News

Song Sun, who received his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has joined the faculty as an associate professor of mathematics.

A new study of mouse models of autism challenges the most common assumption about what goes wrong in brain circuits to cause disease symptoms. UC Berkeley neuroscientists demonstrated that while inhibition does decrease in the brains of these mice, altering the balance between excitation and inhibition, the changed balance does not affect spiking at all. Instead, this altered balance seems to be a compensatory mechanism that stabilizes brain activity in response to the disorder.

Kate Scott, Mass Communications ’05 is familiar with taking the road less traveled, from being Cal’s first female “mic man” to the first woman to call football on Pac-12 Networks. The Cal Alumni Association sat down with Scott to find out more about her journey, and to get tips for recent graduates facing the unpaved road ahead.

Robert Alter, a professor of Hebrew and comparative literature, has completed a new translation of the Hebrew Bible after two and a half decades of work. In a new interview, Alter talks about what he hoped to achieve with his new translation - such as evoking the "beautifully expressive" Hebrew of the original text.

Ariel Bloch, who used his career at UC Berkeley as a way to fuse Arab and Hebrew culture, died in Richmond on Dec. 14 at the age of 85 after a lengthy illness. A professor in the Department of Near Eastern Studies, Bloch specialized in Arabic linguistics, but he took on Hebrew and Aramaic as subspecialties and did what he could to encourage a multilingual balance of both of the languages and the cultures.

Daniel Weisz, an assistant professor of astronomy at UC Berkeley, was honored at this week’s meeting of the American Astronomical Society for his early-career research on relatively nearby “dwarf” galaxies using the Hubble Space Telescope.

Take a look back at 2018 at UC Berkeley, featuring highlights from several L&S departments.

Chancellor Carol Christ sends the following holiday message to the campus community.

Chancellor Carol Christ had a clear message for the 600 UC Berkeley graduates at Saturday’s commencement ceremony: Think beyond yourself and attend to your civic life just as you do a personal and professional life.

Geckos are renowned for their acrobatic feats on land and in the air, but a new discovery that they can also run on water puts them in the superhero category, says a University of California, Berkeley, biologist. The study was conducted by U.C. Berkeley graduate students Jasmine Nirody, now a biophysicist at Oxford and Rockefeller University, and Judy Jinn.