Faculty

UC Berkeley Letters & Science announces recipients of 2025 L&S Faculty Awards

April 8, 2025

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....

Two science deans on the ups and downs of teaching

April 7, 2025
by Alexander Rony

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...

Do vowels have colors? According to some with synesthesia, yes.

April 7, 2025
Anne Brice

It’s hard to pinpoint when synesthesia, the rare neurological condition where a stimulus that affects one sense prompts a response in a different sense, was first documented. Scientific literature marks its beginning in 1812, when it appeared as an aside in a Bavarian medical student’s dissertation. Toward the end, there’s a small section where he detailed how he associated musical tones and letters with colors.

“He enumerates the colors he sees in connection with the letters of the alphabet. A and E: vermilion, I: white, O:orange and so forth,” says UC Berkeley French...

https://news.berkeley.edu/2025/04/02/do-vowels-have-colors-according-to-some-wit…

‘Tremendously effective teachers’: Five UC Berkeley instructors receive Distinguished Teaching Award

March 27, 2025
Anne Brice

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...

Leon Litwack honored with new speaker series

January 31, 2025
by Alexander Rony

UC Berkeley’s Department of History is recognizing one of its most beloved professors with a new speaker series devoted to African American history. The series extends the legacy of Leon Litwack, a trailblazing scholar who taught generations of students to peer behind the curtain of whitewashed narratives and learn difficult truths about their country’s past.

Few areas of scholarship are as contentious — and...

Creativity is What Comes Next: An L&S Lunch and Learn Conversation

March 27, 2025
Lauren Miller

On Tuesday, March 18, the College of Letters & Science Administrative Advisory Committee (AAC) hosted a conversation between Professors David Nadler and Shannon Steen on the topic “What is Creativity?” at its second L&S Lunch and Learn convening. Moderated by Aileen Liu, Director of Curricular Engagement Initiatives, this discussion afforded L&S staff the opportunity to thoughtfully engage with the scholarship of the College and connect with their colleagues....

Seven faculty members named fellows of American Association for the Advancement of Science

March 27, 2025
Robert Sanders

Seven headshots of AAAS winners in circles against a blue backgroundSeven 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.

The 471 new AAAS fellows...

https://news.berkeley.edu/2025/03/27/seven-faculty-members-named-fellows-of-amer…

Language, Identity, and Ecolinguistics: An Interview with Nataliia Goshylyk on Teaching Ukrainian at Berkeley

March 25, 2025
Lucille Lorenz, Arts & Humanities writer-in-residence

Nataliia Goshylyk is a lecturer in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, where she teaches Ukrainian. Dr. Goshylyk received her M.A. in Philology from Lesya Ukrainka Volyn State University, and her PhD in linguistics from Kharkiv National University. She is the recipient of the Berkeley Language Center Summer Fellowship in 2022, as well as a U.S. Fulbright Scholarship from 2021-2022, and she was an Erasmus Mundus Ianus II recipient in 2015, where she did research in Graz, Austria. Some of her main areas of focus include ecolinguistics, language pedagogy, and...

https://artshumanities.berkeley.edu/news/language-identity-and-ecolinguistics-in…

Meet Our Faculty

The outstanding faculty in the Division of Mathematical & Physical Sciences are pushing the boundaries in the fields of astronomy, earth & planetary science, mathematics, and physics. Read below to learn more about their groundbreaking work.

Svetlana in Wonderland: Professor Svetlana Jitomirskaya

March 24, 2025
Avi Rosenzweig

Consider the guitar leaning against the wall over there—you got it because you wanted to look cool, sure, but notice that it is unlike a piano (where you press one key and you get one note) and also unlike a violin (where you can press anywhere, and you look less cool). The guitar is somewhere in between because its frets are positioned where they are for a reason, not arbitrarily, but you can still make tiny changes to notes, as tiny as you like. It’s kinda digital at the same time it’s kinda analog.

Mathematics has a similar area of study,...