Berkeley Talks

Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II is a pastor and social justice advocate building a broad-based grassroots movement, grounded in the moral tenets of faith-based communities and the constitution, to confront systemic racism, poverty, environmental devastation, the war economy and the distorted moral narrative of religious nationalism in America today. Barber delivered the closing keynote speech on Apr...

Jennifer Doudna spoke at UC Berkeley's International House on Feb. 21, 2019, about the revolutionary gene-editing tool she co-invented, CRISPR-Cas9. Our technological capacity to make changes to genomic data has expanded exponentially since the 2012 discovery of CRISPR-Cas9 as an RNA-programmable genome editing tool. Over the past seven years, this genome editing platform has been used to revoluti...

1.5 degrees Celsius. That's the maximum global temperature increase allowable before we see catastrophic impacts on food security, ecosystems, water access, frequency and extremity of weather events, according to a special 2018 report from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The report warns global leaders and policymakers that failing to limit the earth’s temperature increase...

Amy Heineike is the vice president of product engineering at Primer AI. One area the company is active in is around news data and news cycles — they model the contrasting narratives that people are telling around global stories using millions of statistical observations about entities and their relationships. Another area that they’re active in is around Wikipedia — human-written summaries and mai...

Ellen Ullman is a computer programmer, essayist on technology and culture and an author of four books — two nonfiction and two novels — on the human side of technology. Her most recent book,  Life in Code: A Personal History of Technology , in 2007 was named by the San Francisco Chronicle among the best books of the year. Life in Code bookends her earlier work, in 1997, where that was named C...

For millennia, humans have cultivated deep relationships with psychoactive plants — relationships embedded within and guided by ritual frameworks honoring the powers of these plants as allies. As cultures have evolved, so also have these plant-human interactions, often in ways that are highly interdependent. David Presti, who teaches neurobiology, psychology and cognitive science at UC Berkeley, g...

Tarfia Faizullah is the author of  Registers of Illuminated Villages (2018) and  Seam (2014). Faizullah has won a VIDA Award, a GLCA New Writers’ Award, a Milton Kessler First Book Award, Drake University Emerging Writer Award and other honors. Her poems have been published widely in periodicals and anthologies both in the United States and abroad, including  Poetry Magazine , ...

Ashton Applewhite, named one of PBS Next Avenue’s Influencers in Aging and author of the breakaway new book, This Chair Rocks: A Manifesto Against Ageism, share her own personal experiences with ageism — defined as “treating a person differently on the basis of age" and discusses her work, which explores ageism’s destructive impact on individuals, our communities and our policies. Chronological ag...

Composer Jimmy López, who earned his Ph. D. in music from UC Berkeley in 2012, speaks about  Dreamers , an oratorio he was commissioned by Cal Performances to write that is informed by interviews held with undocumented students at UC Berkeley. The piece was written in collaboration with Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Nilo Cruz, who created the libretto. Esa-Pekka Salonen, the mus...

In his latest book, How to Change Your Mind , Michael Pollan turns his focus to psychedelics — LSD, psilocybin mushrooms and the like — exploring their history, use, and potential to help people not only transcend, but also treat conditions from addiction to anxiety. On March 5, 2019, Pollan joined Dacher Keltner, a professor of psychology at UC Berkeley and founder of the Greater Good Science Cen...

NIMBYism, geographical limitation and weaponized policies have led California to the biggest housing crisis in state history. Can state-level policies fix a very local problem?   California housing is an undeniable problem. Rents are too high and there is not enough housing for those who need it in the places they want it. But how did we get h...

How are individuals and groups racially classified? What are the meanings attached to different racial categories? And what impact do these categories have on a range of policies and practices? Taking the U.S. Census as a site of racial classification, Michael Omi, a professor of ethnic studies at UC Berkeley, examines the shifting state definitions of race and how individuals and groups assert, e...

National analysts have noted the sharply increased number of women running for elective office in 2018, especially among Democrats. In a panel discussion, “Year of the Woman?," Nicole Boucher, co-executive director of the California Donor Table; Mary Hughes, a democratic strategist and founder of Close the Gap California; and Amanda Renteria, chair of Emerge America examines the phenomenon in the...

Dancer/choreographer Akram Khan appeared in the West Coast premiere of  XENOS , a Cal Performances co-commission, in Zellerbach Hall on March 2-3, 2019.  Khan, who is of British and Bangladeshi descent, is celebrated for physically demanding, visually arresting solo productions that combine Indian kathak with contemporary dance to tell stories through movement. Khan’s...

Berkeley Law Professor Catherine Fisk, author of Writing for Hire: Unions, Hollywood, and Madison Avenue (2016), gave a lecture on Feb. 13, 2019, that examines some of the recent radical changes in the law of the workplace in California and nationwide. She discusses how the transformation of work through the gig economy and through the decline of union presents unprecedented challenges for regulat...

Ari Banias is the author of  Anybody  (2016), which was named a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and the PEN Center USA Literary Award. His poems have appeared in various journals, in  Troubling The Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics  and as part of the MOTHA exhibition, Trans Hirstory in 99 Objects. Banias is the recipient of fellowships from the New Yor...

Richard Rothstein, a fellow of the Othering and Belonging Institute at UC Berkeley and author of  The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How our Government Segregated America,  gave a lecture on Feb. 6, 2019, about the forgotten history of how federal, state and local policy segregated metropolitan areas nationwide, creating racially homogenous neighborhoods in patterns that violate th...

In a panel discussion, "The Changing California Electorate," Lisa García Bedolla, the director of Berkeley's Institute of Governmental Studies; Kristin Olsen, a Republican who served on the California State Assembly from 2010-2016; Mindy Romero, director of the California Civic Engagement Project at USC; and Dan Schnur, director of the Sacramento Bee California Influencer series examine the changi...

What are some of the current challenges to maintaining social welfare programs for the nation's most vulnerable people in the Trump era? Tina Sacks, an assistant professor at UC Berkeley's School of Social Welfare, gave a lecture on this topic on Jan. 30, 2019, as part of a series of talks sponsored by UC Berkeley's  Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI) . Sacks's fields of interest includ...

Elizabeth (Dori) Tunstall is a design anthropologist, public intellectual and design advocate who works at the intersections of critical theory, culture and design. As dean of design at Ontario College of Art and Design University in Canada, she is the first Black woman dean of a faculty of design. She leads the Cultures-Based Innovation Initiative, focused on using old ways of knowing to drive in...

On Nov. 6, 2018, Ph. D. candidate in molecular and cell biology Rosalie Lawrence gave an interview on KALX's program, "The Graduates," about her research on how cells in our bodies make decisions. She studies mTORC1, a protein complex that interacts with cellular organelles called lysosomes and tells the cell when it has enough nutrients to grow. She is interested in the role mTORC1 plays in...

Jodi Kantor is a New York Times investigative reporter and a recipient of the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for her reporting on the #MeToo movement. Her work has exposed abuses of power, from Harvey Weinstein to Amazon. Kantor joined UC Berkeley's 2018 graduation celebrations as the commencement speaker for journalism students. Afterwards, she sat down with former Mother Jones...

Presidential power is always a hot topic, but never more so than today. This lecture, given by Berkeley Law Professor Daniel Farber on Sept. 25, 2018, explains the constitutional limits on the president and how individual rights are affected. Dan Farber is the Sho Sato Professor of Law at UC Berkeley and the faculty director of the Center for Law, Energy and the Environment. Professor Farber serve...

Twenty years ago, astronomers were astonished to learn from observations of exploding stars that cosmic expansion is speeding up. We attribute this to a mysterious “dark energy” that pervades the universe and makes up 70 percent of it. Scientists are working in many ways to learn more about the nature of dark energy, but our reservoir of ignorance is deep. On Oct. 24, astronomer Bob Kirshner gave...

There are a greater number of forcibly displaced people in the world today than at any time since the end of World War II, and the Bay Area has welcomed many of these individuals. Hear from clinicians, including Sita Patel, who received her master’s degree and Ph. D. in clinical psychology from UC Berkeley and is an associate professor in clinical psychology at Palo Alto University, who are workin...