Society archive
SubscribeTackling the global energy challenge
June 8, 2012: The Energy Biosciences Institute at UC Berkeley is leading the world’s quest to transition from today’s carbon-based energy economy.
Bridging the R&D gap
December 12, 2011: The vision of the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society is to develop information technology solutions for the world’s most pressing social and environmental problems. CITRIS leverages interdisciplinary collaborations among faculty at four University of California campuses with government resources and researchers at industry-leading corporate partners. Advancing groundbreaking discoveries in clean energy, health care and smart [...]
Jump-starting the bioeconomy
December 6, 2011: Harnessing innovation across the fields of bioengineering and biotechnology, structural and chemical biology, and bioinformatics, the California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences (QB3) is accelerating fundamental discoveries to address society’s critical needs and catalyzing the technologies and industries of the 21st century. QB3 fosters interdisciplinary research collaborations across three UC campuses to stimulate partnerships with private industry, and provides state-of-the-art facilities [...]
Biotech building blocks
November 22, 2011: Using seed money from the National Science Foundation, bioengineers from UC Berkeley and Stanford launched the world’s first open-source biological design-build facility to help speed the development of innovative solutions across health, energy and industry. The synthetic anti-malarial drug artemisinin, which relied on engineered microbes, took 10 years and $25 million to get out of the lab and into small-scale [...]
Missing link
November 14, 2011: Heralded as the “Breakthrough discovery of 2009″ by the journal Science, Ardipithecus ramidus, a completely new human ancestor, was unearthed in Ethiopia by a UC Berkeley co-led research team. At 4.4 million years old, “Ardi” is the oldest, most complete hominid skeleton ever found — 1.2 million years older than the famous fossilized specimen “Lucy.” Funded by the National Science [...]
Synthetic biology revolution
October 19, 2011: UC Berkeley established the Synthetic Biology Institute with the goal of creating transformative processes, products and technologies that meet critical demands in energy, health, agriculture, manufacturing and security. Backed by Agilent Technologies, SBI seeks to bridge the gap between today’s small-scale biological engineering and the mass production of synthetic-biological systems across industries. Synthetic biology has the potential to profoundly impact [...]
Saul Perlmutter awarded 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics 
October 4, 2011: Saul Perlmutter, UC Berkeley professor of physics and LBNL senior scientist, will share the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics with two other scientists, including former UC Berkeley postdoc Adam Riess, for their discovery that the expansion of the universe is accelerating. This discovery in 1998 led to the realization that the universe is largely composed of an enigmatic “dark energy.”
