Research & Innovation

Berkeley Economics Professor Edward Miguel has spent his career uncovering the structural forces behind poverty, instability and inequality. As the Oxfam Professor of Environmental and Resource Economics and co-director of the Center for Effective Global Action (CEGA), he leads groundbreaking research that ties together rural finance, climate change, conflict and human capital — often through long-term fieldwork in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Miguel's research isn't just about diagnosis. It's about evidence-based solutions, such as a recent study on post-harvest loans in Kenya that's...

Berkeley Geography Professor Clancy Wilmott is conducting innovative research on the political stakes of mapping in its digital and physical forms.

She focuses on critical cartography, a subfield of geography that critiques the structures behind how mapping knowledge is produced. Wilmott’s research perceives mapping as a tool not just for representation, but also as a means of influencing the world. Her work at UC Berkeley, which intersects critical cartography, new media and spatial practices, bridges theory and practice through community-...

In a decision released today (May 12), the U. S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington, D.C., ordered the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) to reconsider its 2022 interference decision that scientists at the Broad Institute in Boston invented CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing in plant, animal and fungal cells.

CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing is a revolutionary technique for manipulating DNA invented by Jennifer Doudna of the University of California, Berkeley; Emmanuelle Charpentier, who was then at Umeå University in Sweden; and their...

Today, we are living increasingly longer lives compared to 150 years ago. However, the question is, can that trend go on?

The Human Mortality Database (HMD), operated jointly by Berkeley Demography researchers, processes data that can help answer that question.

Co-led by Demography researcher Magali Barbieri, HMD is a collaboration between Berkeley and two other organizations, the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Germany and the French Institute for Demographic Studies in Paris....