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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).

Thousands of admitted students and their families flooded UC Berkeley’s walkways, plazas and lecture halls Saturday as Berkeley brought attendees back to campus for the first fully in-person Cal Day since the beginning of the pandemic.

Prospective students navigated over 200 events on campus which included Chancellor Carol Christ’s signature morning welcome at California Memorial Stadium and a noon rally at Upper Sproul Plaza where future and current students enjoyed traditional spirit songs.

As a high school student in 2019, Jimmy Nguyen wasn’t sure which college he wanted to attend. A senior at Yerba Buena High School in San Jose, he’d been accepted to several universities. And while UC Berkeley was on his radar, he felt it was a little too close to home.

But that spring, when Nguyen went to Cal Day, Berkeley’s annual open house, he said he was able to envision himself as a part of its bustling campus community — he knew it was the place for him.

BERKELEY – Less than 24 hours after Mark Madsen and his wife, Hannah, welcomed their fourth child into the world, the two-time NBA champion and 2022-23 Western Athletic Conference Coach of the Year was introduced into a new family himself.

Welcome to a new era of California men's basketball.

MINNEAPOLIS – In a testament to its depth and talent, the California men's swimming & diving team had multiple athletes score multiple points as the Golden Bears secured the program's eighth national championship on Saturday evening at the Jean K. Freeman Aquatica Center. Cal finished the meet with 482 points with one individual champion - sophomore Destin Lasco in the 200-yard backstroke.

Magical. Inclusive. Riveting. Welcoming. Brilliant. Supportive. Rigorous. Joyful. Enthusiastic.

These adjectives and more were used to recommend five UC Berkeley instructors who are this year’s recipients of the Distinguished Teaching Award, the campus’s most prestigious honor for teaching. The award, first given in 1957, recognizes teaching that incites intellectual curiosity, engages students in learning and has a lifelong impact.

“In whatever aspect of tech I am in, I always seek to fight for ways in which tech can promote social good,” said Bhasin.” (Photo courtesy of Amrita Bhasin)

This I’m a Berkeleyan was written as a first-person narrative from an interview with Sotira founder and UC Berkeley graduating senior Amrita Bhasin.

Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost Benjamin Hermalin and University Librarian and Professor Jeff MacKie-Mason sent the following message to the campus community on Thursday:

UC Berkeley’s Police Chief Yogananda Pittman, Vice Provost for the Faculty Victoria Plaut, Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs Stephen Sutton and Associate Vice Chancellor for People & Culture Eugene Whitlock sent the following message on Wednesday: 

A new UC Berkeley center will convene top scholars and students across a range of disciplines to conduct high-level research on critical social challenges at the intersection of politics and economics.

Yogananda Pittman took the oath of office today to become UC Berkeley’s new police chief, telling a festive, packed room in Sproul Hall — and East Coast family, friends and former co-workers on Zoom — that she is “ecstatic” to be starting her new role on campus. The former interim chief of the U.S.

What do the smallest building blocks of life look like? How do molecules dance and dart and drift through cells, fold and fuse and form the machinery of living things? For Ke Xu, a 2021 Heising-Simons Faculty Fellow, these questions are at the forefront of everything he does. Xu wants to visualize living cells at the nanoscale; he wants to see things that were—until he made it possible—unseeable. 

https://news.berkeley.edu/2022/12/13/top-stories-from-2022/

Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost Benjamin Hermalin and Eugene Whitlock, chief people & culture officer, sent the following message to the campus community on Monday:

With a year remaining in UC Berkeley’s historic Light the Way campaign, an exciting new gift to support the Robert T. Matsui Center for Politics and Public Service at the Institute for Governmental Studies has brought the total to $6 billion, the campaign’s monetary goal.

For the fourth straight year, UC Berkeley topped the list as the nation’s best public university for startup founders, and it remains the second-best university among both private and public schools, according to Pitchbook’s 2022 annual rankings of universities released Monday (Oct. 31).