Congratulations to Carl J. Rothfels, one of this years recipients of the Distinguished Graduate Student Mentoring Award

Carol D. Soc Distinguished Graduate Student Mentoring Awards, established in 2007, recognize UC Berkeley faculty for their vital role in mentoring graduate students and training future faculty. The awards are funded by the Graduate Division and seek to foster the qualities of excellence in mentorship that are so important to the Berkeley community. The winners are honored annually at an awards ceremony jointly sponsored by the Graduate Assembly and the Graduate Division.

Congratulations to Mike Boots on being elected a AAAS fellow!

Ten members of the UC Berkeley community – including nine faculty and one staff member — have been elected American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) fellows, one of the most distinctive honors within the scientific community. The 2021 class of AAAS fellows includes 564 scientists, engineers and innovators who are being recognized for their scientifically and socially distinguished achievements.

Some birds sing the same song for hundreds of thousands of years

A new study by biologists from the University of California, Berkeley, and Missouri State University in Springfield, however, documents songs in East African sunbirds that have remained nearly unchanged for more than 500,000 years, and perhaps for as long as 1 million years, making the songs nearly indistinguishable from those of relatives from which they’ve long been separated.

Captured in flight

University of California, Berkeley, doctoral candidate Lawrence Wang, leader of the squirrel documentation project and his team refined efforts to produce the high quality cover images of the August 2021 issue of Science magazine. Their efforts produced some of the best high quality motion shots of fox squirrels showing off their stuff as they leap through the air. 

Read more about the process here! 

IB is Hiring a new Assistant/Associate/Full Professor - Plant Evolutionary Biology/Director of the University and Jepson Herbaria

The Department of Integrative Biology and the University and Jepson Herbaria at the University of California, Berkeley invite applications for a tenure-track (assistant rank) or tenured (associate or full rank) professor in Plant Evolutionary Biology. This position includes appointment as Director of the University and Jepson Herbaria.

Applications open September 2nd, 2021 through Monday, Nov 8, 2021 at 11:59pm (Pacific Time)

Apply today

Leaping squirrels! Parkour is one of their many feats of agility

Biologists like Robert Full at the University of California, Berkeley, have shown over the last few decades how animals like geckos, cockroaches and squirrels physically move and how their bodies and limbs help them in sticky situations — all of which have been applied to making more agile robots. But now they are tackling a harder problem: How do animals decide whether or not to take a leap? How do they assess their biomechanical abilities to know whether they can stick the landing?

New book on species concepts by professor Brent Mishler

A new book entitled “What, if Anything, are Species?” by IB Professor Brent Mishler explores this controversial topic in detail, based on 40 years of investigation. He concludes that species are nothing special; entities currently given that rank are simply clades like taxa at all other levels on the tree of life, smaller or larger than the traditional species level.  He goes into the advantages of fully rankless classification, and of a multi-level approach to ecology and evolution.