From using smartphone data to predict mental health relapses to leading French Club, Asher Cohen found community — and opportunities to serve others — in a myriad of corners of campus.
In the room that Asher Cohen will soon pack up, there’s a corkboard with mementos from his senior year at UC Berkeley: birthday cards, show programs for Carmen and Hamilton and an “I Voted” sticker. In the cabinet next to it is a math calendar a professor gifted him, tiny notebooks with Eiffel Towers that French Club distributed at Cal Day, a medical Spanish textbook, a mishmash of school supplies and an air fryer cookbook.
Cohen is the 2025 UC Berkeley University Medalist, the highest honor given to a graduating senior. In addition to stellar grades, this assortment of keepsakes hints at one of the reasons he was selected; Cohen has involved himself in pockets of curiosity and camaraderie across many corners of campus.
“A big part of my identity is that I do a whole bunch of different things,” he said. “I’m a math tutor, and I’m in charge of French Club, and I do medicine, and I do this niche digital psychiatry stuff, and now I have crippling senioritis,” he said “I’ve been able to find different communities and still cohesively put them together into one Berkeley lifestyle.”
Asher Cohen, Fourth-year Math major