Social Sciences (Faculty & Staff)

The number of unhoused individuals in the U.S. reached a record high of 770,000 at the end of 2024 (Porter 2024). Homelessness policy remains a source of vehement partisan debate. Some argue that homelessness is, in fact, a housing problem, with permanent housing solutions required to help those most in need. Others argue that those who are chronically unhoused must have issues that go beyond lack of affordable housing; instead, untreated mental illness and substance use are often at the heart of the problem. Should homelessness policy target housing or mental health treatment? My research...

Edward Miguel, the son of immigrants from Uruguay and Poland, knew from an early age that his life in the U.S. was different from those of his family members around the world.

“I got a chance to see how my relatives lived in South America and Eastern Europe,” Miguel recalls. “They were a lot poorer than us here in the U.S., and that made me wonder why, and what could be done about it.”

Miguel, faculty co-director of the Center for Effective Global Action (CEGA) and a professor of economics at UC Berkeley, has...

UC Berkeley Geography Professor Kurt Cuffey digs deep—literally—to explore the important layers beneath glaciers’ beauty. Each crevice reveals something different about our environment and the growing concern of climate change.

As a professor who focuses on earth and planetary science, Cuffey’s research addresses climate feedback loops, a process in which initial global warming causes the melting of ice—darkening the planet surface—and causing further warming. In particular, his research showed how carbon dioxide and global temperature over a...

Robin Lakoff, a distinguished linguist and professor emerita at UC Berkeley, died on Aug. 5. She was 82.

Lakoff joined the Berkeley Linguistics Department in 1972, after teaching at the University of Michigan from 1969 and earning a Ph.D. in linguistics from Harvard in 1964. As an accomplished young professor tenured in her early 30s in a male-dominated academic world, she paved the way for future female scholars.

Her early work focused on syntax in Latin, but for most of her career she studied the relationship...