The academic year 2013-14 changed the direction of Wendy Ingram’s life. Over the course of a few months, four members of the UC Berkeley department in which she was a graduate student died by suicide: an undergraduate student, a doctoral student, a post-doctoral fellow and a faculty member.
The tragic events left many in the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology (MCB) reeling, but Ingram also found that the suicides prompted co-workers to share their own mental health issues. She discovered that, like herself, about half the people she talked to had sought therapy at some point...
This week, MTI announced the recipients of its 2025 MTI Innovator Awards, honoring six scientists for their transformative approaches to therapeutic discovery. MTI was founded to reinvent drug discovery at the interface of academia and biotech, drawing on UC Berkeley’s unique strengths: a...
When most people hear about a fishing expedition in Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula, they might picture researchers snorkeling through coral reefs in the Caribbean Sea or diving into crystal-clear cenotes, surrounded by postcard-perfect scenery.
But nothing I had imagined—or Googled—before my first field trip came close to the reality we faced in our search for pupfishes. We were after something far more elusive: the Laguna Chichancanab adaptive radiation, a group of pupfish species named for the way their tails wag like those of playful puppies. These fish exhibit remarkably different...
UC Berkeley's College of Letters & Science is proud to announce the recipients of the 2025 L&S Faculty Awards. This distinguished award recognizes each awardee's exceptional scholarship, service to the College and community, and transformational teaching. These extraordinary individuals not only embody the excellence of the College of Letters & Science, but they also serve as an inspiration to the entire campus community. The recipients will be honored at a private ceremony on Wednesday, May 14....
Deans maintain heavy workloads and busy calendars, so colleges tend to excuse them from teaching.
At UC Berkeley’s College of Letters & Science, however, two deans increased their course load this year. Steven Kahn, head of the Division of Mathematical & Physical Sciences, is currently teaching a cosmology course following a fall Freshman Seminar on big science experiments. Dean Richard Harland of the Division...
The campus's highest honor for teaching excellence, the Distinguished Teaching Award underscores the profound impact instructors have on their students’ learning experiences and future careers.
Five UC Berkeley instructors have received the 2025 Distinguished Teaching Award, the campus’s highest honor for teaching excellence. The Academic Senate’s Committee on Teaching announced the selection on March 10, highlighting that this year’s recipients are “tremendously effective...
UC Berkeley students have photographed California’s most elusive mammal alive for the first time.
A small, cute and elusive mammal native to sub-alpine regions of the Sierra Nevadahas been captured alive on camera for the first time by a team of UC Berkeley students.
Engineers have designed robots that crawl, swim, fly and even slither like a snake, but no robot can hold a candle to a squirrel, which can parkour through a thicket of branches, leap across perilous gaps and execute pinpoint landings on the flimsiest of branches.
University of California, Berkeley, biologists and engineers are...
The pleasure we get from eating junk food — the dopamine rush from crunching down on salty, greasy French fries and a luscious burger — is often blamed as the cause of overeating and rising obesity rates in our society.
Seven UC Berkeley faculty members from a broad range of fields are among the 2024 class of fellows elected to the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), one of the world’s largest general scientific societies and publisher of the Science family of journals.
Seven UC Berkeley faculty members from a broad range of fields are among the 2024 class of fellows elected to the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), one of the world’s largest general scientific societies and publisher of the Science family of journals.