News

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).

Halfway through Anjika Pai’s junior year of high school, Donald Trump began his U.S. presidency. As one of the few Indian Americans in the pastoral community of Jamison, Pennsylvania, Pai braced herself for an onslaught of xenophobia.

“People’s bigotry around that time was out on full display, and there was nothing I could do to make them like me because of the way I look, as a brown person,” she recalls...

Traveling abroad was my first adventure. Among strangers, I learned to depend on myself and to see the world from a different perspective. 

Growing up the child of cultural anthropologists, Karen Nakamura traveled around the world living in places like Indonesia, Australia, New Zealand and Japan. And while being exposed to different cultures and communities at a young age helped her to conceptualize the world around her, Nakamura said she didn’t have a real sense of her own identity.

When Jade Jaimes-Chavez moved to UC Berkeley in August, she was homesick.

As a first-generation undergraduate Latinx student, and the oldest of three sisters, she grew up taking care of her siblings with a close-knit family in Orange Cove, a predominately Chicanx/Latinx agricultural community in Central California. At Berkeley, she wasn’t sure she belonged, and she missed the support of her family...