Campus news

Media Advisory: April 21 Cal Day to welcome visitors

By Sarah Yang

ATTENTION: Weekend assignment desks, photo desks, and general assignment and feature writers

WHAT
Cal Day, the University of California, Berkeley’s free, annual public open house, with more than 370 events. Some 40,000 visitors are expected to visit the campus’s museums, labs, performance halls, classrooms and more.

WHEN
9 a.m. – 4 p.m., Saturday, April 21

WHERE
Events are scheduled throughout the entire UC Berkeley campus and up the hill at the Lawrence Hall of Science, UC Botanical Garden and Space Sciences Laboratory.

DETAILS
In keeping with this year’s Cal Day theme, “Expand Your Universe,” Chancellor Robert Birgeneau will interview Saul Perlmutter, who won a Nobel Prize in Physics in 2011 for his part in the discovery that the expansion of the universe was accelerating.

Other Cal Day speakers will include former U.S. Labor Secretary Robert Reich, a UC Berkeley professor of public policy, who will analyze political civility, and author Mary Roach, who will offer her take on UC Berkeley’s famous museum collections in her talk, “Shrunken Heads and Edible Spacesuits.”

Visitors will have free access to museums normally closed to the general public, such as the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology and the Essig Museum of Entomology, where plenty of bug, bone and other biological specimens can be viewed up close.

A number of children’s book authors, including Thacher Hurd, Marissa Moss and Anne Nesbet, will be on hand at the Celebration of Children’s Literature and Literacy hosted by the Graduate School of Education.

Parking will be limited, so the best way to reach campus is by public transportation. Free cable cars and shuttles will transport people from the Berkeley BART station to spots around the campus. .

The full program is online through the Cal Day website. An overview of Cal Day events is also available here.