Berkeley Voices

Carol Nekesa doesn’t know if she was ever infected by parasitic worms. But it’s likely, she says, since most kids in her community had them. “It was just a normal part of childhood,” she says. 

Carol grew up in the 1980s in a rural village in Busia County, Kenya. Like many regions in Sub-Saharan Africa at the time, Busia lacked the infrastructure for clean water and modern sanitation, leading to the pervasive spread of infectio...

In the United States, the housing crisis can feel like an unsolvable puzzle. We talk of housing as something we navigate alone — a commodity we rent or buy, subject to the whims of a volatile market.

But in Thailand, they’ve pioneered a different model. A government program called Baan Mankong, or “secure housing,” treats shelter as a collective right — and proves that the U.S.’s individualist framework isn’t the only way.

As a Berke...

At 3 months old, Victoria Gray wouldn’t stop crying. Blood tests brought devastating news: she had sickle cell disease, a genetic blood disorder that blocks blood flow and oxygen delivery to the body. It causes unbearable pain that Victoria describes as “getting struck by lightning and hit by a truck.”

As she got older, Victoria felt increasingly isolated and hopeless. She often spent her kids’ birthdays at the hospital, where she r...

After Wikipedia made its debut in 2001, some trends quickly emerged. Most editors were male, topics tended to skew toward geek culture interests like computing and gaming, and only a small fraction of biographies were about women. 

More than two decades later, biases and knowledge gaps on Wikipedia of all sorts remain, especially for marginalized communities. But a UC Berkeley professor and her students are working to change th...

Tyler Lee-Wynant grew up hearing stories about his great-great aunt, Edna Campbell Guerrero. Born in 1907 in Mendocino County, she was a native speaker of Northern Pomo, one of seven languages spoken by the Pomo people who are Indigenous to Northern California. 

“She was a no-nonsense person,” says Lee-Wynant, a UC Berkeley Ph.D. student in linguistics. “She was an amazing individual. She cared so deeply about passing on what s...

There’s so much incredible research and work that happens every day at UC Berkeley, on everything from artificial intelligence and quantum computing to linguistics and the study of social justice. It holds the record for the most Nobel Prize winners among any public university in the world, with two wins just this year.

This work can be highly theoretical and technical, taking decades to fully develop. Yet its impact extends far bey...

Last month, UC Berkeley researchers published a study about how they tricked the eye into seeing a new color. It was a highly saturated teal, a peacock green, the greenest of all greens. 

The scientists produced this color, which they named “olo,” by shining a laser into the eye and stimulating one type of color-sensitive photoreceptor cells called cones. 

Austin Roorda, a professor of optometry and vision science at Berkel...

When Ann Johnson had a rare brainstem stroke at age 30, she lost control of all of her muscles. One minute, she was playing volleyball with her friends. The next, she couldn’t move or speak. 

Up until that moment, she’d been a talkative and outgoing person. She taught math and physical education, and coached volleyball and basketball at a high school in Saskatchewan, Canada. She’d just had a baby a year earlier with her new hus...

When Winnie Wong first saw Dafen Oil Painting Village in 2006, it was nothing like she’d imagined. 

The Chinese village was known for mass producing copies of Western art. She’d read about it in The New York Times, which described a kind of compound where thousands of artists painted replicas of famous artworks, like da Vinci’s Mona Lisa or van Gogh’s Starry Night, for European and U.S. hotels and condos.

“We had an expectation,...

Have you ever seen letters from the 1800s? Aside from the pristine penmanship and grammar, the way friends expressed their fondness for each other is remarkable.

“Letters sent between friends are often full of the kinds of loving and affectionate language that today we would only associate with romantic or sexual relationships: ‘My darling,’ ‘I love you,’ ‘I can't wait to be near you,’” said UC Berkeley historian Sarah Gold McBride,...

Against her mom’s warnings, UC Berkeley political scientist Marika Landau-Wells watched Arachnaphobia as a kid. Ever since, she has been terrified of spiders. But over the years, she has learned to reason with her quick fear response — No, that spider is not 8 feet in diameter — and calmly trap them and put them outside.

We all encounter problems like this, she says, where we have quick reactions to things we’ve learned to fear. It ...

For UC Berkeley Professor Jack Tseng, the world of paleontology never gets old. With each new discovery, paleontologists like him learn more about the animals that walked the earth millions of years ago.

"If you look at books from 50 years ago, they postured dinosaurs very differently from the way we do it today," Tseng says. "This constant profusion of new scientific knowledge into the popular psyche is recorded in children's books...

Like millions of other Americans, UC Berkeley Professor Poulomi Saha watched a lot of docuseries about cults during the COVID-19 pandemic. The more Saha watched, the more they felt a kind of change within themself. "I was absolutely enthralled," said Saha. “My reaction no longer fit that old script, the script that I had internalized. I wasn’t just having a passing interest. I wasn’t sort of mildly terrified. I was thinking, “Oh, w...

In a June 2024 study, UC Berkeley psychology professor Keanan Joyner and his colleagues found that by using a combination of methods tailored to the multidimensional nature of psychopathy, we could transform how we identify and understand this personality disorder. "I think that it goes toward having a functional and positive society," Joyner said. "Our collaboration is the substance of what makes humans so wonderful as a species."

...

For the first three years of Justin Davidson's childhood in Chicago, his mom spoke only Spanish to him. Although he never spoke the language as a young child, when Davidson began to learn Spanish in middle school, it came very quickly to him, and over the years, he became bilingual.

Now an associate professor in UC Berkeley's Department of Spanish and Portuguese, Davidson is part of a research team that has discovered where in the b...

There are countless English varieties in the U.S. There's Boston English and California English and Texas English. There's Black English and Chicano English. There's standard academic, or white, English. They're all the same language, but linguistically, they're different.

"Standard academic English is most represented by affluent white males from the Midwest, specifically Ohio in the mid-20th century," says UC Berkeley sociolinguis...

Spanish speakers in the United States, among linguists and non-linguists, have been denigrated for the way they speak, says UC Berkeley sociolinguist Justin Davidson. It’s part of the country's long history of scrutiny of non-monolingual English speakers, he says, dating back to the early 20th century.

"It’s groups in power — its discourses and collective communities — that sort of socially determine what kinds of words and what kin...

In his research, UC Berkeley Ph.D. candidate Saagar Asnani looks at music manuscripts from between the 12th and 14th centuries in medieval France. He says only recently have scholars begun to use a wider variety of media and artistic expressions as a way to study language. "If we unpack the genre of music, we will find a very precise record of how language was spoken," Saagar says. 

To read medieval music, Saagar learned five l...

Brandon Sánchez Mejia stood at a giant wall in UC Berkeley’s Worth Ryder Art Gallery and couldn’t believe his eyes. In front of him were 150 black-and-white photos of men’s bodies in all sorts of poses and from all sorts of angles. It was his senior thesis project, "A Masculine Vulnerability," and it was out for the world to see.

"It came from this idea that as men, we are not allowed to show skin as scars or emotions or weakness," ...