Bridging divides and marking milestones: The top UC Berkeley stories from 2024

More than a few major milestones marked UC Berkeley’s 2024 calendar: one chancellor’s retirement and another’s arrival, the successful end of a multi-billion-dollar fundraising campaign, the long-awaited start of construction at People’s Park and the opening of a novel apartment building for transfer students.

Berkeley also facilitated the largest repatriation of cultural items in Hawaiian history and became a model for ways to bridge divides between people with conflicting views, with several new programs, fellowships and classes across campus designed to support healthy disagreement.

UC Berkeley News chronicled these happenings, and below we present the top 12 stories of the year.

Seismic station on remote Farallon Islands gets critical upgrade

In late January, seven engineers from the Berkeley Seismological Laboratory helicoptered into the Farallon Islands, a windswept, nearly treeless chain of islands 30 miles off San Francisco’s Golden Gate, on an eight-day mission to upgrade one of the lab’s most remote — yet most critical — seismic stations.

Watch a video of Richard Allen, director of the Berkeley Seismological Laboratory, and engineer Zack Alexy explain the importance of upgrading the Farallon Islands seismic station to improve the performance of the lab’s Northern California network and the earthquake early warning system along the Pacific Coast.

As a kid, he learned men don’t cry. As an art practice student, he’s challenging that.

For Brandon Sánchez Mejia’s thesis project, “A Masculine Vulnerability,” the art practice student showcased a series of black-and-white photos of men’s bodies. In the photos, of everything from crinkled feet to clenched fists, the viewer can see details — pores, lines, blood vessels — that they normally wouldn’t. The project explores how it feels to live in a world that often discourages vulnerability in men.

Mejia’s cohort was part of the Department of Art Practice’s 100th year, a milestone that highlights the longstanding prominence of arts education on campus. “There have been moments in art practice’s history when it was unclear that art should be at a university at all,” said department chair Ronald Rael, a professor of architecture and affiliated faculty in art. “And here we are, at 100 years, and it’s one of the most popular majors on campus.”

It’s golden: UC Berkeley’s Light the Way campaign raises $7.37 billion

One of the largest capital campaigns launched by any public or private U.S. university — UC Berkeley’s Light the Way: The Campaign for Berkeley — came to an impressive end in 2024. Its ambitious $6 billion goal was vastly surpassed, with more than $7.37 billion raised, the largest total in history for any public university and for any university without a medical school.

UC Berkeley launches closure of People’s Park construction site

UC Berkeley closed the People’s Park construction site in January. Construction work began in July, and work is now underway building housing for more than 1,100 undergraduate students and preserving more than 60% of the 2.8-acre site as revitalized open park space that also reinforces the site’s history.

Carol Christ: Years of challenge, years of historic progress

After serving as the 11th chancellor of UC Berkeley, Carol Christ announced her retirement in 2024, stepping down in June. In this exit interview with UC Berkeley News, the former executive vice chancellor and provost and longtime English professor discusses the challenges she faced leading one of the world’s most influential universities, the values and experiences that guided her and the critical lessons she has learned in a career spent with students.

Chancellor Rich Lyons talks finances, rankings and ‘painting a picture’ of UC Berkeley’s future

After an exhaustive search for the university’s next leader, UC Berkeley announced in April that it had found its next chancellor close to home. Rich Lyons, an undergraduate alumnus and the former dean of the Haas School of Business, officially began his tenure in September, when he outlined the beginnings of his long-term vision for the campus in a Campus Conversations event. It touched on how he plans to bring financial strength to the campus, Berkeley’s deep history of encouraging free speech and how to build a more diverse student body.

Largest repatriation in Hawaiian history completed with cultural items long held at UC Berkeley

After being stored for decades at UC Berkeley’s Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology, the university announced in April that 335 items — 34 of them sacred objects — would be repatriated to Native Hawaiian organizations, in what is believed to have been the largest single repatriation of cultural items in Hawaiian history. Native Hawaiians said the effort demonstrates how significantly repatriation processes have improved, signaling a more positive chapter in museums returning ancestors and objects to their Indigenous homelands.

“This represents not us doing the minimum legal obligation. That’s the floor,” said Sabrina Agarwal, professor and chair of the campus’s anthropology department and a special adviser to the chancellor on issues of repatriation. “It represents us thinking about how we can really expand to think about whose cultural heritage something is. They can define what’s theirs and what needs to be returned.”

Psychedelics change how we see the world. A UC Berkeley study aims to find out why.

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For many, psychedelic-assisted therapy has the power to unlock new insights and lift the burden of mental distress. But why these compounds have such profound effects — and how exactly they interact with the complex machinery of the human brain — remains largely a mystery.

In June, the UC Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics (BCSP) announced the launch of a new study designed to reveal the mechanisms behind how psychedelics shape human perception. Their aim is to test a hypothesis that psychedelics work by “relaxing” the brain’s assumptions about what it sees based on past experiences, and allowing our perceptions to be shaped by more raw sensory information.

“We have this incredible opportunity to characterize the psychedelic experience in real time — while it’s happening — using modern neuroimaging methods,” said Michael Silver, director of the BCSP. “It will also shed light on some of the fundamental mysteries of the human brain, mind and consciousness and how they relate to each other.”

Introducing UC Berkeley’s Anchor House, a remarkable gift built especially for transfer students

In August, 772 transfer students stepped into UC Berkeley’s Anchor House for the first time, and quickly discovered the new 14-story building on Oxford Street is no ordinary campus housing. Instead, it’s a home designed just for transfer students, a sizable population at Berkeley with talent, drive and a unique set of challenges. 

More than just bedrooms with desks, the approximately 450,000-square-foot building includes an indoor/outdoor fitness center and yoga studio, a maker’s space run by the Berkeley Art Studio, and special places to unwind and watch movies, cook, garden and appreciate Bay Area sunsets with new friends.  

A reimagining of the student residential experience, Anchor House provides transfer students — who often face financial, academic and social hurdles — with an anchor of support and a source of well-being and community.

New process vaporizes plastic bags and bottles, yielding gases to make new, recycled plastics

A new chemical process can essentially vaporize plastics that dominate the waste stream today and turn them into hydrocarbon building blocks for new plastics.

The catalytic process, developed at the University of California, Berkeley, works equally well with the two dominant types of post-consumer plastic waste: polyethylene, the component of most single-use plastic bags; and polypropylene, the stuff of hard plastics, from microwavable dishes to luggage. It also efficiently degrades a mix of these types of plastics.

The process, if scaled up, could help bring about a circular economy for many throwaway plastics, with the plastic waste converted back into the monomers used to make polymers, thereby reducing the fossil fuels used to make new plastics.

Bridging divides: from anger and mistrust to belonging — and hope

Just as Berkeley in the 1960s was at the vanguard in expanding free speech, today the campus community is striving for a new sort of change: to bridge uneasy divides with programs, fellowships and classes to support healthy disagreement. From the Bridging Differences program at the Greater Good Science Center to the Othering and Belonging Institute’s Campus Bridging Project, these efforts are centering the campus as a national center of innovation in nurturing dialogue to counteract the forces of polarization that are undermining democracy.

This story was part of a UC Berkeley News package created to mark Berkeley’s 60th anniversary of the free speech movement on campus, and to uphold its commitment to cultivating an environment where everyone feels encouraged and safe to express their views.

“We are committed to a constructive collision of ideas,” said Chancellor Lyons. “We’re committed to providing every community member a true sense of safety and belonging, regardless of who they are or what they believe in. We can fully enjoy the benefits that community provides if we can debate and disagree without descending into identity-based condemnation, without violence, harassment or discrimination, without infringing on the rights of others.”

Watch a UC Berkeley digital forensics expert break down political deepfakes

Every day someone asks Berkeley Professor Hany Farid to review images, audio and videos found online to determine if they are real or fake. One of the world’s leading experts on digital manipulation and misinformation, Farid says the rapid advances of generative artificial intelligence has made his job a lot harder. 

In this video, Farid explains how he evaluates whether something is a “deepfake” or not, using both sophisticated digital tools and common sense, and tells viewers what they can do to stop the spread of misinformation online.