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Over 1,000 students and nearly 5,000 guests participated in this year's event.

Long before James McCloy walked into a lecture hall at UC Berkeley, he was sweeping floors beside his mother, a janitor, and pulling weeds beside his father, a landscaper. As a first-generation transfer student, he said, “I am here because my parents pushed a dream they themselves were not offered.”

Chancellor Rich and Jen Lyons — with help from a few special friends — invite the Cal family to join them in ringing in a new year filled with learning, discovery, and connection. Featuring Simone Browne, interim university carillonist; Andrew Hiranprasitikul and Steven Luo of the Berkeley Carillon Guild; and Oski the Bear.

Smoot, a physicist at UC Berkeley and Berkeley Lab, shared the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics for detecting minute temperature variations in the cosmic microwave background, a prediction of the Big Bang theory.

Yaghi created a field called reticular chemistry, which involves stitching together molecular building blocks to form porous structures — metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) — with myriad applications.

The Nobel Prize committee honored Clarke "for the discovery of macroscopic quantum mechanical tunneling and energy quantization in an electric circuit." These circuits were forerunners of the qubits in many quantum computers.

Keltner, a distinguished professor of psychology at Berkeley, has led the discipline's study of human emotion, power and the concept of awe throughout his career.

Dacher Keltner, a UC Berkeley distinguished professor of psychology who has led the discipline’s study of human emotion, power and the concept of awe, was honored this month with a lifetime achievement award from the Association for Psychological Science.

Of the more than 1,700 U.S. colleges and universities evaluated, Berkeley claimed the No. 1 spot of all public schools in the 2026 U.S. News & World Report rankings.

Berkeley bested Stanford, Harvard and MIT in the annual Pitchbook rankings, a testament to the campus's investments in innovation and entrepreneurship.

The annual rankings focus on graduates' return on investment and career achievements, among other factors.

In its newest ranking of America’s Top Colleges, Forbes placed UC Berkeley at #5 nationwide and #1 among public universities based on academic, financial and career outcomes for undergraduate students.

"Berkeley is not just a place, it’s a promise — and together we can ensure it will forever be kept," he says.

Chatbot Arena, which allows users to rank and compare AI models, has quickly grown to 1 million monthly users.

126,798 first-year students applied in total, according to new data released by Berkeley officials.