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For the first time, the campus is using mass timber — a lighter, safer and more energy-efficient alternative to traditional concrete and steel construction — in construction.

The Dwinelle Annex will undergo interior and exterior architectural updates to make it accessible for DSP’s diverse community of students.

For the first time in its over 50-year history, UC Berkeley’s Disabled Students’ Program (DSP) will have its own building, a campus investment that will centralize DSP staff and services, expand its facilities and make them more accessible, and improve support for the program’s community of 5,000 students.   

Some 60 languages are taught on campus, and revitalizing and preserving endangered languages is a priority.

At least 60 languages — from Mongolian and Old Norse to Polish, Catalan, Ancient Egyptian, Arabic and Biblical Hebrew — are taught at UC Berkeley, one of the nation’s top institutions for the breadth and depth of its world languages program. A growing emphasis also is being placed at Berkeley on revitalizing and preserving endangered languages, most of them spoken by Indigenous peoples.

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The 2023 Pitchbook rankings also found that Berkeley was the No. 1 public university for startup founders.

UC Berkeley has taken the top spot for the number of venture-funded startups its undergraduate alumni have founded, according to data from the 2023 PitchBook university rankings released Monday. 

Berkeley undergraduate founders have created more companies than undergraduate founders from any other university in the world.

New treatments for cancer and heart disease and new tools to remove tumors are among seven innovations selected this year to receive a Bakar Fellows Spark Award, which includes funding, resources and mentorship to accelerate translation of faculty-led research to benefit society.

The story behind the summer blockbuster movie Oppenheimer, which opens across the nation on Friday, July 21, began at the University of California, Berkeley.

A 25-year-old J. Robert Oppenheimer arrived at UC Berkeley in fall 1929 as an assistant professor, and over the next dozen years established one of the greatest schools of theoretical physics in the U.S. — one that continues to this day. He made UC Berkeley’s physics department the center of American thought about the new field of quantum mechanics and how to apply it to atoms, nuclei and even neutron stars.

Chancellor Carol Christ and several other top UC Berkeley officials say the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling today, that public and private universities cannot use race as a factor in admitting students, is regrettable. They warned the decision will reduce opportunities for people of color and thwart the nation’s progress toward racial equality.

Chancellor Carol Christ sent the following message on Thursday:

It is with decidedly mixed feelings that I am writing to let you know I will be stepping down and retiring next summer, at the end of June 2024. My time in office has been meaningful and rewarding beyond compare, and I will sorely miss the challenges, the opportunities, and the daily interactions with the members of Cal’s amazing extended family.

Despite steady improvements in quantum computers, they’re still noisy and error prone, which leads to questionable or wrong answers. Scientists predict that they won’t truly outcompete today’s “classical” supercomputers for at least five or 10 years, until researchers can adequately correct the errors that bedevil entangled quantum bits, or qubits.

But a new study shows that, even lacking good error correction, there are ways to mitigate errors that could make quantum computers useful today.

The UC Board of Regents today voted to establish UC Berkeley’s College of Computing, Data Science, and Society (CDSS), the campus’s first new college in more than 50 years.

The college will develop, implement and share high-quality, ethics-oriented and accessible curricula, educating a diverse student body in data science, computing and statistics. It will also create new fields, applications and solutions to societal problems through groundbreaking, multidisciplinary research that capitalizes on Berkeley’s excellence across campus.

All the fun and excitement of Commencement 2023!  Fiat Lux and Go Bears!

Most members of the University of California, Berkeley’s Class of 2023 will always remember a stressful and disappointing two-year stretch, when the pandemic forced classes online at the end of their first year on campus.

But for graduating senior Catherine “Catey” Vera, those online classes instead were a refuge during the slow death of her father from ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s disease, the illness that afflicted physicist Stephen Hawking. Someone who had been a stable rock in her life was suddenly weak and vulnerable.

Gabriel Zucman, a UC Berkeley economist who has helped propel globally influential research on tax avoidance and economic inequality, today was awarded the John Bates Clark Medal by the American Economic Association (AEA).