Richard Chan was hosting a Hong Kong dinner with other UC Berkeley alums when he heard a startling fact: the state of California covers just 14 percent of the public university’s budget. Chan, a serial entrepreneur and investor, decided to investigate how his skills could be of service to his alma mater.
At UC Berkeley, the next wave of medical and biological research isn’t just coming from our renowned faculty — it’s being driven by undergraduates. With the help of the College of Letters and Science’s Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF L&S) program, students have undertaken independent projects and made their own notable discoveries this past summer.
SURF L&S supports undergraduates with funding to...
As soon as you put starch in your mouth — whether in the form of a dumpling, a forkful of mashed potatoes or a saltine — you start breaking it down with an enzyme in your saliva.
That enzyme, known as amylase, was critically important for the evolution of our species as we adapted to a changing food supply. Two new studies revealed that our ancestors began...
UC Berkeley is the No. 1 public university in the U.S and the eighth-best university in the world, according to the Times Higher Education’s 2025 World University Rankings, released on Oct. 8. Berkeley has held the ranking of top U.S. public university for nine of the past 10 years.
This year’s rankings evaluated more than 2,000 universities from 115 countries and territories and were based on five criteria: teaching, research environment, research quality, industry...
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...
Two UC Berkeley computational biology and neuroscience scholars received the New Innovator Award from the U.S. National Institutes of Health, the agency announced today.
The prestigious award supports especially creative, high-impact biomedical and behavioral research by early-career investigators. Assistant professors...
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...
Over the course of nearly five months in 2022, NASA’s Perseverance rover collected rock samples from Mars that could rewrite the history of water on the Red Planet and even contain evidence for past life on Mars.
But the information they contain can’t be extracted without more detailed analysis on Earth, which requires a new mission to the planet to retrieve the samples and bring them back. Scientists hope to have the samples on Earth by 2033, though NASA’s sample return mission may be delayed.
“These samples are the reason why our mission was flown,” said paper co-author...
As soon as you put starch in your mouth — whether in the form of a dumpling, a forkful of mashed potatoes or a saltine — you start breaking it down with an enzyme in your saliva.
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...