Joshua A. Miele got a text from an unknown phone number in Chicago a few weeks ago asking if he could schedule a call that day. The text was from a scientist at The MacArthur Foundation.
"When they ask you if you have time for a call, you say yes," Miele told Berkeleyside Wednesday morning. But he spent the next few hours in meetings, and given that he had nominated colleagues for the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship in the past, he spent those hours thinking variations of the same theme: They do not want to talk to you about you. But this time, they did. It was announced Tuesday that Miele, a Berkeley resident for three decades, is one of this year's fellows. Winners of what's commonly called the "Genius Awards," get $625,000 over five years, with no strings attached as to how it is used. Miele is a UC Berkeley graduate.

President Biden announced Wednesday the 30 science and technology leaders who will serve on the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, a group of external advisers tasked with making science, technology and innovation policy recommendations to the White House and the president. The council includes 20 elected members of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine; five MacArthur "genius" fellows; two former Cabinet secretaries; and two Nobel laureates. It is also the most diverse council in its history, with women comprising half of the members and people of color and immigrants making up more than one-third. The members include Inez Fung, an atmospheric scientist and professor at the University of California, Berkeley and Saul Perlmutter, an astrophysicist and cosmologist who is a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and director of the Berkeley Institute for Data Science. For more on this, see our story at Berkeley News

The Carnegie Corporation of New York announced the 2021 class of Andrew Carnegie Fellows today. UC Berkeley professor of economics Gabriel Zucman is one of the 26 new fellows who will receive $200,000 to fund significant research and writing in the social sciences and humanities on a range of important social issues. A Carnegie Fellow award can be used for a period of up to two years, and it's anticipated that a book or major study will result from a fellow's work.

The Guggenheim Fellows for 2021 were announced this week. This year's winners include 184 scholars, artists, scientists and writers selected via a rigorous peer review process from more than 3,000 initial candidates. UC Berkeley hosts four new Guggenheim fellows: Christopher J. Chang (Chemistry), Raúl Coronado (Ethnic Studies), Ken Light (Journalism), and Debarati Sanyal (French). The prestige of a Guggenheim Fellowship is substantial. Since its inception almost a hundred years ago, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has granted nearly $400 million in Fellowships to over 18,000 individuals. For more on this, see our press release at Berkeley News.

A collection of fuchsia seesaws stationed across the US-Mexico border wall have won a prestigious design award in the UK for their innovation in building bridges across the communities. The toy's creators, Ronald Rael, a professor of architecture at the University of California, Berkeley, and Virginia San Fratello, an associate professor of design at San José State University, said they hoped the design would encourage people to question the effectiveness of borders and help to heal divisions. For more on this, see our press release at Berkeley News.

UC Berkeley African American Studies professor Nikki Jones has won the 2020 Michael J. Hindelang Award. The national honor given by the American Society of Criminology recognizes a book published within the past three years that makes the most outstanding contribution to research in criminology. Jones recently received the award for her book The Chosen Ones: Black Men and the Politics of Redemption. Through the use of ethnographic interviews with inner-city police officers and recordings of police encounters collected by and alongside law enforcement, the book delves into the reasons why violence persists in inner cities, despite the presence of adequate funding and resources.

The New York Times talks to UC Berkeley biochemist Jennifer Doudna about her winning the Nobel Prize in chemistry and about the impact the pandemic has had on her work. "I'd love to see science become more integrated into our daily conversations. It seems that in the past, at least in certain societies, science was much more integrated. And I would love to see us work toward that. We could be using different forms of media, whether it's in cartoons or short videos, and more conversational use of language that isn't exclusive - not using jargon. One of the things that I've seen in my career is that there's been an unfortunate change in the opposite direction where scientists are increasingly distrusted." For more on this, see our press release at Berkeley News.

UC Berkeley biochemist Jennifer Doudna won the Nobel Prize in chemistry Wednesday for her work helping to develop a genome-editing tool, a breakthrough in biomedicine. Working with colleague Emmanuelle Charpentier, of the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology in Berlin, Doudna developed CRISPR-Cas9, which allows scientists to edit DNA strands with previously unfathomable precision. For more on this, see our press release at Berkeley News. Stories on this topic have appeared in dozens of sources, including The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, AP News, Reuters, NPR, CNN, and The Mercury News.

The Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to three astrophysicists today for their work on black holes, massive objects that swallow light and everything else forever that falls into their reach. They are Roger Penrose, an Englishman, Reinhard Genzel, a German, and Andrea Ghez, an American. Genzel is a director at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Garching, Germany, and a professor at the University of California, Berkeley.Working independently, Genzel and Ghez, and their teams, have spent the last decades tracking stars and dust clouds whizzing around the center of our galaxy with telescopes in Chile and Hawaii, trying to see if that dark dusty realm does indeed harbor a black hole. "Their pioneering work has given us the most convincing evidence yet of a supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way," the Swedish Academy of Sciences said in its announcement. For more on this, see our press release at Berkeley News. Stories on this topic have appeared in dozens of sources, including NBC News, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, NPR, Vox, and The Mercury News.

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry was jointly awarded on Wednesday to Emmanuelle Charpentier and UC Berkeley professor Jennifer A. Doudna for their work on Crispr-Cas9, a method to edit DNA. The announcement marks the first time the award has gone to two women. "This year's prize is about rewriting the code of life," Goran K. Hansson, the secretary-general of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, said as he announced the names of the laureates. Dr. Charpentier and Dr. Doudna, only the sixth and seventh women in history to win a chemistry prize, did much of the pioneering work to turn molecules made by microbes into a tool for customizing genes — whether in microbes, plants, animals or even humans. "I'm over the moon, I'm in shock," Dr. Doudna, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, said at a news conference on Wednesday. For more on this, see our press release at Berkeley News. Stories on this topic have appeared in dozens of sources, including The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, AP News, Reuters, NPR, CNN, and The Mercury News.

Not so long ago, scientists couldn't say with much confidence that black holes existed, nor did they know that a giant one sits at the center of our own galaxy. Yesterday, the Nobel Committee recognized decades of black-hole research by awarding its physics prize to three scientists. Half the prize went to Roger Penrose, of the University of Oxford, who showed that black holes could exist, and half went to Reinhard Genzel, of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics and UC Berkeley, and Andrea Ghez, of UCLA, who provided the most convincing evidence that a particular black hole - the supermassive one at the center of our Milky Way - did indeed exist. For more on this, see our press release at Berkeley News. Stories on this topic have appeared in dozens of sources, including NBC News, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, NPR, Vox, and The Mercury News.

Among the 21 newly minted MacArthur "genius grant" fellows is UC Berkeley cellular and developmental biologist Polina V. Lishko. The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation will give each winner $625,000 over five years to use as they please. The Chicago-based foundation has awarded the "genius grants" every year since 1981 to help further the pursuits of people with outstanding talent. For more on this, see our press release at Berkeley News. Stories on this topic have also appeared in several sources, including Fast Company, The New York Times, and The Chicago Sun Times.

UC Berkeley energy and chemistry professor Peidong Yang has received the 2020 Global Energy Prize for his research. A prestigious prize awarded annually in Russia by the president of the Russian Federation, the Global Energy Prize recognizes research and technological developments in the field of energy from around the world. Yang received the accolade in the Global Energy Prize's Non-Conventional Energy category for the invention of the nanoparticle-based solar cell and artificial photosynthesis.

The American Chemical Society (ACS) has selected Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost Paul Alivisatos, of the University of California, Berkeley as the recipient of the 2021 Priestley Medal, the Society's highest honor. Alivisatos, the Samsung Distinguished Professor in Nanoscience and Nanotechnology Research and professor of chemistry and materials science and engineering at UC Berkeley, is being recognized for "foundational contributions to the chemistry of nanoscience, development of nanocrystals as nanotechnology building blocks and leadership in the chemistry and nanoscience communities."

Molecular and cell biology and biochemistry professor James Hurley and chemistry professor Dean Toste have been elected to the National Academy of Sciences. According to this reporter: "Election to NAS, which is more than 150 years old, recognizes scientists and engineers for their distinguished and continuing achievements in original research and is considered one of the highest scientific honors bestowed in the US. This year, 23 of the newly elected are members of the American Chemical Society or work in areas related to the chemical sciences." For more on this, see our press release at Berkeley News.