New fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science

New fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science

Eleven UC Berkeley faculty members have been elected lifetime fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the world’s largest general scientific society and publisher of the journal Science. Rodolfo Mendoza-Denton, professor of psychology, “for outstanding contributions to the science on the causes and consequences of prejudice and the identification of factors […]

How a Bit of Awe Can Improve Your Health

How a Bit of Awe Can Improve Your Health

Awe can mean many things. It can be witnessing a total solar eclipse. Or seeing your child take her first steps. Or hearing Lizzo perform live. But, while many of us know it when we feel it, awe is not easy to define. “Awe is the feeling of being in the presence of something vast […]

Alison Gopnik: Making AI more childlike

Alison Gopnik: Making AI more childlike

The renowned expert on how babies learn about the world through curiosity and exploration is now collaborating with artificial intelligence researchers to make AI systems smarter by being more like children.

Celebrating 30 Years of Freshman and Sophomore Seminars at Berkeley

Three people smiling

“The Freshman Seminars owe their existence to the combination of a good idea and a bad budgetary situation. In 1992 the University suffered deep cuts in its state budget and threats of further curtailments. The legislature resounded with the old complaints that the faculty did not teach enough. To demonstrate that we could do more […]

Liberal arts education is about truth-seeking — a call to intellectual arms

Liberal arts education is about truth-seeking — a call to intellectual arms

Institutions of higher education and, more specifically, liberal arts colleges, have become the butt of resentment in current culture wars based on misinformation and the attack on facts. But UC Berkeley’s College of Letters and Science aims to combat that by continuing to provide an education that focuses on truth-seeking and on knowledge-based discourse and […]

Berkeley Talks: Learning from nature to design better robots

Berkeley Talks: Learning from nature to design better robots

In Berkeley Talks episode 148, Robert Full, a professor of integrative biology and founder of the Center for Interdisciplinary Biological Inspiration in Education and Research at UC Berkeley, discusses how nature and its creatures — cockroaches, crabs, centipedes, geckos — inspire innovative design in all sorts of useful things, from bomb-detecting, stair-climbing robots to prosthetics […]