CITRIS and the Banatao Institute are pleased to announce a partnership with the Academic Innovation Catalyst to launch the CITRIS Innovation Fellowship program and AIC Awards.

A new incubator on the west side of campus will provide resources and support to entrepreneurs in renewable energy and clean technology.

For researchers developing critical new technologies, having an entrepreneurial bent is almost as important as conducting successful experiments.

These teams are working to address significant societal challenges, including diagnosing and treating serious diseases and navigating an increasingly difficult rental housing market.

Three leaders of the NASA-partnered project to establish a research park at Moffett Field met in a virtual event to discuss the transformational promise of the Berkeley Space Center.

UC Berkeley professor peers into the black box of airline pricing strategies and methods.

The culture and spirit of innovation at UC Berkeley throughout history can be seen in the changemakers who have helped in countless ways to improve our lives and our world.

PitchBook 2023 data shows that Berkeley undergraduate students and alumni have created more companies than 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, of which multiple recipients are UC Berkeley faculty.

UC Berkeley School of Public Health launches the new Berkeley Center for Health Innovations and Entrepreneurship to create solutions for the health problems faced by an aging population.

The Molecular Therapeutics field focuses on innovative approaches to treat diseases, and the division hopes to accelerate the drug discovery process from idea to laboratory to clinic.

Berkeley Haas Professor Sameer Srivastava and co-authors have developed a deep learning model that can identify where and when prescient ideas first emerge.

Dubbed “the Woodstock of Hackathons,” the event was hosted by Berkeley’s premiere startup accelerator, Berkeley SkyDeck, and Cal Hacks, a nonprofit that runs collegiate hackathons.

A new study is the first to document how removing commission fees on trading platforms improves returns for the average trader.

New research has shown that people who experience periods of high inflation in their lifetimes are significantly more likely to own a home.

For the fourth straight year, UC Berkeley topped the list as the nation’s best public university for startup founders.

A new book collects Harrison’s path-breaking work on globalization, trade, and foreign direct investment into a single volume. 

Berkeley Haas provides novel insight into the subscription model and that the market for online subscription services will be $900 billion by 2026.

How do we incentivize the use of climate-friendly blockchains? Should lawmakers play a key role in creating opportunities for underserved communities via crypto assets and Web3? And what can the crypto asset industry do to ensure wealth-building opportunities are accessible to historically excluded communities?

David Schaffer remembers sitting on his father’s lap as a child, curiously delving into science books and crafting mnemonic phrases that instilled in him the building blocks of biology. Recently, Schaffer was appointed the new executive director of QB3, a UC-systemwide group that supports California entrepreneurship. Schaffer also leads the Bakar BioEnginuity Hub, which will hold 50 new biotechnology startup companies supported by the Bakar Labs incubator, and he directs Berkeley’s Bakar Fellows Program, a funding incubator that accelerates the application of discovery research.

David Schaffer, PhD, a University of California, Berkeley professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering, bioengineering, and molecular and cell biology, has been appointed the next executive director of QB3, the institute announced today.

Plenoxels surpass NeRF in every way — from their speed to their image quality — which may broaden their potential for consumer, industry and scientific applications.

UC Berkeley’s campus community this week celebrated the grand opening of the Bakar BioEnginuity Hub (BBH), the campus’s bold new home for research and innovation. After two years of seismic upgrades and renovations, BBH celebrated its opening this month. Bakar Labs, the facility’s flagship life sciences incubator, has been operational since mid-November, offering space to tenant companies.

Bakar Labs, the flagship life sciences incubator at UC Berkeley’s Bakar BioEnginuity Hub (BBH), has formed a partnership with the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation to provide free lab space and resources to startups that are focused on the application of gene therapy technologies that treat cystic fibrosis.

Professor David Schaffer has been announced as the new Faculty Director of the Bakar BioEnginuity Hub and the Bakar Fellows Program effective March 1, 2022.

Berkeley SkyDeck, UC Berkeley’s flagship startup incubator, plans to spread its culture of innovation and entrepreneurship to Europe with the launch of SkyDeck Europe — a new accelerator program based in Milan, Italy.

Four UC Berkeley faculty members, whose technological innovations promise to deliver solutions to some of the world’s most pressing problems, have been awarded the Bakar Fellows Program 2022 Bakar Prize.

The Chan Zuckerberg Biohub announced today (Jan. 11) the second cohort of scientists to be named CZ Biohub Investigators, 21 of whom are UC Berkeley faculty members.

Microbiologist Cecilia Martinez-Gomez studies a widespread specie of bacteria that thrives on rare earth elements, also known as rare earth metals or lanthanides. She has engineered one strain of the bacteria to efficiently accumulate a rare earth element known as neodymium from electronics waste and recycle it back to the industry for making batteries, speakers, even jet turbines.

More than 40 million MRI scans are carried out every year in the U.S.  In about one out of three, patients get an infusion containing the metal gadolinium as a contrast agent to improve imaging. Because contrast MRIs sometimes lead to potentially life-threatening complications, the FDA issued a warning against contrast MRIs for patients with kidney disease. Rebecca Abergel studies the chemical biology of metals, with a research focuses on organic molecules that can sequester and eliminate metals in the body, a chemical process known as chelation. She is using her Bakar Fellow support to evaluate the effectiveness of a chelating drug she has developed.

More than a billion people around the world – hundreds of millions of families – can’t afford secure housing. Researchers project the housing gap will nearly double within a decade. Simon Schleicher is part of a new generation of architects and engineers developing novel designs and construction technologies to ramp up production of affordable homes.  The Bakar Fellows program supports his research to advance the use of 3D printing in home construction.

Netherton Syndrome is a rare, genetic skin disease that can be fatal to neonatal patients. It's caused by a mutation in a gene for an enzyme known as LEKTI. There is no cure. With support from the Bakar Fellows Program, bioengineer Jay Keasling aims to employ a harmless bacterium to deliver the LEKTI enzyme that Netherton children lack, restoring the natural cycle that assures healthy skin and giving them a chance for a normal life.

Their inner workings reside in the realm of physics, but lasers make everyday life possible. With support from the Bakar Fellows Program, Boubacar Kante is preparing to fabricate a prototype and demonstrate the potential of the Bound State in Continuum Surface Emitting Laser (BICSEL) for a range of applications.

In 1965, Gordon Moore of Intel predicted that microprocessors would double in speed and capacity every couple of years. This prediction, now known as “Moore’s Law,” has with some modification in 1975 been reliably prophetic until now. We’re fast approaching the limits of Moore’s Law at the same time as demands on microprocessor performances are continuing to grow at an ever more rapid pace. The solution may be in a burgeoning technology whose name reads like a character in the Marvel Universe – magnonics. Bakar Fellow James Analytis believes magnons can be harnessed to meet future needs for high-speed, high-fidelity and energy-efficient data-processing that surpasses the limits of Moore’s Law.

Fruit bats aren’t the first words that comes to mind when you think of driverless cars.  But in their nightly forays for fruit and nectar, they routinely solve many of the engineering challenges that have stalled efforts to develop safe, reliable and efficient autonomous vehicles. Michael Yartsev describes the neurobiological principles his lab has uncovered and how the insights may provide a roadmap to the future.

Berkley startup, Catena Biosciences, is valued at over $10 million and stands as an example of Berkeley’s change-making spirt: Put entrepreneurial scientists, mission-driven business experts and accomplished faculty in the same space — focused on solving the world’s problems — and innovation will flourish.

Kristofer Pister leads research to embed microbatteries directly into sensor circuitry, providing a built-in power source instead of an external one. The technology could shrink circuit boards to make the sensor, microprocessor and battery all one unit that can speak to the internet.

Maria Paz Gutierrez has begun to explore the potential of using lichens rather than plants as living air purifiers, and installing them along interior walls, rather than exterior walls.  With support from the Bakar Fellowship Program, Dr. Gutierrez aims to fabricate small-scale “lichen building blocks” and test their capacity to purify indoor air. She describes her unorthodox approach and what drew her to it.

Bakar Fellow Norman Yao, Assistant Professor of Physics, has overcome conventional limitations with the invention of the NV-DAC, which directly integrates a thin layer of NV center sensors into a diamond anvil tip. With this invention, Yao and his group have been able to obtain highly sensitive and localized DAC measurements of a sample material’s properties under enormous pressure over a wide range of temperatures.

Russell Vance, PhD, Professor of Immunology and Pathogenesis in the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology, studies the immune system’s production of Interferons, a type of protein that normally helps trigger the immune response to viruses. With support from the Bakar Fellowship Program, he is developing a way to disable cancer’s ability to block interferon production.

Rikky Muller, Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, has refined the physical comfort of EEG earbuds and has demonstrated their ability to detect and record brain activity. With support from the Bakar Fellowship Program, she is building out several applications to establish Ear EEG as a new platform technology to support consumer and health monitoring apps. 

After last-minute bids that twice extended today’s auction on Foundation, the University of California, Berkeley’s NFT based on the Nobel Prize-winning research behind cancer immunotherapy finally went for about $54,360 — 22 ETH (Ether) — and netted the campus about $50,000.

In the face of daunting global challenges, such as climate change and a catastrophic pandemic, it is evident that the world urgently needs science-based solutions to tackle society’s greatest problems. At the University of California, Berkeley, the next generation of emerging scholars and entrepreneurs will work to confront those challenges in the Bakar BioEnginuity Hub (BBH), a new campus initiative that aims to launch the world-changing startups of today, while cultivating the innovative leaders of tomorrow.

Bakar Fellow Alessandra Lanzara has been at the forefront of expanding the capabilities of ARPES (Angle-Resolved Photo-Emission Spectroscopy) to directly detect electron spin. She and her team have now developed a detection system, which they call “spin-TOF,” that enables a material’s spin-dependent electronic and magnetic properties to be studied with a thousand times more sensitivity than any previous technology.