Alumni

African American Studies Alumna Petra Rivera-Rideau co-authored an op-ed for The New York Times titled "Which Bad Bunny Halftime Show Did You See?"

Bad Bunny made history at the Super Bowl on Sunday, giving voice to Puerto Rican history and culture, and doing so in Spanish at a time when that alone could get you picked up by masked immigration agents. Though Bad Bunny did not yell “ICE out” or otherwise call out the Trump administration directly, his performance was unapologetically political.

And you know what? It was a party, too, complete with live salsa,...

Driven by a mission to address global food insecurity while protecting vulnerable ecosystems, UC Berkeley Political Science alum Justin Kolbeck co-founded Wildtype, the world’s first cultivated salmon. Instead of fishing or farming salmon, the company grows real salmon meat from fish cells.

Wildtype tackles key problems in the global food system, including overfished oceans, the limits of fish farming — which requires large amounts of feed, water and space — and the risk of contamination in seafood supply chains. By growing salmon cells in...

African American Studies and Political Science Alumna Sydney Roberts has been awarded a 2026–27 Schwarzman Scholarship. Roberts, a former ASUC president who graduated from Cal in 2024 as a double major in the Berkeley Social Sciences Division, is one of 150 inspiring and innovative leaders selected from a pool of more than 5,800 candidates worldwide — the largest applicant pool in the program’s history. She is Berkeley’s 21st recipient of the award since its founding in 2013.

This fall, Roberts will participate in a one-year, fully funded master’s degree program...

Tristan Lombard’s first interaction with what was then known as the Cal Independent Scholars Network was to call the Better Business Bureau and report a scam.

It was 2006, and Lombard’s pre-college years had looked different than most of his peers: He’d attended four different high schools, sold drugs, had brushes with law enforcement and experienced periods of homelessness. So, as what he terms a “very bitter 17-year-old,” he saw an invitation to create a wish list for move-in day dorm products and assumed it was a con.

It wasn’t. Rather, it was part of a fledgling program...