Faculty

Political scientists launch the Berkeley Center for American Democracy

October 8, 2024

Americans are feeling pessimistic about their political landscape. Polls show that US voters’ top concern involves political extremism and threats to democracy, eclipsing perennial issues like immigration and the economy. Last year, the Pew Research Center...

Interview: Tadiwa Madenga and her Research on 20th and 21st century African book fairs

September 30, 2024

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Tadiwa Madenga is a scholar of African and Black diasporic literature, gender and sexuality, and print cultures. Her research is concerned with the relationship between literature and sexuality which she traces through 20th and 21st century African book fairs and their subgenres: keynotes, book stalls, magazines, poetry. Across her academic and creative projects, her reading practice centers archival work...

How looking closely led this cell biologist to world-changing breakthroughs

September 30, 2024

Hear Randy Schekman, a UC Berkeley professor of Molecular and Cell Biology, explain his Nobel Prize-winning work in just 101 seconds.

Screenshot of man speaking to camera with an inset of cells next to him

For Randy Schekman, a UC Berkeley professor of Molecular and Cell Biology, the study of life and basic research has been a calling since...

Physicist Paul Richards, a pioneer in studies of the cosmic microwave background, dies at 90

September 30, 2024

Black and white image of man wearing a tie, sitting in his office

Paul L. Richards, an experimental physicist who built some of the first highly sensitive detectors to probe the faint radiation left over from the birth of the universe, died peacefully at his home in Berkeley on Monday, Sept. 16. A professor emeritus of physics at the University of California, Berkeley, Richards was 90.

Richards got his start as a solid-state...

One Petabyte At A Time: Raúl Briceño

September 3, 2024

In the last hundred years, particle physicists have developed a fine-grained understanding of how the building blocks that make up the universe fit together, called the Standard Model. The concrete and steel are basic particles like protons, neutrons, and electrons, and the energies that weld them together are divided into three or four forces: strong, electromagnetic, weak, and sometimes gravity. Testing shows that the Standard Model is very accurate, but it’s not quite perfect. In building construction each trade needs to know enough about the other’s work to make the...

The biological sciences have a new leader in Richard Harland. Read his first interview as dean.

September 19, 2024
Four decades after arriving at UC Berkeley as a new faculty member, Richard Harland remains fascinated by embryos, evolution, and early developmental biology. In his first public interview as dean, Harland explained why he came to Berkeley, what it takes to enable top-tier research, how the division serves the state, and what pulled him away from his beloved lab to take on a leadership role.

Berkeley Social Sciences welcomes new 2024–25 faculty

September 10, 2024

Berkeley Social Sciences has welcomed 17 new faculty for the 2024–2025 academic year, including new professors of psychology, sociology, economics, gender and women’s studies, history, political science, linguistics, African American studies, geography and demography.

They bring insight, expertise and dedication to the Social Sciences. Learn more about them here

CRISPR co-creator Jennifer Doudna on watching her groundbreaking gene-editing technology help sickle cell patients

September 11, 2024

Jennifer Doudna wearing a white lab coat and standing in a labWhen biochemist Jennifer Doudna and her research partner, Emmanuelle Charpentier, published a paper in Science 12 years ago, they had a hunch that their findings would transform how genomics is used in medicine. The paper outlined a method they’d developed for editing DNA that used an RNA-based system known as CRISPR-Cas9. The approach was more efficient and precise...

Curating Conversations: Patricia Cariño Valdez ('10) on Berkeley, Art Consulting, and the Olivia Collection

September 10, 2024

Curators of Berkeley is a series of interviews with Berkeley alumni from a range of disciplines in the arts and humanities who work across curatorial practices and fields. Patricia Cariño Valdez is an art consultant, independent curator, and manager of the Olivia Collection.

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Podcast: Berkeley Talks: What is understanding? Berkeley scholars discuss

September 9, 2024

Four people sitting in chairs, talking in front of a black backgroundIn Berkeley Talks episode 208, three UC Berkeley professors from a wide range of disciplines — psychology, biology and ethnic studies — broach a deep question: What is understanding?

“When I think about it through the lens of being a psychologist, I really think about understanding as a demonstration of, say, knowledge that we have...