Nine of the ten UC Berkeley faculty members holding Nobel Prizes reside in UC Berkeley's College of Letters & Science. L&S has a deep legacy of groundbreaking research and transformative discoveries, and as a result, has generated several faculty members and alumni honored with Nobel Prize awards for their academic contributions. For the 2024 Nobel Prizes, four of the Nobel...
The years 1999 to 2004 were a period of incredible academic creativity and productivity for James Robinson, an economist and political scientist at UC Berkeley. His research and writing were transforming how the world thinks about the development of low-income countries. His teaching was shaping a generation of young Berkeley scholars who would help advance his ideas about why some nations were rich and others poor.
Today, Robinson was named one of the winners of the 2024 Nobel...
This year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry was shared by David Baker, a biochemist who received his Ph.D. from UC Berkeley in 1989 working with Randy Schekman, a professor of molecular and cell biology who won the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
At Berkeley, Baker conducted research primarily on protein transport and protein trafficking in yeast, the field in which Schekman received the prize. But after a postdoctoral fellowship at UCSF, he joined the biochemistry...
UC Berkeley alumnus Gary Ruvkun has been awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Ruvkun, a 1973 graduate with a B.A. in biophysics, shares the prize with Victor Ambros, a professor at the UMass Chan Medical School, for their discovery of microRNA and and its role in post-transcriptional gene regulation. MicroRNA are tiny pieces of genetic information that play critical roles in helping cells regulate gene expression and control what types of proteins they produce.
The work from Ruvkun and Ambros has influenced scientists worldwide, guiding research for diseases such...
Fareed Zakaria GPS takes a comprehensive look at foreign affairs and global policies through in-depth, one-on-one interviews and fascinating roundtable discussions.
On the September 2, 2024 episode: Reengineering Life: The Next Frontiers in Science
Fareed examines two emerging technologies that are already changing life as we know it—CRISPR gene editing and artificial intelligence—in interviews with two women who pioneered them: UC Berkeley’s Jennifer Doudna and Stanford’s Fei-Fei Li.
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...
A physicist, a philosopher and a psychologist walk into a classroom.
Although it sounds like a premise for a joke, this was actually the origin of a unique collaboration between Nobel Prize–winning physicist Saul Perlmutter, philosopher John Campbell and the psychologist Rob MacCoun. Spurred by what they saw as a perilously rising tide of irrationality, misinformation and sociopolitical polarization, they teamed up in 2011 to create a multidisciplinary course at the University of California, Berkeley, with the modest goal of teaching undergraduate students how to think—more...
One hundred thousand years ago, you live in a small tribe preparing for the day’s hunt when suddenly a shadow crosses the sun, and all goes dark. For long terrifying minutes you ask yourselves: Is this the end? How can we survive? What will we eat? The sun returns, but the terror remains: What did we do to provoke the wrath of the gods?
The same location, 5,000 years ago, another tribe, another eclipse. But this time, an elder recalls a story she heard as a child about “a short day and a short night.” She announces that it has happened again, but that the sun will return. The tribe...
Did you know? 
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...