Social Sciences (Faculty & Staff)

For neuroscientists, a checklist for eliminating gender bias

July 7, 2021

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.

Where were the men, they wondered? More than 75% of all tenured faculty in Ph.D. programs around the world are men, making their participation key to solving the problem of gender bias, which negatively impacts the...

Elaine Kim on a reckoning with race many years in the making

June 23, 2021

Elaine Kim, founder of Berkeley Ethnic Studies departmentBefore 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.

She would go on to be the...

L&S celebrates the commemoration of Juneteenth as a national holiday

June 18, 2021

JuneteenthUC Berkeley embraces the declaration of Juneteenth as a national holiday. In the College of Letters & Science, we celebrate this momentous occasion, affirming our pursuit of diversity, equity, inclusion, belonging, and justice across all aspects of...

Gabriel Zucman, L&S Economics Professor, Named 2021 Carnegie Fellow

April 28, 2021

Gabriel Zucman, L&S Economics Professor, named 2021 Carnegie FellowGabriel 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. Stone Center on Wealth and Income Inequality, has been selected as one of 26 recipients...

‘Berkeley Model’ for Combating Antisemitism on College Campuses Poised to Go Viral

June 7, 2021

Antisemitism video's initiative is to demystify and educateAn 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.

The ...

What Pedro De Anda Plascencia '21 Wants His Fifth-Grade Self to Know

June 3, 2021

Pedro De Anda Plascencia '21 holds English and political science degreesPedro 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. Following is an excerpt from his speech delivered at this spring's TAAP...

Aurora Lopez, John Gardner Public Service Fellow, on her path to UC Berkeley

May 26, 2021

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:

https://news.berkeley.edu/2021/05/13/graduation-...