As tensions have flared over events ranging from the 2020 murder of George Floyd to the recent assassination of Charlie Kirk, our nation’s divisions seem to grow more and more stark. Against that backdrop, Berkeley’s new course “Openness to Opposing Views” aims to foster dialogue across ideological divides.
The asynchronous, self-paced course launched in the summer with just 50 enrollees. Since then, it has grown to roughly 700 students, with thousands more Cal faculty, staff, and alumni taking advantage of the free, non-...
African American Studies and Political Science Alumna Sydney Roberts has been awarded a 2026–27 Schwarzman Scholarship. Roberts, a former ASUC president who graduated from Cal in 2024 as a double major in the Berkeley Social Sciences Division, is one of 150 inspiring and innovative leaders selected from a pool of more than 5,800 candidates worldwide — the largest applicant pool in the program’s history. She is Berkeley’s 21st recipient of the award since its founding in 2013.
This fall, Roberts will participate in a one-year, fully funded master’s degree program...
Tristan Lombard’s first interaction with what was then known as the Cal Independent Scholars Network was to call the Better Business Bureau and report a scam.
It was 2006, and Lombard’s pre-college years had looked different than most of his peers: He’d attended four different high schools, sold drugs, had brushes with law enforcement and experienced periods of homelessness. So, as what he terms a “very bitter 17-year-old,” he saw an invitation to create a wish list for move-in day dorm products and assumed it was a con.
It wasn’t. Rather, it was part of a fledgling program...
The L&S Staff Achievement Awards, now in its second year, recognize and celebrate outstanding staff members in the College of Letters & Science. Awardees are selected for their exceptional commitment to the College’s shared mission of teaching, research, and public service. Each of these individuals has excelled in areas such as collaboration, goal accomplishment, inclusion & belonging, innovation, and mastery of their work.
We are deeply grateful to our 2025 recipients for their remarkable contributions to the College and to the University. Their...
The L&S First-Year Pathways program is now in its third year, and as some alumni from the first two iterations of the program have continued on their journeys in the College, they have identified key support areas that they believe would benefit the first-year student partipants in their academic and eventually professional futures beyond the program. In the profiles that follow, the L&S First-Year Pathways Alumni Team share about themselves, their experiences in the College of Letters & Science, and their...
Meet ROTC (Reserve Officers' Training Corps) leadership at UC Berkeley: CAPT Randy Van Rossum, Lt Col Jeff Fyffe, and LTC Aaron Elliott. Together, they prepare students from Berkeley and the San Francisco Bay Area to become leaders and future military officers.
L&S Alum Spotlight: Phuong Le '22 (she/her) Major: American Studies
Phuong Le graduated from UC Berkeley's College of Letters & Science with a degree in American Studies. While that may sound straightforward, her path was anything but traditional. After building a strong academic foundation at Berkeley, personal challenges with her mental health and finances ultimately led Phuong to withdraw from school just shy of graduation in 2017.
Over the next five years, Phuong worked tirelessly to overcome these obstacles, which were...
The UC Berkeley College of Letters & Science is pleased to announce the 2025 recipients of the inaugural L&S First-Year Pathways Course Enrichment Grants.
Now entering its third year, the L&S First-Year Pathways program has significantly expanded for 2025-26, growing from 6 clusters serving 125 students to nearly 20 clusters serving more than 230 students. L&S Pathways provides a small cohort experience for groups of 17-30 incoming freshmen who take "clusters" of three or four courses together...
For UC Berkeley’s Jennifer Doudna, the revolutionary discovery of CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing began 15 years ago with a meeting at the campus’s Free Speech Movement Cafe.
“This is a quintessential story about Berkeley,” begins Doudna, a professor of molecular and cell biology and of chemistry, in a lecture she gave on campus in April. “The research that I’ll talk about today wouldn’t have happened … if I...
For UC Berkeley’s Jennifer Doudna, the revolutionary discovery of CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing began 15 years ago with a meeting at the campus’s Free Speech Movement Cafe. 