattered throughout the Milky Way galaxy. The problem is, isolated black holes are invisible.
Now, a team led by University of California, Berkeley, astronomers has for the first time discovered what may be a free-floating black hole by observing the brightening of a more distant star as its light was distorted by the object’s strong gravitational field — so-called gravitational microlensing.
Professor Wen-hsin Yeh taught the first Chinese history class I ever took. I was so moved that before I even completed her class, I changed my major to Asian studies. More importantly, she encouraged me to expand my horizons beyond just books, and to study abroad for a year at Beijing University. That experience transformed my personal and professional life.
Alumna Addy Spiller '00 Economics, a long-time supporter of the Economics Department through the Charter Hill Society for the Social Sciences, shares in a Q&A why she chose to support CHS in a leadership role as an honorary chair and what she appreciates about her Berkeley experience.
A team led by UC Berkeley astronomers has for the first time discovered what they believe to be a free-floating black hole located between 2,280 and 6,260 light years away from Earth.
It’s an incredibly rare discovery, since black holes are invisible. The team of researchers, led by Cal graduate student Casey Lam and astronomy professor Jessica Lu, found the object through gravitational microlensing, in which the brightening of a more distant star is the result of the strong gravitational pull of the object.
A remarkable international community of economists and economics students gathered in Berkeley June 3 and 4 to celebrate the achievements of Berkeley scholar David Card, who shared the 2021 Nobel Prize in economics.
Among those who joined in the celebration were Card’s two co-winners: Guido W. Imbens of Stanford University and Joshua D. Angrist of MIT.
Every year, CEND (Center for Emerging & Neglected Diseases) supports graduate students and post-doctoral fellows in their research through the Irving H. Wiesenfeld, Kathleen Miller, Sidney MacDonald Russell and Alber fellowships. CEND Fellows pursue research in areas such as emerging infectious diseases, drug development, and infectious disease surveillance.For many Southeast Asian refugees, the current violence in Afghanistan and Ukraine is like an instant replay of a painful history that few can forget.
If little is taught about the Vietnam War — a misnomer, because the war was not confined to Vietnam — even less is known about Cambodia and the U.S. intentional destruction of that country to secure a supposedly honorable exit from Vietnam in April 1975. What followed was a genocide that decimated almost a quarter of Cambodia’s population and rendered hundreds of thousands of families and individuals stateless: I was one of them.
A major Hollywood studio sent UC Berkeley back to the 1940s at the end of May for a motion picture that was filmed on campus.
The set, which included old cars and costumes, was constructed over two days in an area near Sather Tower, Wheeler Hall and Physics North, a 1924 building designed by John Galen Howard and known as LeConte Hall until 2020.
For Trinh T. Minh-ha, learning isn’t about accumulating knowledge.
“This has been something that my students very much appreciate,” said Trinh, a longtime UC Berkeley professor of gender and women’s studies and of rhetoric who retired in 2020. “But also, I have had students who agonized with me over the whole semester because of this.
Vice Chancellor for Equity and Inclusion Dania Matos; Em Huang, director of LGBTQ+ Advancement & Equity; Benjamin E. Hermalin, vice provost for the faculty; Stephen Sutton, vice chancellor for student affairs and Eugene Whitlock, chief people and culture officer sent the following message to the campus community on Wednesday:
This month is Pride Month, a time to celebrate UC Berkeley’s queer and trans students, staff and faculty: We celebrate you, your thriving and your contributions to the campus community.
As a child in the Philippines during the 1970s, Joi Barrios-Leblanc remembers singing songs that glorified the country’s president Ferdinand Marcos, and his U.S-backed regime of martial law that turned the government into a one-man dictatorship that killed, tortured and incarcerated thousands of its citizens.
In Berkeley Talks episode 141, a panel of scholars discuss the work of Roman Vishniac, a renowned Russian American photographer who took thousands of photos over seven decades and across three continents.
Although Vishniac’s genres were diverse, he’s best known for images that he took of Jewish life in Central and Eastern Europe before the Holocaust.
A chance discovery on her first day at the University and Jepson Herbaria in 2005 changed Kelly Agnew’s life, leading her down a rabbit hole of Civil War battles and prison camps, gold rush settlements, the exploits and foibles of California’s earliest botanists, the founding of the Sierra Club and ultimately the establishment at UC Berkeley of the largest plant collection at any public university in the world.
The California Language Archive’s (CLA) new website was unveiled this week!. Professor Andrew Garrett (Director) praised the hard work of Ronald Sprouse (IT Specialist), Zachary O'Hagan (Manager), and Anna Björklund (graduate student assistant), who were tasked with the project.
Nikki Jones, H. Michael and Jeanne Williams Professor and Department Chair, African American Studies at UC Berkeley, reflects on the Buffalo massacre. Listen to the WTOP interview
On May 10, 2022, Dr. Lisa DeNell Cook, UC Berkeley alumna, was confirmed to the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. She is the first Black woman to serve on the Fed in its 108-year history. As governor, Cook will take part in setting U.S. monetary policy and stabilizing the national financial system.
In the mid-1990s, Quirina Geary was a cashier at a Safeway store in Madera, California, and a young mother of two. While raised in a tribal community in California’s Central Valley, she did not speak her ancestral Mutsun language and wanted to fix that.
Intimidated, yet determined, she headed along with her sister, Clara Luna, to UC Berkeley to attend Breath of Life, a biennial workshop in which California Native Americans pair up with linguists and other scholars to revitalize Indigenous languages by sharing personal histories, knowledge and archival materials.
Halfway through Anjika Pai’s junior year of high school, Donald Trump began his U.S. presidency. As one of the few Indian Americans in the pastoral community of Jamison, Pennsylvania, Pai braced herself for an onslaught of xenophobia.
“People’s bigotry around that time was out on full display, and there was nothing I could do to make them like me because of the way I look, as a brown person,” she recalls.
UC Berkeley graduate student Justin Lee beat out nine other talented contestants at this year’s Grad Slam competition, taking home the top prize for his three-minute talk on how genetic engineering could be used to stop COVID from replicating inside the body.
The annual contest, now in its seventh year, challenges grad students to sum up their research in three pithy and jargon-free minutes that a non-research audience can understand.
Vice Chancellor for Equity & Inclusion Dania Matos sent the following message on Monday, May 16:
Dear Black leaders on campus,
The news of the anti-Black mass shooting in Buffalo this weekend is shocking and horrific. I imagine many of you felt deep sadness or anger as you watched the news unfold. I know I did. I still do.
Scientists have captured the first image of the black hole at the center of our galaxy, discovered by UC Berkeley professor emeritus Reinhard Genzel and UCLA professor Andrea Ghez.
Undergraduate students typically start their university years expecting the greatest challenges will come in the classroom or the lab, but the Class of 2022 also had to work through a pandemic, natural disasters and historic social turmoil.
It was fall 2019 when Katherine Snyder, an associate professor of English at UC Berkeley, first taught her course Climate Fiction. Wildfires were blazing across California, prompting a series of public safety power shut-offs across the state.
Nine UC Berkeley faculty members, seven of whom are L&S faculty, have been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAAS), bringing the total number of living AAAS members at Berkeley to about 275. This year, the following L&S members were elected:
Wendy Brown, Berkeley professor emerita of political science and currently the UPS Foundation Professor in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey
Six UC Berkeley’s faculty members were elected today to the National Academy of Sciences in recognition of their distinguished and continuing achievements in original research.
The six were among 120 members and 30 international members elected at the conclusion of the academy’s 159th annual meeting. Membership is a widely accepted mark of excellence in science and is considered one of the highest honors that a scientist can receive.
There are now 151 Berkeley faculty members in the academy.
The newly elected members are:
New research on the ownership of about 800,000 properties in Dubai co-authored By Gabriel Zucman, Director of The James M. and Cathleen D. Stone Center on Wealth and Income Inequality at UC Berkeley offers a unique window into cross-border real estate investments. Read more
The Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion (BCSR) is pleased to announce a $1,000,000 grant from the Henry Luce Foundation in support of a 4-year project with the Asian Pacific American Religions Research Initiative (APARRI). This grant will support APARRI in its mission to advance the interdisciplinary study of Asian Pacific American religions and to ensure the legacy of Asian Pacific Americans within the American religious and racial landscape.
Wendy Brown, Professor Emerita in the Charles and Louise Travers Department of Political Science, speaks to the New York Times about campus culture. Read more
As a kid growing up in Orange County, UC Berkeley biology professor Randy Schekman remembers collecting a jar of dirty pond scum from a nearby riverbed, sliding it under the lens of his toy microscope and being transfixed by the tiny, cellular world he saw.
That fascination led Schekman to an illustrious career: a Berkeley biology professorship and a 2013 Nobel Prize for groundbreaking research on cellular membranes.
UC Berkeley Dean of Social Sciences Raya has been announced as a new member of The Social Science Research Council Board of Directors. Read more
The College of Letters & Science is well represented on the 2022 UC Berkeley Distinguished Teaching Award list.
In Episode 8, "The Man Who Upended the Universe," UC Berkeley physics professor, Nobel Laureate, and astrophysicist Saul Perlmutter speaks with Alan Alda for an engaging conversation. From the Clear + Vivid Podcast:
After making the astonishing discovery that what he and his fellow cosmologists thought they knew about the universe was wrong, Saul Perlmutter began a course at his university explaining why catching mistakes is at the heart of science. It's also a lesson in life for the rest of us.
In episode 139 of Berkeley Talks, Damilola Ogunbiyi, CEO and Special Representative of the U.N. Secretary General for Sustainable Energy for All (SEforALL), gives the UC Berkeley Energy and Resources Group‘s 28th Annual Lecture on Energy and Environment. In the March 31, 2022 talk, Ogunbiyi discusses how to drive a just, inclusive and equitable transition to affordable and sustainable energy for all, and how the Russia-Ukraine war is affecting energy markets around the world.
For the third year in a row, the Consulate General of Mexico in San Francisco is partnering with Science at Cal at UC Berkeley to host "Dia de la Ciencia,” an event that gives the Spanish-speaking public an opportunity to interact with scientists from different fields and have a closer experience with real scientific activities! This event will be a virtual event showcasing six UC Berkeley scientists.
You can hear Hari Srinivasan’s confident voice in his academic research papers, his Daily Californiannewspaper articles and in his poetry and essays. But in person, you’re not likely to hear him speak.
That’s because the UC Berkeley psychology major’s ability to vocalize is severely limited due to regressive autism and a neurological disorder known as oral-motor apraxia.
It closed many doors to him. But not at Berkeley, and certainly not now.
UC Berkeley graduate schools and programs scored high in the 2023 Best Graduate Schools rankings recently released by U.S. News & World Report. Among them, the departments of English, history, sociology, and psychology scored #1. Graduate programs in biological sciences, clinical psychology, and mathematics came in third as well. Graduate programs in political science and economics each placed fourth.
Julia Bryan-Wilson, Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art and Director of the UC Berkeley Arts Research Center has curated an official collateral exhibition for the upcoming Venice Biennale, entitled Louise Nevelson: Persistence.The Biennale is one of the most prestigious art exhibitions in the world; there are only 30 official collateral events, and to be chosen is a huge honor and career highlight.
Amitav Ghosh, novelist, and essayist who is an award-winning author of several books of fiction and non-fiction will be in conversation with Dr. Kum Kum Bhavnani and Dr. Sugata Ray on April 23rd from 3-4:30 PM. Drawing from writings and against the backdrop of the pandemic and Black Lives Matter protests, Ghosh will discuss how the history of resource exploitation and the extractive mindset is directly connected to the deep inequality around us today.
Andrew Dillin, the Thomas and Stacey Siebel Distinguished Chair in Stem Cell Research and a Howard Hughes Medical investigator in UC Berkeley’s Department of Molecular and Cell Biology, shared the 2022 Lurie Prize in Biomedical Sciences for work on the aging process.
In Berkeley Talks episode 138, Harry Edwards, a renowned sports activist and UC Berkeley professor emeritus of sociology, discusses the intersections of race and sport, the history of predatory inclusion, athletes’ struggle for definitional authority and the power of sport to change society.
“You can change society by changing people’s perceptions and understandings of the games they play,” Edwards said at a March 1 campus event sponsored by the Institute for the Study of Societal Issues (ISSI) and Cal Athletics.
Dr. Julia Schaletzky, Executive Director of CEND, IVRI, and the Drug Discovery Institute, has been chosen as a speaker at the upcoming TEDxBerkeley Event for her talk: "Overcharged and Underserved - Blind Spots in Healthcare".
Payal Hathi, a PhD student in Demography and Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley and a Research Fellow at r.i.c.e., co-authors a major scientific article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
In this Berkeley Voices episode, Bree Rosenblum, a professor of global change biology at UC Berkeley, talks about why we need to stop blaming each other for the environmental crisis that we’re in, and instead confront its root causes and expand our ideas of what it means to be human on our planet. “I really think that if we’re not addressing culture at a really deep level, that we cannot address climate change,” said Rosenblum. “Do we want humanity to mean what it has meant in the past, or do we want to create a new meaning for our species and for our purpose?”
Over the two decades paleontologist Kevin Padian taught a freshman seminar called The Age of Dinosaurs, one question asked frequently by undergraduates stuck with him: Why are the arms of Tyrannosaurus rex so ridiculously short?
Today, postdoc J.J. Zanazzi was announced as a 2022 51 Pegasi b Fellow by the Heising-Simons Foundation. J.J. will complete his fellowship at UC Berkeley in the group of Eugene Chiang. The 51 Pegasi b Fellowship provides exceptional postdoctoral scientists with the opportunity to conduct theoretical, observational, and experimental research in planetary astronomy. J.J. will be the third 51 Peg Fellow (all hosted by Chiang) to take up residence at Berkeley since the fellowship’s inception in 2017.
On April 11 make sure to watch the 2022 Berkeley Grand Slam! Cheer on Berkeley graduate students (most of them from L&S!) as they showcase their research in a series of three-minute talks and vie for the “Berkeley Finalist” title. Attendees will get to vote on who wins the “People's Choice” award.
For 25 years, UC Berkeley biologist Robert Dudley has been intrigued by humans’ love of alcohol. In 2014, he wrote a book proposing that our attraction to booze arose millions of years ago, when our ape and monkey ancestors discovered that the scent of alcohol led them to ripe, fermenting and nutritious fruit.
A new study now supports this idea, which Dudley calls the “drunken monkey” hypothesis.
Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, have found that a drug once widely used to wean alcoholics off of drinking helps to improve sight in mice with retinal degeneration.
The drug may revive sight in humans with the inherited disease retinitis pigmentosa (RP), and perhaps in other vision disorders, including age-related macular degeneration.
As a Russian immigrant experiencing economic woes, Sofia Liashcheva expressed herself through art. As a UC Berkeley student, she speaks out against the war in Ukraine: “There is no excuse for the war, and I will do what I can to speak out against it. Because I stand with Ukraine.”
In the last three weeks, Russia’s political ambitions in Ukraine have escalated into a full-fledged invasion and war. As politicians attempt to negotiate a ceasefire, thousands of soldiers and hundreds of civilians have likely been killed, and more than two million people have fled the country into neighboring Poland, Hungary, Romania, and other countries. The conflict has upended international relations, raised questions about the dependence of the United States and Europe on Russian fossil fuels, and strained infrastructures of refugee assistance and resettlement.
In episode 136 of Berkeley Talks, UC Berkeley psychology professor Jack Gallant discusses functional brain mapping for understanding health, aging and disease.
Paul Pierson, an influential UC Berkeley scholar and author focused on the challenges confronting American democracy, has been named a fellow of the American Academy of Political and Social Science (AAPSS).
“People have been discussing the idea of a graduate program in Cognitive Science at Berkeley since at least the early 90s,” says Terry Regier, a Professor of Linguistics and a previous director of the Cognitive Science program. This long-hoped-for goal will finally come true, in the form of a PhD designated emphasis (DE), thanks to support from the Social Science Division, the Institute of Cognitive and Brain Sciences (ICBS), the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute, and a generous gift from Metta Murdaya ‘97 (Architecture and Cognitive Science).
Mentoring and support program activates students’ potential for success in biology, at Berkeley, and in life. This video illustrates the history and impact of the Biology Scholars program — and the importance of the community and legacy it creates.
In episode 135 of Berkeley Talks, UC Berkeley political scientist George Breslauer and economics professor Yuriy Gorodnichenko discuss Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine — what his motivations are and how they compare to Adolf Hitler’s and Joseph Stalin’s, if the invasion was avoidable and what should be done about it.
“I was born in 1991, when Ukraine declared its independence and the Soviet Union collapsed. I grew up in a rural area of western Ukraine in the Ivano-Frankivsk region in a home built by my grandparents. My parents and grandparents still live there. This is the place I call my home, no matter where I live.
When two neutron stars spiral into one another and merge to form a black hole — an event recorded in 2017 by gravitational wave detectors and telescopes worldwide — does it immediately become a black hole? Or does it take a while to spin down before gravitationally collapsing past the event horizon into a black hole?
Ongoing observations of that 2017 merger by the Chandra X-ray Observatory, an orbiting telescope, suggests the latter: that the merged object stuck around, likely for a mere second, before undergoing ultimate collapse.
To honor Black History Month 2022, we asked Black members of the UC Berkeley School of Public Health community what the month means to them. The answers we received were thoughtful, nuanced, emotional, and joyful. Click through the links to see our participant’s full thoughts on Black History Month, Black Lives Matter, Black experience in health care, and what UC Berkeley and Berkeley Public Health can do to amplify Black voices.
Physicists searching — unsuccessfully — for today’s most favored candidate for dark matter, the axion, have been looking in the wrong place, according to a new supercomputer simulation of how axions were produced shortly after the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago.
We are sad to report that Professor Emeritus Leo Bersani died on February 20, 2022.
Four UC Berkeley assistant professors have been awarded a Sloan Research Fellowship, one of the most prestigious honors given to early-career scientific researchers.
The four are among 118 new 2022 fellows announced this week by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. The fellowships recognize young scholars whose “achievements and potential place them among the next generation of scientific leaders in the U.S. and Canada,” the foundation said in an announcement.
At UC Berkeley, neuroscientist Dr. Daniela Kaufer and now UCSF post-doc Kimberly Long — along with UCSF and San Francisco VA scientists Radiologist Dr. Linda Chao and Psychiatrist Dr. Thomas Neylan — may have provided a convincing reason why some people are resilient to trauma and others are susceptible.
As a young boy in Portsmouth, a naval town in southern England dating back to Roman times, Andrew Stewart kindled his fascination with the ancient and medieval realms. While archaeology started off as a childhood hobby, it quickly blossomed into a career that has taken Stewart around the world, shedding light on human history.
What’s wrong with antitrust policy for regulating the tech sector? In his new book, Innovation Matters: Competition Policy for the High-Technology Economy, Richard Gilbert, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Economics at UC Berkeley, argues that regulators should be considering the effects of mergers and monopolies on innovation, rather than price.
UC Berkeley Chancellor Carol T. Christ and Interim Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost Catherine P. Koshland announced today the reappointment of Michael R. Botchan as Dean of the College of Letters & Science Division of Biological Sciences. Botchan has held this position since 2016 and is a professor of Integrative Biology and Molecular and Cell Biology.
Many of today’s marine invertebrates, including sponges and jellyfish, have chromosomes with the same ancient structure they inherited from their primitive ancestors more than 600 million years ago, according to a new study.
The surprise finding is a reminder that evolution is conservative — it keeps things that work well, like the organization of genes on a chromosome — and provides a key link between creatures alive today, including humans, and our very distant ancestors.
Between 1910 and 1970, about 6 million Black Americans moved from the rural South to cities in the North, the West and other parts of the United States. It’s known as the Great Migration.
Musicians who moved to these cities became ambassadors, says UC Berkeley history professor Waldo Martin, not only for the music of the South, but for the culture from which the music emerged. And the music was made and remade, and continues to be today.
The American philosopher, Judith Butler, has been awarded the Catalonia International Prize for their influential work in fields such as political philosophy and ethics.
The jury considered their "activism and thinking inspiring," showing "that life counts," Catalan president Pere Aragonès said during a press conference on Monday afternoon.
Aragonès also highlighted "the revolution and transformation their work has had on feminist philosophy, their activism for lesbian and gay rights, and their support for the queer community."
Gross domestic product is a useful metric of a nation’s economic success, but what you’d also like to know is who reaps the benefit when it grows — the rich, the poor, the middle class or everyone. During the pandemic, for example, we know that government benefits helped the poor, while stimulative monetary policy pushed up stock prices and benefited the rich in particular. What was the net result?
Professor Alex Filippenko has been awarded the American Astronomical Society’s 2022 Education Prize “for his passionate and wildly popular teaching of non-science majors; his mentoring of hundreds of teaching assistants and undergraduate research students; his dedication to public education through lectures, TV documentaries, and video courses; his textbook and other popular writings; and his leadership in saving Lick Observatory, a prominent California observatory that faced defunding in 2014.”
UC Berkeley economists have launched a powerful new web tool that allows users to track, almost in real time, how economic growth and public policy affect the distribution of income and wealth among classes in the United States.
In observance of Black History Month, we celebrate the rich array of organizations and resources created by and for the Black community at Berkeley. Berkeley Diversity has created this comprehensive site with news stories, events, and resource guides that amplify Black Excellence on our campus.
Nine members of the UC Berkeley community – including eight faculty and one staff member — have been elected American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) fellows, one of the most distinctive honors within the scientific community. The 2021 class of AAAS fellows includes 564 scientists, engineers and innovators who are being recognized for their scientifically and socially distinguished achievements.
NASA’s latest and snazziest mission, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), launched on Christmas Day, deployed its 21-foot-wide mirror a mere two weeks ago and reached its orbital destination earlier this week. With a flashy new telescope now nearly a reality, astronomers at the University of California, Berkeley, are chomping at the bit to start observing.
To engage students in course materials, educators often turn to cutting-edge tools. As technology progresses, new methods offer an increasingly wide array of options for professors. Forms of communication and inquiry have indeed transformed, but what if a form that dates back thousands of years can provide students with new insights? What if practices from the past can aid us in understanding the future?
Michigan State University economist and professor Lisa D. Cook today was nominated by President Joe Biden to the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. If confirmed, Cook will be the first Black woman to serve on the board in its 108-year history. Professor Cook is an economist at Michigan State University who has researched racial disparities and labor markets.
Dear Campus Community,
I am pleased to announce that Benjamin E. Hermalin has been chosen to serve as our next executive vice chancellor and provost following a competitive national search that attracted a large number of highly qualified candidates. Ben will begin transitioning into the role over the next several months, with his appointment effective on July 1, 2022.
All of human experience - our perceptions, thoughts, feelings, desires, plans and actions - reflect the coordinated activity of a complex network of hundreds of distinct areas and modules within the brain. Disorders of these brain networks that occur during development, aging, or due to neurological disease, can have profound effects on quality of life. Therefore, understanding how information is represented and processed in this network during daily life is a major challenge for medicine.
UC Berkeley economist Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas was named the chief economist of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), one of the most prestigious and influential positions in the sphere of global economics.
A recent study links anxiety behavior in rats, as well as post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in military veterans, to increased myelin — a substance that expedites communication between neurons — in areas of the brain associated with emotions and memory.
Astronomers have long suspected that massive stars become red supergiants at the end of their lives, hiccup a few times and then explode in a classic supernova visible across the universe. But no one had ever seen this scenario play out in a single star.
Now, thanks to coordinated observations by numerous ground- and space-based telescopes, astronomers have recorded such a sequence for a star about 120 million light years from Earth and, before it collapsed and exploded, about 10 times the mass of the sun.
Three UC Berkeley astronomers have been named 2022 Fellows of the American Astronomical Society (AAS), an accolade the society instituted in 2020 to honor members for extraordinary achievement and service.
UC Berkeley is proud to announce its inaugural class of Shurl and Kay Curci Foundation Ph.D. scholars. The university received $1.78 million to support this pilot program, providing three years of incoming cohorts of six graduate students with two years of funding.
Majors: Nutritional Science (Rausser College of Natural Resources) and Psychology (College of Letters & Science) Nearly four decades after UC Berkeley alumnus Steven Sidener, Class of 1982, earned his economics degree, his legacy will carry on to impact generations of Berkeley graduate students. Sidener passed away in August 2020 at the age of 62, just 8 days shy of his 63rd birthday. Shortly after, the Department of Economics received a $10.5M estate gift that will extend Sidener’s enduring connection to the university and department.
The graduating class of 2021 shared a single emotion: preservation. Being able to survive the most recent years strengthened the class and created a sense of connection and family between its members.
During Saturday’s commencement, the host, campus Associate Dean of Students Alfred Day, recognized the original settlers of the Berkeley area, the Huchiun. He acknowledged everyone benefits from the land in the Berkeley area and that it is the responsibility of the UC Berkeley community to acknowledge these original residents and their current prosperity.
Dear friends,
I am distressed to share the news that the distinguished historian of modern France and our former colleague Tyler Stovall passed away unexpectedly on Friday, December 10, at the age of sixty-seven.
Our laptops and smartphones are compact yet powerful because of silicon microelectronics, also known as microchips or chips, the tiny brains behind the digital brawn of almost every modern device.
But such modern convenience comes at a cost. By 2030, about 25% of the world’s energy – most of which is produced by burning carbon-rich fossil fuels – could be consumed by electronic devices if nothing is done to make them more energy efficient.
Robert L. “Bob” Powell passed away on December 13, 2021. He passed peacefully in his home, in the company of friends.
Dear Colleagues and Friends in the College of Letters & Science,
As the fall semester comes to a close, I am writing to say thank you and congratulations, and to wish you a restful and joyous winter break.
Varsha Sarveshwar '20, a UC Berkeley College of Letters & Science alumna, has received one of the world's most prestigious honors for academic excellence—the Rhodes Scholarship.The 2022 World Inequality report, authored by Lucas Chancel, Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, and Gabriel Zucman, also found that wealth inequality had a strong correlation to carbon emissions and climate change goals. The poorest half of the population in rich countries is already at (or near) the 2030 climate targets in terms of emission rates, but that’s not the case for the top 50%.
Nikki Jones, a celebrated scholar and professor at UC Berkeley, was appointed the H. Michael and Jeanne Williams Professor and Department Chair for African American Studies in the College of Letters & Science.
Congratulations to our fellow community members in the College of Letters & Science recognized as 2020 and 2021 Excellence in Advising and Student Services Awards winners!
Raffaella Margutti is an associate professor of astronomy at UC Berkeley's College of Letters & Science, Division of Mathematics & Physical Sciences. In 2021, Margutti was awarded the 2022 New Horizons in Physics Prize, awarded every year to early-career scientists by the Breakthrough Prize Foundation. 
Sarafina Nance, a Ph.D candidate in astrophysics at UC Berkeley, examines exploding stars to better understand the composition, evolution and fate of the universe. An avid science communicator, she wrote a children's book about astronomy, hosted the digital series Constellations and has a deal to publish her memoir Starstruck.
Adam Marcus, Daniel Spielman, and Nikhil Srivastava will receive the 2022 Ciprian Foias Prize in Operator Theory.
The months-long rainy season, or monsoon, that drenches northwestern Mexico each summer, reaching into Arizona and New Mexico and often as far north as Colorado and Northern California, is unlike any monsoon in the world, according to a new analysis by William Boos, UC Berkeley associate professor of earth and planetary science and first author of a paper detailing the findings that appeared last week in the journal Nature
Chris Gould is a junior transfer in the Fung Fellowship Conservation + Tech track studying economics. Here, he shares his experience in the Army, goal to become a CPA and vision to combat the environmental crisis.
Jenina Yutuc is a Fung Fellows Honors student, majoring in interdisciplinary studies and minoring in global poverty & practice. Here, she shares her experiences as a second-year fellow, her honors team project, and her ambitions and reflections as an aspiring architect.Monarch butterflies and their close relatives thrive on poisonous milkweed, thanks to genetic mutations that block the effects of the plant’s toxins while allowing the poisons to accumulate in the caterpillar or adult insects as deterrents to hungry predators.
Turns out some of those insect-eating predators evolved similar mutations in order to feast on monarchs.
A sacred Jewish object called a mezuzah that is in the collection of UC Berkeley’s Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life will soon be hung in the official Washington, D.C., residence of Vice President Kamala Harris and her husband, Doug Emhoff.
Carissa Samuel is a Health + Tech fellow studying Molecular and Cellular Biology (MCB) with a minor in Dance and Performance studies. Here, she shares more about her personal and professional interests and why she chose the Fung Fellowship.
Alan Munoz is a recent UC Berkeley graduate with a BA in Political Economy. As an alumnus of the Fung Fellowship, having been a part of the program for two years, he shares what he’s been doing after graduation and how the fellowship shaped his professional interests in public health and design.
At the recent Times Higher Education Teaching Excellence Summit, UC Berkeley Dean of Arts + Humanities Sara Guyer spoke in a session on "The value of critical thinking in a post-pandemic world." Guyer spoke to the importance of critical thinking as a core value at Berkeley, "especially in th
In Berkeley Talks episode 128, a panel of artists, organizers and academics discuss UC Berkeley professor Eric Stanley’s 2021 book, Atmospheres of Violence: Structuring Antagonism and the Trans/Queer Ungovernable, which interrogates why, in a time when LGBT rights are advancing in the U.S., anti-trans violence continues to rise.
In 2015, as a Ph.D. student at UC Santa Cruz, Juniper Harrower was planning to go back to Costa Rica, where she’d been working in the cloud forests to study patterns of forest regeneration. But then she learned something — something heart-wrenching — that would change the path of her research.
“Scientists had just found out that Joshua trees were really impacted by climate change and could be gone from the National Park within 100 years,” said Harrower. “When I read that, it was such a gut punch.”
As opponents of critical race theory continue to gather at school boards across the country protesting its use in classrooms, it has become evident that the study of racism in America continues to be seen, by some, as trivial.
For Peter Nelson, stepping foot on the UC Berkeley campus last January as a new faculty member, after 3 1/2 years on the San Diego State University faculty, was a return to his alma mater, where he earned his master’s and doctoral degrees in anthropology.
Few groups of animals encapsulate the extremes of longevity more than fish. While coral reef pygmy govies survive for less than ten weeks, Greenland sharks can endure more than 500 years. So when a team of biologists at the University of California, Berkeley, wanted to explore the genetics of aging, they grabbed their fishing gear.
Berkeley neuroscientist Yang Dan will help conduct an ambitious $9 million project exploring how the circuitry in the brain progressively goes awry in patients suffering from Parkinson’s disease.
The Government of Japan announces Professor Alan Auerbach as one of two recipients of the 2021 Autumn Conferment of Japanese Decorations.
Alan Auerbach is the Robert D. Burch Professor of Economics and Law Director, Robert D. Burch Center for Tax Policy and Public Finance.
Bathsheba Demuth (Ph.D. '17) has been awarded the John H. Dunning Prize by the AHA for her book Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait (W.W. Norton, 2019). Demuth is currently an Assistant Professor of History & Environment and Society at Brown University. The John H.
Alumnus Bobby Lee (Ph.D.
For the eighth straight year, UC Berkeley tops the list of the world’s best public universities and remains the fourth-best university overall in U.S. News & World Report’s 2022 global universities rankings.
UC Berkeley has announced the addition of a new health and wellness minor in the College of Letters & Science. This interdisciplinary minor centers on a three-course core, covering the cultural, psychological, and physiological aspects of health and wellness.
“There’s this funny, almost magical aspect of following curiosity-based research, when you just try to understand how the world works,” said professor of physics, Saul Perlmutter, reflecting on the ingenuity that is intrinsic to basic research. “Somehow, that’s made it possible for us to leapfrog all sorts of problems.”
Join us on October 20th at 5pm Pacific to welcome poet and Cave Canem co-founder Cornelius Eady to the ARC virtual stage. He will be joined by two emerging poets who have benefitted from his teaching and mentorship in the Cave Canem Black artists collective: Morgan Parker (author of Magical Negro) and Cameron Awkward Rich (author of Dispatch).
In Berkeley Talks episode 125, a panel of leading UC Berkeley experts describe the harms of disinformation and explore potential solutions to its spread, from measures to strengthen old-school local news media to government regulation of tech titans like Facebook and Twitter.
In January 2015, 15-year-old Mariana Soto Sanchez woke up one Saturday morning at her home in Ontario, California, with weakness in her hand. Within minutes, the feeling had spread throughout her body. Her parents rushed her to the hospital. By the time they got there, she had total paralysis.
When you clicked to read this story, a band of cells across the top of your brain sent signals down your spine and out to your hand to tell the muscles in your index finger to press down with just the right amount of pressure to activate your mouse or track pad.
“At the end of the day, despite all the trials and tribulations we go through as Latinx students, it’s our communities and identities that ground us as we pursue our research projects,” Ph.D. candidate Hector Callejas said. (Photo by Edgar Castrejón)
David Julius, one of today’s winners of the 2021 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, was a standout even as a graduate student at UC Berkeley in the 1970s and ’80s, according to one of his mentors, 2013 Nobel laureate Randy Schekman.
CBS news foreign correspondent Chris Liversay reports the race to succeed Angela Merkel and her legacy as Germany's leader for 16 years.
The Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), the nation’s largest biomedical research foundation, announced today the appointment of 33 American scientists as investigators, and three of them are from the University of California, Berkeley.
Astrophysicist Saul Perlmutter and climate scientist Inez Fung were tapped to join the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST), the White House announced today.
The Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life has re-opened to the public with a new exhibition, Time Capsules, The Magnes: 10 Years at UC Berkele
Joe Goode, professor and department chair of UC Berkeley's Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies, is also the artistic director of Joe Goode Performance Group. His current work, "Time of Change," was recently featured in the San Francisco Chronicle's Datebook.
Latinx Heritage Month recognizes, honors, and celebrates the resilience, contributions, and cultures of Latinx, Chicanx, and all Latinx-identified folx from America and with ancestors from Mexico, the Caribbean, Spain, and Central and South America.
Raffaella Margutti, a newly arrived associate professor of astronomy, and Norman Yao, an assistant professor of physics, are among nine winners of the 2022 New Horizons in Physics Prize, awarded every year to early-career scientists by the Breakthrough Prize Foundation.
Public universities can deliver the most outstanding education to the broadest range of students at the most affordable price. That’s the message of Forbes’ 2021 ranking of top colleges.
For the first time ever on a national ranking of America’s best colleges, a public school, the University of California at Berkeley, is in the No. 1 spot (In 2009 West Point topped our list, but military academies are slightly different animals). Of the top 25 schools in the Forbes ranking, six are public, including three other U.C.s, the University of Michigan and the University of Florida.
The Sam Dubal Fellowship in Critical Cultural and Medical Anthropology honors the legacy of Sam Dubal, M.D., Ph.D. ’15, as an anthropologist, activist, medical doctor, professor, and ardent contributor to many vibrant intellectual communities. Dubal’s family generously established a fellowship following his tragic disappearance during a hike on Mt. Rainier in October 2020.
Five new faculty members at UC Berkeley this fall hail from disparate U.S. states, academic disciplines and personal backgrounds. But they’re already forming a team partnered around one critical global issue — climate equity and environmental justice — as part of six interdisciplinary faculty “cluster hires” underway on campus.
Timothy Douglas White, UC Berkeley Professor of Integrative Biology in the College of Letters & Science and Director of the Human Evolution Research Center, received the prestigious International Prize for Biology on August 31.
A new Youtube video by Econimate asks whether food labels can help combat obesity.
The video is based on new research by Berkeley Economics professor Nano Barahona and Ph.D. student Cristóbal Otero, Sebastián Otero (Stanford), and Joshua Kim, on the equilibrium effects of food labeling policies.” Based on a new working paper.
Watch the video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HWHGwxJwvP4
Scientists have taken the clearest picture yet of electronic particles that make up a mysterious magnetic state called a quantum spin liquid (QSL). The achievement could facilitate the development of superfast quantum computers and energy-efficient superconductors. The scientists are the first to capture an image of how electrons in a QSL decompose into spin-like particles called spinons and charge-like particles called chargons.
From ASUC Student President and political economy major, Chaka Tellem:
Stephen Miller, a professor emeritus of classics who for nearly 50 years led UC Berkeley’s archaeological excavation in Greece of a site of the ancient Panhellenic Games, died Aug. 11 in a Greek hospital. The Greek Reporter, an international news outlet, reported that 79-year-old Miller died that morning following a hemodialysis treatment.
Steven Kahn of Stanford University has been appointed the next dean of the Division of Mathematical and Physical Sciences (MPS) in the UC Berkeley College of Letters & Science. This move marks a homecoming for Kahn, as he obtained his Ph.D. in physics from UC Berkeley and served as professor of physics and astronomy for 15 years.
Leon Litwack, a legendary American historian who influenced generations of students with his energizing teaching and lectures, passed away on Aug. 5. He was 91.
Psychologist Alison Gopnik, a world-renowned expert in child development and author of several popular books including The Scientist in the Crib, The Philosophical Baby, and The Gardener and the Carpenter, has won the 2021 Carl Sagan Prize for Science Popularization.
One Saturday afternoon a few years ago, Richard Allen was riding Bay Area Rapid Transit between Berkeley and Oakland when the train suddenly stopped. "We've had an alert for an earthquake," the conductor announced. "We're going to assess the situation and decide what to do." Allen, the director of the Seismological Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley, had spent much of the previous two decades working toward that moment. After a few minutes' orderly wait, the train's journey resumed.
Frequent, rapid testing for COVID-19 is critical to controlling the spread of outbreaks, especially as new, more transmissible variants emerge.
While today’s gold standard COVID-19 diagnostic test, which uses qRT-PCR — quantitative reverse-transcriptase-polymerase chain reaction (PCR) — is extremely sensitive, detecting down to one copy of RNA per microliter, it requires specialized equipment, a runtime of several hours and a centralized laboratory facility. As a result, testing typically takes at least one to two days.
In treetops all around the world, squirrels leap meters through the air to get from branch to branch. In this natural arena the squirrels scurry around to find morsels of food, all the while trying to evade occasional airborne predators such as hawks. But the speed and ease with which they navigate the challenging and unpredictable canopy environment is “spectacular,” says University of California, Berkeley, biomechanics researcher Robert Full. The animals easily land leaps several times the length of their body. And we do not really know how they do it, Full says.
How do poisonous animals like the hooded pitohui, a small, drab bird whose orange and black feathers are laced with poison, keep from poisoning themselves? For decades, the best theory has been that the birds and frogs evolved specially adapted sodium channels. But a study in the Journal of General Physiology overturns that notion.
The Division of Social Sciences in the College of Letters & Science received a grant totaling nearly $500K from the UC Office of the President for its proposal, Advancing Faculty Diversity in the Social Sciences. Part of the UC’s systemwide Advancing Faculty Diversity (AFD) program, this funding seeks to improve faculty diversity and enrich teaching, research and service missions among all UC campuses.
Linda Kinstler, Ph.D. candidate in the Rhetoric Department, was recently featured in The New York Times Sunday Review. Her essay, "Can Silicon Valley Find God?" is an exploration of the relationship between spirituality and technology, between the digital and the divine. It’s the product of over a year of reporting and dozens of conversations with religious leaders, programmers, and believers of all faiths about how our devices are indeterminately altering our interior lives.
When the customs agent at San Francisco International Airport asked Reinhard Genzel why he was visiting America, Genzel had a pretty good answer ready.
“I said, ‘Well, I’m an emeritus professor from UC Berkeley, and this is my first opportunity to return since becoming a Nobel laureate,’” Genzel said. “People nearby started clapping.”
Out of 16 Golden Bears in action as the Tokyo Olympics get underway, a dozen have attended UC Berkeley's College of Letters & Science. We are proud to have athletes who majored in the broad range of subjects offered at L&S, from sociology to American Studies to molecular and cell biology. These athletes are representing several different countries and we wish them the best of luck in the coming games. Follow CalBears.com for daily coverage of the Olympics and read on for more detail.
Alicia Hayes, UC Berkeley Prestigious Scholarships Manager and Advisor in the Office of Undergraduate Research (OURS), was awarded the 2021 McCray Exemplary Service Award from the National Association of Fellowships Advisors (
It’s no secret that UC Berkeley attracts outstanding women from all walks of life, all over the world, to pursue their educational goals. As these women transition from academic to professional careers, having a network of Cal alumnae ready and available for support can be a transformative benefit. In 2019, Jennifer Youstra ‘88 and Jessica Rothenberg-Aalami ‘94 partnered with the Social Sciences division in the College of Letters & Science to formally establish such a network and created the UC Berkeley Women in Leadership Circle (WILC).
A decade after scientists discovered that lab rats will rescue a fellow rat in distress, but not a rat they consider an outsider, new UC Berkeley research pinpoints the brain regions that drive rats to prioritize their nearest and dearest in times of crisis. It also suggests humans may share the same neural bias.
The findings, published today, Tuesday, July 13, in the journal eLife, suggest that altruism, whether in rodents or humans, is motivated by social bonding and familiarity rather than sympathy or guilt.
In 2019, Anaïs Llorens and Athina Tzovara — one a current, the other a former University of California, Berkeley, postdoctoral scholar at the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute (HWNI) — were attending a scientific meeting and pleased that one session, on gender bias in academia, attracted nearly a full house. The problem: The audience of some 300 was almost all women.
Congratulations to PhD student, Bruno Anaya Ortiz, for becoming a Berkeley Empirical Legal Studies (BELS) Fellow for 2021-2022. Ortiz is a fifth-year student in the Rhetoric Department.
Associate Professor of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley, director of the James M. and Cathleen D. Stone Center on Wealth and Income Inequality at UC Berkeley Gabriel Zucman writes in a co-authored op-ed in the New York Times:
Professor Richard Allen, director of the Berkeley Seismology Lab and former chair of the Department of Earth and Planetary Science, has been named interim dean for the Division of Mathematical & Physical Sciences in the College of Letters & Scie
Before Elaine Kim came to Berkeley as a Ph.D. student in 1968, she was used to being the only Asian person in the room. Kim, who is Korean American, was born in New York and raised in a predominantly working class white suburb of Washington, D.C., the daughter of a migrant farmworker mother and waiter-turned-diplomat father.
Most butterflies sport colorful, eye-catching patterns on their wings. But some species, like the glasswing butterfly, use mostly transparent wings to hide in plain sight.
The Asian American wealth gap, explained in a comic: By Lok Siu, cultural anthropologist and Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley
Read the Vox article: https://www.vox.com/identities/22530103/asians-americans-wealth-income-gap-crazy-rich-model-minority
UC Berkeley embraces the declaration of Juneteenth as a national holiday.
Bay Area scientists have captured the real-time electrical activity of a beating heart, using a sheet of graphene to record an optical image — almost like a video camera — of the faint electric fields generated by the rhythmic firing of the heart’s muscle cells.
The Supreme Court can’t object to levies on their unrealized capital gains, say Berkeley Economics professors Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman in a Washington Post Op-ed.
Read the article: https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2021/04/14/wealth-tax-capital-gains-billionaires/
In a Vox article, Professor Gabriel Zucman, Director of the UC Berkeley James M. and Cathleen D. Stone Center on Wealth and Income Inequality discusses his research and the $1.8 trillion plan to raise taxes.
When Grace Lavery joined UC Berkeley’s English department in 2013, she didn’t know that she would become one of the most followed trans scholars in the world on social media and an outspoken advocate for the trans community.
An education program developed at UC Berkeley aimed at stamping out antisemitism on campus is finding a national audience, with help from a $25,000 grant and a video that strives to put a complex history into simpler terms.
Here’s news that will shake you to your core: Earth’s solid-iron centre is growing faster on one side than the other. And experts can’t explain why.
Pedro De Anda Plascencia recently graduated with two degrees in English and political science from the College of Letters & Science. He is an Achievement Award Program (TAAP) Scholar in UC Berkeley's Class of 2021.
"Diversity in STEM enhances discovery and provides a catalyst for social change by enabling an equity of experience. Our ultimate goal is to diversify the next generation of STEM leaders and empower them to achieve their academic and professional aspirations. We aim to change the face of science and technology."
Jack Tseng, UC Berkeley assistant professor of integrative biology, explains his research on juvenile T. rexes and what the findings tell us about the lifestyle of the teenage tyrannosaur.
Frank F. Davis ‘55, UC Berkeley alumnus and inventor of a process used in the Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines, died of pneumonia on May 19. He was 100.
Congratulations to the Class of 2021! This year’s graduation was one-of-a-kind as more than 6,400 UC Berkeley graduates participated in a five-day-long procession ceremony at the Greek Theatre.
Two UC Berkeley faculty members from the College of Letters & Science, Daniel Aldana Cohen and Ellora Derenoncourt, have been named CIFAR Azrieli Global Scholars.
How having the ‘wrong’ address almost cost one graduate everything: Aurora Lopez, John Gardner Public Service Fellow, on her path to UC Berkeley
Lopez is going to move to Washington, D.C., where she she plans to pursue a congressional fellowship with the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations or work for the U.S. Department of State.
Read the story:
On May 18th, Chancellor Carol Christ awarded the Berkeley Citation to Bob Jacobsen, Dean of Undergraduate Studies in the College of Letters and Science.
In March, UC Berkeley linguist Zachary O’Hagan called Florida Atlantic University anthropologist Gerald Weiss to ask about audio recordings that Weiss had made in the 1960s and ‘70s of Ashaninka people, the largest Indigenous group living in Peru’s Amazon rainforest.
O’Hagan figured they’d discuss their shared passion for the Peruvian Amazon and the need to preserve early records of the region’s languages and cultures.
Akiko Thomson-Guevera continues to give back to the sports world, years after hanging up her goggles.
In this episode of Berkeley Talks, Adewale “Wally” Adeyemo, the deputy secretary of the U.S. Department of the Treasury and UC Berkeley alumnus, delivers the keynote address at Berkeley’s commencement on Saturday, May 15.
Kim Nalley graduated in May 2021 with a Ph.D. in history from the College of Letters & Science. In her dissertation, “G.I. Jazz,” she looks at African Americans as jazz artists, as well as occupiers, in post-World War II Germany.
In the second part of a three-part series, Philip Kan Gotanda, playwright and UC Berkeley professor in the division of Arts & Humanities, discusses how he began to write music during the emerging Asian American movement, which began at Berkeley in the late 1960s. And how, after his music career didn’t take off as he’d hoped, he went to law school, where he wrote his first play. Now, he’s one of the most prolific playwrights of Asian American-themed work in the United States.
Julie Thao graduates this year with a bachelor’s in Asian American and Asian diaspora studies from the Department of Ethnic Studies, and a minor in global public health. Here, Thao reflects on the impact of violence and war on her family, and why Hmong American history is ignored.
Graduating CalNerds scholar Jose Magana, a senior studying geophysics and seismology in the Earth and Planetary Sciences department, was uprooted from his life in El Salvador and forced to flee his country as an undocumented refugee.
Images captured by two different telescopes are showing our solar system's largest planet in a new light.
In the face of daunting global challenges, such as climate change and a catastrophic pandemic, it is evident that the world urgently needs science-based solutions to tackle society’s greatest problems.
Anna Sharpe has never done something because it was easy. Quite the opposite. If it’s hard — if it’ll take all she’s got, if it’ll leave her in pieces, she’s interested. Because it shows that it means something. That it matters.
As the country continues to confront a history of racial injustice, deeply rooted in the legacy of slavery and systemic racism, today, Governor Gavin Newsom appointed five individuals to serve on the newly formed Task Force to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African Americans. The formation of this task force was made possible by the Governor’s signing of AB 3121, authored by then-Assemblymember Shirley Weber (D-San Diego), which established a nine-member task force to inform Californians about slavery and explore ways the state might provide reparations.
On Tuesday, officials in Washington state flipped the switch that enables earthquake early warnings to be disseminated to residents of the state. Washington joins California and Oregon, where such warnings are already enabled, in making “ShakeAlert,” a high-tech warning system that can provide notice seconds before the ground starts shaking, a reality for more than 50 million Americans.
The fundamental idea was out there: Cosmologists could learn the secrets of the early universe if only they found a way to decipher a riddle in the Cosmic Microwave Background. In 1997, two papers published back to back in Physical Review Letters showed them how.
Marc Kamionkowski, Uroš Seljak, and Matias Zaldarriaga are the recipients of the 2021 Gruber Cosmology Prize for their authorship of those papers as well as for numerous other contributions to cosmology since the mid-1990s.
On the evening of March 16, 2021, a man opened fire in three Atlanta-area businesses and killed eight people, six of whom were of Asian descent. In response to those tragic shootings, “#StopAsianHate” and “#AsiansAreHumansToo” became all too familiar refrains as thousands across the country protested the rising tide of anti-Asian bias and violence. Gene Luen Yang, a renowned cartoonist, turned to his pen and paper and used the medium of comics to channel his own thoughts and emotions.
Republished from BCSR:
As part of our series spotlighting UC Berkeley graduate student research, BCSR recently had the opportunity to sit down with Rachel Lim, a PhD Candidate in Ethnic Studies studying Korean diaspora in the Americas. She is completing a dissertation entitled “Itinerant Belonging: Korean Transnational Migration to and from Mexico.” Her work has been recently published or is forthcoming in The Journal of Asian American Studies and Verge: Studies in Global Asias.
Renowned evolutionary biologist David Wake, the world’s leading expert on salamanders and among the first to warn of a precipitous decline in frog, salamander and other amphibian populations worldwide, died peacefully at his home in Oakland, California, on April 29.
The professor emeritus of integrative biology at the University of California, Berkeley, and former director of the campus’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology (MVZ) was 84.
The official “new normal” for the U.S. climate is warmer than ever before — and the changes are ominous for California, experts say. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration on Tuesday released its new climate averages, based on the 30-year period from 1991 to 2020. The averages, known as “climate normals,” are updated every 10 years, and they show most of the country, including California, heating up.
On April 19, 2021, Talmadge King, Dean of the UCSF School of Medicine, issued special commendations to 21 UC Berkeley undergraduate students who made exceptional contributions to their COVID response in 2020-2021. As part of UCSF’s service-learning program, the Patient Support Corps, students received training to serve as additional patient navigators on their COVID hotline. Students connected with callers to assist them with appropriate strategies for testing, tracing, treatment, return-to-work, and vaccination.
The European house mouse has invaded nearly every corner of the Americas since it was introduced by colonizers a few hundred years ago, and now lives practically everywhere humans store their food.
Yet in that relatively short time span — 400 to 600 mouse generations — populations on the East and West Coasts have changed their body size and nest building behavior in nearly identical ways to adapt to similar environmental conditions, according to a new study by biologists at the University of California, Berkeley.
Gabriel Zucman, associate professor of economics at the UC Berkeley College of Letters & Science, associate professor of public policy at the Goldman School of Public Policy, and director of the James M. and Cathleen D.
David Card, an economist in the College of Letters & Science's Social Sciences Division, was one of three UC Berkeley faculty members elected to join the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), a 158-year-old institution whose membership recognizes distinguished achievements in original research.
Paul Rabinow, a world-renowned anthropologist, theorist and interlocutor of French philosopher Michel Foucault, his former comrade, died from cancer at his home in Berkeley on April 6. He was 76.
A professor emeritus of anthropology, Rabinow joined the UC Berkeley faculty in 1978 after earning his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. He retired in 2019.
A Southern California high school junior has built a low-cost seismometer device that delivers earthquake early warnings for homes and businesses. Costing less than $100 for her to make today, the seismometer could someday be a regular household safety device akin to a smart smoke detector, says its inventor Vivien He. She began reading about earthquake early warning and building a giant three-ring binder of highlighted papers, including many from SSA journals. One of her favorite researchers in the field was Richard M. Allen, director of the Berkeley Seismology Lab.
In a recent Fiat Vox podcast, Anne Brice interviewed Berkeley MFA student Fred DeWitt. DeWitt, 61, shares in his own words what the Black Panthers meant to him as a young boy growing up in the Bay Area, how Barack Obama’s election as president inspired him to go back to school to study art, and the complicated nature of honoring the lives of people who never wanted to be remembered for their deaths. His MFA show will be at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) in June.
Six UC Berkeley faculty members and top scholars have been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAAS), a 241-year-old organization honoring the country’s most accomplished artists, scholars, scientists and leaders who help solve the world’s most urgent challenges.
The blood-brain barrier deteriorates with aging, but animal studies indicate repairs can make old brains look young again.
NPR's Forum spoke to Nikki Jones, professor of African American Studies, UC Berkeley, author of "The Chosen Ones: Black Men and the Politics of Redemption," about the results of the Derek Chauvin trial and the meaning of justice in America.
How many Tyrannosaurus rexes roamed North America during the Cretaceous period?
That’s a question Charles Marshall pestered his paleontologist colleagues with for years until he finally teamed up with his students to find an answer.
Professor Larry Hyman has been awarded the rank of Chevalier in the Ordre des Palmes académiques (Order of Academic Palms)
Hyman’s award recognizes his extraordinary contributions to strengthening French and U.S. collaboration as longtime Director of the France-Berkeley Fund.
Sara Guyer of the University of Wisconsin-Madison has been appointed the next dean of Arts and Humanities in the UC Berkeley College of Letters & Science.
On a solemn late-summer afternoon in 2001, just a few days after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, UC Berkeley student body president Wally Adeyemo stood with campus leaders on the steps of Doe Library and offered consolation and hope to the grief-stricken campus community.
Jenny Kwon, his friend since the early days of their freshman year, was among the 12,000 people on Memorial Glade that day, listening to insights that Adeyemo had drawn from the Bible and from history, and to his eloquent appealthat they should rise above anger and the desire for retribution.
On April 8, 2021, Guggenheim Fellowships were awarded to four UC Berkeley professors amongst a diverse group of 184 artists, scholars, and scientists. These prestigious fellowships acknowledge those with notable achievements and an exceptional capacity for productive scholarship. Two of this year’s recipients are faculty members in the College of Letters and Science:
Jennifer Johnson-Hanks, Chair of the Berkeley Division of the Senate and Professor of Demography and Sociology, has been named the next executive dean of UC Berkeley’s College of Letters & Science (L&S).
Robert Middlekauff, a prolific scholar of early American history who held several top leadership positions at UC Berkeley, died from complications of a stroke on March 10 at his home in Pleasanton, California. He was 91.
UC Berkeley’s College of Letters and Science received national recognition in the 2022 U.S. News & World Report rankings of graduate programs. English, History, and Sociology all received #1 rankings, underlining the exceptional quality and depth of graduate education at L&S, and over thirty L&S programs and specialties earned top ten rankings this year.
Tina (‘91, East Asian Languages and Economics) and David Walton (‘86, JD in Law) both graduated from UC Berkeley, though they only first met after their graduation, when they were both living in Seattle. Their marriage led them first to Hong Kong, and eventually to their permanent home in Singapore. There, David is the Deputy Managing Director and Chief Operating Officer for BOC Aviation and Tina is a published author.
On April 12, UC Berkeley will host: Race and Responsibility: A Conversation on Black-Jewish Relations and the Fight for Equal Justice
How are the historical experiences of the Black and Jewish communities at once distinct and interconnected? Should we see efforts to combat racism and antisemitism as separate struggles? What are African Americans’ and Jews’ responsibilities to one another in America’s current racial reckoning? In this conversation, Eric K.
In 2014, two years after her Nobel Prize-winning invention of CRISPR-Cas9 genome editing, Jennifer Doudna thought the technology was mature enough to tackle a cure for a devastating hereditary disorder, sickle cell disease, that afflicts millions of people around the world, most of them of African descent. Mobilizing colleagues in the then-new Innovative Genome Institute (IGI) — a joint research collaboration between the University of California, Berkeley, and UC San Francisco — they sought to repair the single mutation that makes red blood cells warp and clog arteries, causing
Please join us on April 1 at 5pm PDT for a panel discussion on rising anti-Asian violence in America. This timely panel will consider both the long history of anti-Asian racism and present-day patterns linked to the pandemic and to cultural anxieties about Asian ascendancy and Western decline.
The College of Letters and Science is delighted to announce the launch of its redesigned website:ls.berkeley.edu
Pulitzer Prize winner Alice Walker, a novelist, poet, and activist, spoke with Ra Malika Imhotep, a Ph.D. candidate in African diaspora studies at UC Berkeley, and Darieck Scott, a professor in Berkeley’s Department of African American Studies, as part of the department’s spring 2021 Critical Conversations series.
Determining how rapidly the universe is expanding is key to understanding our cosmic fate, but with more precise data has come a conundrum: Estimates based on measurements within our local universe don’t agree with extrapolations from the era shortly after the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago.
Today, Lightfoot (a UC Berkeley anthropology professor), 67, is an influential and endearing figure in Indigenous archaeology, a subfield of anthropology that eschews cultural imperialism and blends tribal perspectives, customs and collaboration into scholarship. With precision technology that can detect what’s beneath the ground and prevent unnecessary digging — including ground-penetrating radar, satellite imagery, magnetometry and light detection and ranging sensors — the field is, in many ways, an antithesis to anthropology’s grave-plundering past.
UC Berkeley Psychology Professor Alison Gopnik receives 2021 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Association for Psychological Science. The Association’s Highest Honors Recognize Outstanding Contributions to Science. Read more here: lscience.org/news/2021-lifetime-achievement-awards.html
The latest star data from the Gaia space observatory has for the first time allowed astronomers to generate a massive 3D atlas of widely separated binary stars within about 3,000 light years of Earth — 1.3 million of them.
Among the Berkeley experts who have been appointed to the Biden administration, we are proud to say that six are alumni from the College of Letters & Science. They majored in fields including political science, history, Latin American Studies, mathematics, French, and economics, and from these varied starting points, they each blazed a trail to national service.
Berkeley alum Scott McDonald believes in workplace diversity, and he’s put time, effort, and money behind that conviction. A ’73 sociology grad, Scott has had a long and successful career in advertising at leading global media companies like Time Warner and Conde Nast.
In the arid Mojave Desert, small burrowing mammals like the cactus mouse, the kangaroo rat and the white-tailed antelope squirrel are weathering the hotter, drier conditions triggered by climate change much better than their winged counterparts, finds a new study published today in Science.
Ever feel like you were in over your head during math class? Unfortunately, this seems to be a familiar sensation for incoming students at Berkeley, where most undergraduates take a course in mathematics. Beyond being unprepared to understand some core concepts, students who struggle through a gateway math course often stop studying a scientific or technical field.
With a visionary investment connecting life sciences to entrepreneurship, Mark and Stephanie Robinson are fast tracking innovation at UC Berkeley. The Robinsons have given a total of $10 million to support bio-entrepreneurship at Berkeley, creating resources for undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty that leverage our university’s edge in basic science research while preparing the next generation of business leaders.
Nobody believes it was ET phoning, but radio astronomers admit they don’t have an explanation yet for a beam of radio waves that apparently came from the direction of the star Proxima Centauri.
UC Berkeley African American Studies professor Nikki Jones has won the 2020 Michael J. Hindelang Award. The national honor given by the American Society of Criminology (ASC), recognizes a book published within the past three years that makes the most outstanding contribution to research in criminology.
The names of the University of California, Berkeley’s LeConte Hall and Barrows Hall will be removed, campus officials announced today. The decision, capping a formal review process, was made in response to growing awareness of the controversial legacies of the halls’ namesakes — all of them early, prominent members of the UC faculty — that clash with UC Berkeley’s mission and values.
Cara Brook, a UC Berkeley researcher whose work on bat viruses has taken on new urgency with the rise of COVID-19, is one of five recipients of this year’s L’Oréal For Women in Science fellowships.
Given that everything in the universe reduces to particles, a question presents itself: What are particles?
Aware of the vital importance of exemplary graduate students in life sciences research, the Shurl and Kay Curci Foundation has initiated a scholarship program to provide funding for new Ph.D. students. But its efforts go far beyond simple, across-the-board scholarship support. Believing that all qualified applicants should be included in the life sciences enterprise, the foundation is focusing on two groups that do not traditionally garner the strongest financial support — international students and women. The Curci Foundation Ph.D.
With a visionary investment connecting life sciences to entrepreneurship, Mark and Stephanie Robinson are fast tracking innovation at UC Berkeley. The Robinsons have given a total of $10 million to support bio-entrepreneurship at Berkeley, creating resources for undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty that leverage our university’s edge in basic science research while preparing the next generation of business leaders.
University of California, Berkeley, biochemist Jennifer Doudna today won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, sharing it with colleague Emmanuelle Charpentier for the co-development of CRISPR-Cas9, a genome editing breakthrough that has revolutionized biomedicine.
Reinhard Genzel, a professor emeritus of physics and of astronomy at the University of California, Berkeley, and director of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Garching, Germany, will share half the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics with UCLA professor Andrea Ghez “for the discovery of a supermassive compact object at the center of our galaxy.”
Polina Lishko, a Ukrainian-born physiologist whose work at the University of California, Berkeley, has already led to the development of promising new non-hormonal contraceptives for women and could lead to male or unisex contraceptives, has been chosen to receive a 2020 MacArthur “genius” Award.
Sarah Stanley normally researches tuberculosis in her lab at UC Berkeley. But when the COVID-19 pandemic shut down all normal research operations on campus, she quickly utilized her own discretionary funds to mobilize her lab and student researchers to study the SARS-CoV-2 live virus.
Thanks to a rapid funding program thrown together by wealthy entrepreneurs barely six weeks ago, seven COVID-19 research projects at the University of California, Berkeley, are getting an infusion of cash — $2.2 million in all — that could turn up new diagnostics and potential treatments for the infection within months.
Nine UC Berkeley faculty members from a wide range of disciplines have been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAAS), a 240-year-old organization honoring the country’s most accomplished artists, scholars, scientists and leaders.
As doctors around the country scramble to diagnose cases of COVID-19, scientists at the University of California, Berkeley’s Innovative Genomics Institute (IGI) are creating from scratch a diagnostic lab with the capability to process more than 1,000 patient samples per day.
Sometimes, a blockbuster discovery is just too good to be true. UC Berkeley graduate student astronomer Kareem El-Badry knows that all too well — he just shot one down.
Dr. Harriet C.P.
