UC Berkeley announces nominees for the inaugural UC Regents Innovation Awards

This year, the University of California system is launching its first-ever Regents Innovation Awards, recognizing faculty and community partners across all ten UC campuses who turn research into real-world impact. Today, UC Berkeley is proud to announce its five nominees for the inaugural awards, listed below. They exemplify what the university excels at: translating research into tools, treatments and companies that reach the broader world.

“From gene editing to semiconductors to city policy, these nominees show what happens when Berkeley research leaves the lab,” said Darren Cooke, Berkeley’s Chief Innovation & Entrepreneurship Officer. “They didn’t just publish a finding and move on; they turned it into a long-term societal benefit.”

This year’s nominees follow a number of recent campus milestones when it comes to entrepreneurship. Last year, Berkeley ranked No. 1 in the world for the third year running in producing venture-backed startups founded by undergraduate alumni, ahead of Stanford, Harvard, and MIT, and leads the world in female-founded companies. And a new book, Startup Campus: How UC Berkeley Became an Unexpected Leader in Entrepreneurship and Startups, traces how the university became the kind of innovation engine that this year’s five nominees now exemplify.

Gamechanger Award Nominee: Fyodor Urnov

CRISPR gene-editing technology promises to rewrite people’s DNA and cure genetic diseases, but getting it to the clinic has been slow. After co-developing a custom CRISPR therapy that saved a child suffering from a life-threatening genetic disorder, Professor Fyodor Urnov set out to make that kind of treatment repeatable. The blueprint developed by Urnov and the team of experts he convened at the Innovative Genomics Institute cuts the cost of personalized CRISPR therapies for children suffering from genetic diseases by 90% and shortens development timelines tenfold. The FDA has implemented new regulatory pathways around this method, the American Society for Cell and Gene Therapy awarded him its 2025 Catalyst Award, and Urnov is now leading a new multi-institutional initiative funded by the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) to develop on-demand CRISPR therapies for children born with rare immune diseases.

Disruptive Research Award Nominee: Markita Landry

Studying a living system often means damaging it — inserting foreign genes or expensive manipulations. Professor Markita Landry’s lab creates biotechnologies without the expense, damage and stigmas associated with conventional genetic manipulation. Her nanosensors light up neuromodulators in living human brain tissue so researchers can see how brain chemistry changes in addiction and autism. In agriculture, her lab edits a single fertilized plant cell before it grows into an adult plant, introducing no foreign DNA and avoiding the years of breeding and millions of dollars otherwise needed to modify a crop. Her approach has already been adopted internationally, produced a disease-resistant rice variety, and earned Landry a 2025 Guggenheim Prize and a 2026 Fulbright Fellowship.

Best Startup Award Nominee: Jay Keasling (ResVita Bio)

Rare genetic and inflammatory skin disorders like Netherton Syndrome are typically treated with drugs that circulate through the entire body, even though the disease is confined to the skin. Professor Jay Keasling co-founded ResVita Bio to change that. ResVita Bio is pioneering topilogics: topical biologics for skin disease. Topical proteins could hit validated targets that systemic biologics can’t, but they degrade too quickly and cost too much to deliver. ResVita Bio solves this with topical, genetically engineered bacterial cells that continuously produce topilogics, alone or in combination.

Community Changemaker Award Nominee: Elizabeth “Liz” Redman Cleveland

A university can spur innovation, but if the host city doesn’t welcome startups, the surrounding community loses out on the benefits of new technologies, jobs and wealth creation. Elizabeth Redman Cleveland, the City of Berkeley’s Chief Strategist for Sustainable Growth, leads the Berkeley Startup Cluster and makes sure that doesn’t happen in Berkeley. Through her work in the City’s Office of Economic Development, she has championed zoning reforms that keep R&D firms in Berkeley, a policy that has exempted more than $30.1 million in R&D grants from local taxation, a marketing campaign that showcases what’s #DiscoveredinBerkeley, and initiatives connecting local high schoolers to innovation careers. Those efforts earned the Berkeley Startup Cluster both the 2026 East Bay Innovation Award and the UC Berkeley Chancellor’s Community Leaders Breakfast Award.

Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award Nominee: Alberto Sangiovanni-Vincentelli

Modern microprocessors, the chips inside billions of devices, are too complex for engineers to design by hand. Professor Alberto Sangiovanni-Vincentelli built the software tools that made automating that process possible, establishing the foundation of the electronic design automation (EDA) industry. He has co-founded two EDA unicorns, Cadence and Synopsys, authored more than 1,000 articles, and today mentors Berkeley’s next generation of entrepreneurs as Head of Faculty Advisors for the SkyDeck accelerator.