The Extraordinary Teaching in Extraordinary Times Award is intended to honor UC Berkeley faculty, staff, and student instructors who in 2020 embraced the challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic, and engaged in or supported excellent teaching. These instructors and staff used innovative methods and worked beyond their traditional roles to ensure that students remained engaged and supported, and were challenged to do meaningful work under extraordinary circumstances.

The NSF GRFP recognizes and supports outstanding graduate students in NSF-supported STEM disciplines who are pursuing research-based master’s and doctoral degrees at accredited US institutions. The five-year fellowship includes three years of financial support including an annual stipend of $34,000 and a cost of education allowance of $12,000 to the institution.

Congratulations to:

Dan Kim, 

Claire Evensen

Daisy Horr

It was proclaimed on March 14th, 2017, also known as "Pi Day" and is Albert Einstein's birthday (and on every March 14th henceforth) that it is Marian Diamond Day in the City of Berkeley. 

Professor Marian Diamond loved to bake pies, and was the first person to publish research on Einstein's brain. We honor her memory this upcoming Pi Day.

Congratulations to The Biology Scholars Program! Which just received the 2020 HEALTH EQUITY INNOVATION FUND grant from Genentech to support students during the pandemic and beyond.

Ream more about the program here!

Bill Clemens, who died peacefully of metastatic cancer at his home in Berkeley on Nov. 17 at the age of 88, became one of the most persuasive voices against the impact hypothesis. He represented many biologists and paleontologists who, seeing continual turnover of life in the fossil record, challenged the catastrophism of physicists like Luis Alvarez, geologists like his son, Walter, and, increasingly, the public, which found the impact hypothesis very compelling.

Read More...

We applaud the combined responses of our students, staff, and faculty during these unbelievably challenging times and celebrate our amazing portfolio of research, education, and scientific progress for the common good.  

Read the IB Newsletter Here!

Cara Brook, a UC Berkeley researcher whose work on bat viruses has taken on new urgency with the rise of COVID-19, is one of five recipients of this year’s L’Oréal For Women in Science fellowships.

The awards were announced yesterday (Monday, Nov. 16) by L’Oréal USA, which sponsors the annual fellowships to recognize early-career female scientists. Brook and the other recipients each will receive $60,000 to advance their research.

​English limits entry into the world of science and limits public access to scientific results. Valeria Ramírez-Castañeda, a graduate student in IB, encountered this firsthand when she began writing her master’s thesis at the University of Los Andes in Bogota, Colombia, her native country. Read more of her story featured in the Berkeley News...
 

IB is proud to welcome all new students to our community including our class of 13 new PhD candidates! 

Learn about their favorite branches on the tree of life, childhood career aspirations and more.

A graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, found that some mosses in the California desert seek protection from the relentless sun and heat by sheltering under translucent quartz pebbles, essentially using the rocks as sunshades.

The soil under these rocks retains more moisture than exposed desert soil, said Jenna Ekwealor, while enough light leaks through the milky quartz to allow the tiny mosses to remain green with chlorophyll. Mosses actually prefer dim light, making these conditions ideal for growth.