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...
Dana Swensen, Department of English Communications
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...
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.
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...
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 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
When 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...
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.
In 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...