Berkeley Talks

The last eight years have seen a revolution in approved cancer treatments, based on the development of medicines that arouse our immune systems to attack and eliminate our own cancer cells. These breakthroughs in immunotherapy of cancer were based on a deep understanding of the immune system itself, coupled with the first direct evidence that immune responses that attack human cancers occur naturally, albeit weakly. The treatments amplify natural immune responses against cancer, and are effective in some types of cancer, leading to cures in many patients. They are less effective or not effective in many other types of cancer. The success has galvanized major new efforts by researchers and drug companies alike to develop complementary and more broadly effective medications to treat other types of cancer.David Raulet, a professor in the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology, gave a lecture on April 10, 2019, about the revolution of cancer immunology. In this talk, Raulet describes how these medicines work, their current limitations and the prospects for novel and more effective immunotherapy approaches, including those based on research in the his laboratory.This lecture is part of a series of talks sponsored by UC Berkeley’s Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI).Read a transcript on Berkeley News. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

On Thursday, April 18, 2019, Cal Performances’ board of trustees co-chairs Helen Meyer and Susan Graham, and executive and artistic director Jeremy Geffen, announced the organization’s 2019-20 season, programmed by associate director Rob Bailis. Hear Bailis in conversation about the season with Cy Musiker, a KQED radio news reporter, anchor and recently retired host of KQED's weekly arts showThe Do List. Musiker is an alumnus of UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism.Cal Performances' 2019-20 season showcases an exhilarating and expansive breadth of dance productions, from grand to intimate in scale, featuring a broad range of international performance traditions and starring renowned companies from the US and abroad in Zellerbach Hall, widely considered the finest concert dance venue on the west coast; virtuoso soloists and conductors making their Cal Performances debuts; and immersion in key bodies of work by Beethoven, Bartók and Liszt.An interdisciplinary set of projects explores the artistic accomplishments of UC Berkeley faculty and alumni and Berkeley natives — with composers, scholars, writers, filmmakers and performers bringing new and recent work to campus. Dance and contemporary music ensembles perform Cal Performances co-commissioned work and the season concludes with a Hewlett 50 Arts Commission project staged in collaboration with lead commissioner Stanford Live. Artists and ensembles with meaningful, decades-long relationships with Cal Performances and Bay Area audiences return, and master performers from across the globe travel to Zellerbach Hall for presentations that revive and refresh traditional and contemporary music and dance practices.Read a transcript and see photos on Berkeley News.(Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater photo by Andrew Eccles)  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Brown v. Board of Education was hailed as a landmark decision for civil rights. But decades later, many consider school integration a failure. UC Berkeley professor Rucker C. Johnson's new book Children of the Dream: Why School Integration Works shows the exact opposite is true. The book looks at decades of studies to show that students of all races who attended integrated schools fared better than those who did not. In this interview with Goldman School of Public Policy Dean Henry E. Brady, which took place on Jan. 9, 2019, Johnson explains how he and his team analyzed the impact of not just integration, but school funding policies and the Head Start program.This lecture was recorded by UCTV, the UC Public Policy Channel.The Goldman School of Public Policy, with the Berkeley Institute for the Future of Young Americans, also produces a podcast, “Talk Policy To Me.”Listen and read a transcript on Berkeley News. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II is a pastor and social justice advocate building a broad-based grassroots movement, grounded in the moral tenets of faith-based communities and the constitution, to confront systemic racism, poverty, environmental devastation, the war economy and the distorted moral narrative of religious nationalism in America today.Barber delivered the closing keynote speech on April 10 at the 2019 Othering & Belonging conference, organized by the Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society at UC Berkeley. The Othering & Belonging conferences are dynamic and uniquely curated events that aim to elevate work nationally and globally in "othering and belonging," a critical lens developed by the Haas Institute under the leadership of john a. powell for defining structural exclusion and inclusion, and an analytical and applied framework which we can use to design and advance institutions, narratives and policies that support a more fully inclusive “we.”The 2019 conference highlighted models of bridging that give us examples of how to build and sustain a diverse, pluralistic society underpinned by a new, inclusive social compact where group-based difference and forms of identity — whether race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, gender, among others — are not dehumanized nor are they subsumed, but instead are celebrated and included in our imagined and real community.Learn more about the Othering and Belonging conferences.Listen and read a transcript on Berkeley News. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jennifer Doudna spoke at UC Berkeley's International House on Feb. 21, 2019, about the revolutionary gene-editing tool she co-invented, CRISPR-Cas9.Our technological capacity to make changes to genomic data has expanded exponentially since the 2012 discovery of CRISPR-Cas9 as an RNA-programmable genome editing tool. Over the past seven years, this genome editing platform has been used to revolutionize research, develop new agricultural crops and even promises to cure genetic diseases. However, ethical and societal concerns abound, requiring a thoughtful and ongoing discussion among scientists and stakeholder groups.Doudna is a professor in the Department of Chemistry and the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology at UC Berkeley and is Li Ka Shing Chancellor's Professor in Biomedical and Health. She is a member of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2018, Doudna received a Medal of Honor from the American Cancer Society.This talk was hosted by the Institute of International Studies, as part of its Endowed Elberg Series. It was recorded by the Office of Communications and Public Affairs. Watch the video here.Read the transcript on Berkeley News. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

1.5 degrees Celsius. That's the maximum global temperature increase allowable before we see catastrophic impacts on food security, ecosystems, water access, frequency and extremity of weather events, according to a special 2018 report from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The report warns global leaders and policymakers that failing to limit the earth’s temperature increase will result in a world that is unrecognizable – and extremely difficult to live in.  Given the urgency and magnitude of climate change, what are individuals’ role in helping to limit global temperature increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius? How do our lives and habits need to change? How does our responsibility, as residents of the wealthiest country in the world, compare to those living in poverty? And how does individual responsibility for carbon reduction interact with corporate and industrial responsibility? Does it matter that we recycle and buy local produce and use public transit when the U.S. continues to buy oil from Saudi Arabia and 85% of Americans drive to work?  To answer these questions, Talk Policy to Me reporter and Goldman MPP student Reem Rayef spoke with Chris Jones, one of the makers of the CoolClimate Calculator. It's an online interactive tool that calculates users’ carbon footprints (the amount of CO2 they emit per year) using information about their homes, consumption habits and lifestyles. The calculator then provides custom recommendations to users on how they might “green” their lifestyles — from buying an electric vehicle to eating a vegetarian diet.Through April, the campus is participating in the Cool Campus Challenge, designed to educate and motivate all nine UC campuses to take simple, energy-saving and waste-reducing actions to help the UC system reach its goal of carbon neutrality by 2025. Students, staff and faculty are all invited to participate.Read a transcript of this episode on Berkeley News.Listen to more Talk Policy to Me episodes on the Goldman School of Public Policy’s website. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Amy Heineike is the vice president of product engineering at Primer AI. One area the company is active in is around news data and news cycles — they model the contrasting narratives that people are telling around global stories using millions of statistical observations about entities and their relationships. Another area that they’re active in is around Wikipedia — human-written summaries and maintaining these summaries is extremely time intensive and Primer AI has formulated approaches to creating and maintaining pages.For her talk, Heineike focuses on an idea that Primer AI had from the very beginning: How we think about humans and machines interacting with AI, how we understand the data and then, how we overcome the bias we discover.Heineike gave her lecture on March 8, 2019, during the annual Women in Technology symposium at UC Berkeley. The daylong event was sponsored by WITI@UC, a joint initiative of Berkeley Engineering and CITRIS and the Banatao Institute.Read the transcript on Berkeley News. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Ellen Ullman is a computer programmer, essayist on technology and culture and an author of four books — two nonfiction and two novels — on the human side of technology. Her most recent book, Life in Code: A Personal History of Technology, in 2007 was named by the San Francisco Chronicle among the best books of the year.Life in Code bookends her earlier work, in 1997, where that was named Close to the Machine: Technophilia and Its Discontents, recounting life as a woman technologist amongst and almost exclusively male workforce at the start of the global digital revolution. Twenty years later, Ullman reflects on digital technology's loss of innocence and reckons with all that has changed and so much that hasn't.Dean of engineering Tsu-Jae King Liu spoke with Ullman on March 8, 2019, during the annual Women in Technology symposium at UC Berkeley. The daylong event was sponsored by WITI@UC, a joint initiative of Berkeley Engineering and CITRIS and the Banatao Institute.Read the transcript on Berkeley News. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

For millennia, humans have cultivated deep relationships with psychoactive plants — relationships embedded within and guided by ritual frameworks honoring the powers of these plants as allies. As cultures have evolved, so also have these plant-human interactions, often in ways that are highly interdependent.David Presti, who teaches neurobiology, psychology and cognitive science at UC Berkeley, gave an opening talk March 21 for the Lounge Lecture Series at the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology, alongside the new exhibit, Pleasure, Poison, Prescription and Prayer: The Worlds of Mind-Altering Substances, which runs March 15 to Dec. 15.Presti has been on the faculty of Berkeley's Department of Molecular and Cell Biology for 28 years. He teaches classes on topics related to brain, mind, consciousness, neurochemistry and psychopharmacology. For more than a decade, he worked in the treatment of addiction and of post-traumatic stress disorder at the Department of Veterans Affairs Medical Center in San Francisco. And for the past 15 years, he has been teaching neuroscience and conversing about science with Tibetan Buddhist monastics in India, Bhutan and Nepal. He is author of Foundational Concepts in Neuroscience: A Brain-Mind Odyssey (2016) and Mind Beyond Brain (2018).For upcoming events, visit the Heart Museum of Anthropology's website.Read the transcript on Berkeley News. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Tarfia Faizullah is the author of Registers of Illuminated Villages (2018) and Seam (2014). Faizullah has won a VIDA Award, a GLCA New Writers’ Award, a Milton Kessler First Book Award, Drake University Emerging Writer Award and other honors. Her poems have been published widely in periodicals and anthologies both in the United States and abroad, including Poetry Magazine, Guernica, Tin House and The Nation. They are translated into Persian, Chinese, Bengali, Tamil and Spanish, and have been featured at the Smithsonian, the Rubin Museum of Art and elsewhere. In 2016, she was recognized by Harvard Law School as one of 50 Women Inspiring Change. In Fall 2018, she joined the School of the Art Institute of Chicago as a Visiting Writer in Residence.Faizullah read her poetry on March 7, 2019, at Lunch Poems, an ongoing poetry reading series at UC Berkeley that began in 2014. All readings happen from 12:10 to 12:50 p.m. on the first Thursday of the month in Morrison Library in Doe Library. Admission is free.This talk was recorded by UC Berkeley’s Educational Technology Services. Watch the video.Read the transcript on Berkeley News. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.