David Hollinger, a UC Berkeley professor emeritus of history, has been named to the advisory board of a project to produce an ambitious oral history of former President Barack Obama’s life, from growing up in Honolulu to managing the Great Recession to overseeing the raid to kill Osama bin Laden. The project, launched by the Obama Foundation and Columbia University, will inclu
Matt Walker, a UC Berkeley professor of psychology and neuroscience, presented a TED Talk at the organizaton's April 15-19 conference in Vancouver, Canada. The video of Walker’s 19-minute “Sleep is your superpower” talk was just posted on the TED Talks website and received more than 1 million views in the first 72 hours.
Raka Ray, professor of sociology and South and Southeast Asian studies, was named Friday to be the next dean of the Division of Social Sciences in the College of Letters and Science. Chancellor Carol Christ and Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost Paul Alivisatos issued the following message to the campus community.
Four faculty members, including history professor Ethan Shagan and physics professor Robert Littlejohn were selected for one of UC Berkeley’s highest honors, the Distinguished Teaching Award. It recognizes faculty members who stand out for teaching that “incites intellectual curiosity in students, engages them thoroughly in the enterprise of learning and has a lifelong impact.”
Emi Nakamura, a UC Berkeley economist, is this year’s recipient of the prestigious John Bates Clark Medal , widely viewed as second only in prestige to the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences. She is the fourth woman to win the medal since its inception in 1947.
Jill Banfield, a professor of earth and planetary science and of environmental science, policy and management will deliver the 2019 Faculty Research Lecture on Tuesday, April 30. A mineral physicist by training and a gem lover, Banfield is a pioneer of metagenomics, a relatively recent field of study that involves sequencing the DNA in a natural environment and using it to reconstruct the genomes of all the organisms living there.
Less than two weeks have passed since fire hit Notre Dame de Paris, incinerating the distinctive gothic spire and destroying the cathedral’s roof. Nearly a billion dollars has poured in to help rebuild the famed cathedral. But what will the rebuilt cathedral look like? Henrike Lange, assistant professor in UC Berkeley’s departments of History of Art and Italian Studies, weighs in on some speculative options.
Elwyn Berlekamp, a UC Berkeley mathematician and game theorist whose error-correcting codes allowed spacecraft from Voyager to the Hubble Space Telescope to send accurate, detailed and beautiful images back to Earth, died April 9 from complications of pulmonary fibrosis. He was 78.