February 17, 2026
A Sloan Research Fellowship is one of the most prestigious awards available to early-career researchers. The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation today announced the names of the 126 early-career researchers selected to receive 2026 Sloan Research Fellowships, including seven from UC Berkeley. The fellowships honor exceptional scholars in the U.S. and Canada whose creativity, innovation and research accomplishments…
February 12, 2026
Amy Herr, a QB3-Berkeley faculty affiliate and professor of bioengineering, has been awarded a 2026 Weill Neurohub Investigator Award. The award supports her research project, “The Protein Code of Brain Aging: From Molecules to Mechanisms.” The Weill Neurohub Investigator program is designed to fund high-impact, interdisciplinary research that leverages expertise across UC Berkeley, UCSF, and…
February 11, 2026
The National Academy of Engineering (NAE) announced this week that four UC Berkeley faculty — including QB3-Berkeley faculty affiliate Jennifer Doudna — have been elected to its ranks. Election to the NAE is among the highest professional distinctions accorded to an engineer. Academy membership honors those who have made outstanding contributions to engineering research, practice…
February 10, 2026
Parkinson’s disease afflicts more than ten million people worldwide, and with prevalence continuing to rise, the need for therapies that do more than merely mask symptoms has become urgent. In response, UC Berkeley’s Molecular Therapeutics Initiative (MTI) has selected three research teams for the inaugural MTI Parkinson’s Therapeutics Program, launched last autumn to transform high-impact academic…
January 08, 2026
Key Takeaways John Clarke, a former scientist at Berkeley Lab, shared the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics for discovering quantum tunneling in an electric chip. This research, conducted at Berkeley Lab in the 1980s by Clarke and co-laureates Michel Devoret and John Martinis, was supported by the Department of Energy’s Office of Science. The team’s…
January 01, 2026
Findings could lead to eco-friendly plastics and other materials UC Berkeley professor Ting Xu has spent more than seven years trying to figure out how to design synthetic polymers with protein-like behaviors. Now, she and a team of researchers have unlocked “design rules” that upend long-held views on polymers and could pave the way for eco-friendly plastics…
November 19, 2025
Two years ago, a novel analysis by UC Berkeley researchers pointed to comb jellies as the root of the animal tree of life. Another Berkeley group now says it’s sponges. Photo by Alison Yin, courtesy of HHMIBiologists who study the evolutionary origin of animals got a bit of a surprise this month when a new…
November 10, 2025
Worldwide, more than 500,000 children under age five die each year from gastrointestinal bacterial infections, largely in communities lacking safe drinking water, sanitation and hygiene infrastructure. To address this public health threat, scientists need to better understand how these pathogens spread. Now, a team led by Amy Pickering, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering, has discovered…