Social Sciences (Faculty & Staff)

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.

Sharon, who conducts his research at Berkeley’s Center for Human Sleep Science, focuses on how sleep maintains brain health. One key idea is that during sleep, the brain’s cleaning system, known as the...

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.

We all encounter problems like this, she says, where we have quick reactions to things we’ve learned to fear. It might be something that is actually dangerous that we really should quickly react to, but it...

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.

In a social media post, Trump made no mention of intense Santa Ana winds or how climate...

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.

In the lead-up to the November election, Donald Trump threatened to “...