Two UC Berkeley scientists, Jennifer Doudna and John Ngai, each will receive a $100,000 Grand Challenges Explorations grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to explore innovative research that could impact global health.
UC Berkeley's QB3 will launch a biotech incubator on May 6, hoping to duplicate the success of a similar incubator at QB3's Mission Bay outpost. UC Berkeley grad Wesley Chang, CEO of the start-up Aperys, LLC, is the first tenant of the QB3 Garage@Berkeley.
Recognizing the proven leadership of campus faculty and students in addressing climate change, poverty and public health, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation selected the University of California, Berkeley, as one of 10 universities worldwide to launch a new master's degree program in development practice.
California has created, through its laws and policies, a hugely bloated correctional system, says Barry Krisberg, a well-known advocate of criminal-justice reform. With 170,000 prisoners held in dozens of overcrowded facilities located mostly in rural areas, the system is financially unsustainable setting the stage, potentially, for smarter policies, he says.
The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)'s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) has been awarded $8.6 million in Recovery Act funding for what the DOE calls "ambitious research projects that could fundamentally change the way the country uses and produces energy."
For nearly a decade, Jillian Banfield and her UC Berkeley colleagues have been studying the microbe community that lives in one of the most acidic environments on Earth: the drainage from a former copper mine in Northern California. One group of these microbes seems to be smaller, and weirder, than any other known, free-living organism.
Leslie Kurke, professor of classics and comparative literature, and John Searle, professor of philosophy, have been elected to the American Philosophical Society.
The African clawed frog, Xenopus, has helped scientists understand how embryos develop and the many chemical reactions going on inside dividing cells. Now, scientists report the first draft genome sequence of Xenopus, setting the stage for a more complete genetic analysis of this popular frog.
Two University of California, Berkeley, faculty members were elected members of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) and a third professor was elected a foreign associate.
