The David and Lucile Packard Foundation announced today that UC Berkeley integrative biology professor Moisés Expósito-Alonso will receive one of its prized Packard Fellowships for Science and Engineering. The fellowships recognize 20 of the nation’s most innovative early-career scientists, engineers, and mathematicians who are pushing the boundaries of discovery to solve the world’s toughest challenges.
Hernan Garcia, associate professor of molecular & cell biology and physics at UC Berkeley is among the eight 2026 Schmidt Polymaths who will receive a combined total of up to $20 million to take their research in ambitious new directions. Dr. Garcia will adapt rapid gene-editing and screening methods for use in plants to develop more climate-resilient crops.
The Schmidt Polymaths award recognizes proven records of...
Chunlei Liu is a Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, and the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute at the University of California, Berkeley. His current research interests are brain imaging and modulation. He develops MRI and signal processing techniques to study brain structure and function. His group also works on technologies for remote modulation of neuronal activities. He received NIH Pathway to Independence Award (K99) in 2006, ISMRM Young Investigator Award finalist in 2007 and RSNA Margulis Award in 2015. In 2021, he was elected Fellow...
Sarah Kocher wants to understand what shapes variation in social behavior. Her lab has developed new tools to study social behavior across different scales, from the molecular building blocks of the “social brain” to the ecological and evolutionary forces that shape social evolution. Her research focuses on a unique group of bees that includes solitary, social, and socially flexible lineages. In these bees, social behavior has been independently gained and lost multiple times, creating an ideal framework for uncovering the factors shaping social behavior and its evolution.
Ward comes to Berkeley from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke at the National Institutes of Health, where he spent more than a decade as a senior investigator and practicing neurologist. His laboratory studies the basic biology that underlies age-related neurodegenerative diseases, including Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, frontotemporal dementia (FTD), and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS).
Ward's research focuses on how disrupted RNA biology and lysosomal failure drive neurodegeneration. To study these problems, his group developed a simple...
Tuberous sclerosis complex, a leading genetic cause of early-onset epilepsy, is typically resistant to drugs, requiring surgical removal of brain lesions. A new study pinpoints a cause and potential new therapies.
The International Balzan Foundation recognized Rasmus Nielsen, a professor of statistics and integrative biology at UC Berkeley, with its 2026 Balzan Prize for Molecular...
Since joining MCB’s faculty in 2023, Assistant Professor Bronwyn Lucas has had a productive two years: She’s been setting up her lab and her team is growing rapidly, including three PhD students, two postdocs, and several rotation students. Her team has been working on computational projects, which are starting to produce some interesting data, and rewritten a great deal of software....
Many grooves and dimples on the surface of the brain are unique to humans, but they’re often dismissed as an uninteresting consequence of packing an unusually large brain into a too-small skull.
But neuroscientists are finding that these folds are not mere artifacts, like the puffy folds you get when forcing a sleeping bag into a stuff sack. The depths of some of the smallest of these grooves seem to be linked to increased interconnectedness in the brain and better reasoning ability.
