In January, hundreds of students flooded Sproul Plaza to protest the inauguration of newly elected President Donald Trump. (UC Berkeley photo by Hulda Nelson
Following the presidential inauguration in January, Arturo Fernandez, one of UC Berkeley’s 470 undocumented students, voiced his concern that President Trump would end the Deferred Action of Childhood Arrivals program, an act that would threaten benefits for more than 700,000 young immigrants in the U.S. (UC Berkeley photo by Brittany Hosea-Small
Alt-right provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos arrived to speak on campus in February but was driven out when a protest turned violent. The attack was instigated by some 150 masked agitators, now known to be part of the group Antifa. Yiannopoulos, then a Breitbart News editor, had been invited to speak by the Berkeley College Republicans. (UC Berkeley photo by Brittany Hosea-Small
Pictured in one of the photos was Eniola Abioye as she led a protest. Abioye, now a graduate, was one of the key people who brought the center to life. (UC Berkeley photo by Ken Li
Also in March, the European Patent Office announced its intention to grant a broad patent for the revolutionary CRISPR-Cas9 gene-editing technology to the University of California, the University of Vienna and Emmanuelle Charpentier. The tool, developed by UC Berkeley’s Jennifer Doudna, a professor of molecular and cell biology and of chemistry, and Charpentier, is already being used to edit the genomes of animals to study diseases that affect humans, insects to fight disease and crops to improve disease resistance.a A legal battle over U.S. patent rights for CRISPR-Cas9 continued throughout 2017.
Tens of thousands of prospective and current students, alumni, families and friends flooded the campus in April for Cal Day, the campus’s annual all-day open house. Visitors chose from 400 events, performances, tours, faculty talks and hands-on activities designed to show off every side of the Berkeley campus. (UC Berkeley photo by Brittany Hosea-Small
In May, more than 5,500 graduating seniors, decked out in black caps, gowns and colorful variations thereof, celebrated their hard-earned right of passage. “This is a beautiful mix of people,” the keynote speaker, Iranian American stand-up comic and actor Maz Jobrani, told the audience. (UC Berkeley photo by Keegan Houser
In June, the Human Rights Center at UC Berkeley’s School of Law, along with Amnesty International, hosted first-ever summit for the growing workforce of college students, including 16 students from Berkeley’s Human Rights Investigations Lab, being trained worldwide to review and verify digital content — typically videos shot by citizens who witnessed atrocities — that could help human rights lawyers prosecute war criminals. (UC Berkeley photo by Brittany Hosea-Small
Marian Diamond, one of the founders of modern neuroscience who was the first to show that the brain can change with experience and improve with enrichment, and who discovered evidence of this in the brain of Albert Einstein, died in July at the age of 90 at her home in Oakland. (UC Berkeley photo by Elena Zhukova
In August, UC Berkeley was again named the No. 1 U.S. public university in the Academic Rankings of World Universities, an assessment of 500 top institutions around the globe by ShanghaiRanking. (UC Berkeley photo by Keegan Houser
The media crush as the press conference starts (UC Berkeley photo by Keegan Houser
Also in August, the campus broke a world record when 7,196 students formed a “C,” the largest human letter as judged by Guinness Book of World Records. The last recorded human letter was made by 4,223 University of Tennessee students, who formed a T in March 2016. (UC Berkeley photo by Keegan Houser
Malachi Jackson is one of the hundreds of students who attended a speech in September by conservative political commentator Ben Shapiro at the campus’s Zellerbach Hall. The event, which the campus spent an estimated $600,000 on for security, has been one of many events that has affirmed the campus’s dedication to promoting free speech. (UC Berkeley photo by Anne Brice
Also in September, the campus launched a free speech website (freespeech.berkeley.edu, a hub of information related to free speech on campus that continues to be updated throughout the academic year. (UC Berkeley photo courtesy of Bancroft Library
In October, Berkeley News premiered a series of short, TED-like talks highlighting the work of 17 UC Berkeley and Berkeley Lab researchers who are tackling the global challenges of climate change. Climate modeler William Collins (pictured, a professor of earth and planetary sciences and a Berkeley Lab researcher, kicked off the series with a 5-minute video exploring “pathways for getting down off the up escalator of climate change.” (UC Berkeley photo by Elena Zhukova
Also in October, a small team of students, led by Berkeley student and Iraq veteran Matthew Smith, mobilized to help victims of the Sonoma County wildfires. For a week, they cleaned, sanitized, mopped and scrubbed a Santa Rosa shelter for fire evacuees. (UC Berkeley photo by Jeremy Snowden
In November, Berkeley students Ash Bhat and Rohan Phadte, launched a Google Chrome browser extension that puts a button onto every Twitter profile and tweet. With a click on the Botcheck.me button, users can see if the account is run by a person or automated program, based on the pair’s own machine-learning model. (Wired photo by James Tensuan
Students in Puerto Rico’s “la diaspora” took relief efforts into their own hands in November, raising money and delivering supplies to the island’s residents, struggling to live after Hurricane Maria struck in September. Members of the student group Boricuas in Berkeley (pictured raised more than $7,000, which they donated to nonprofits helping farmers restore their destroyed crops and aiding in the humanitarian crisis. (UC Berkeley photo by Anne Brice
As 2017 drew to a close, Chancellor Carol Christ was formally inaugurated in December as UC Berkeley’s 11th chancellor, in front of 600 new graduates and their families at the winter commencement ceremony. “You are completing your college education and beginning that period I always imagine in capital letters — LIFE AFTER COLLEGE,” Christ told the crowd. “And I too am beginning a momentous task.” (UC Berkeley photos by Brittany Hosea-Small