Research

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.

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.

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! 

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

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?

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.

Join IB graduate student Tara Lepore on Thursday, June 10th for another exciting "Grounds for Science" event in UC Berkeley's Science at Cal series. Register for this free event here.

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

IB Associate Professor Caroline Williams was one of the lead authors of a new study appearing this week in the journal Global Change Biology. Read more here.

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!