Elena Conis is a writer and historian of medicine, public health, and the environment. Her current research focuses on scientific controversies, science denial, and the public understanding of science, and has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Institutes of Health/National Library of Medicine, and the Science History Institute. Her first book, Vaccine Nation: America’s Changing Relationship with Immunization, received the Arthur J. Viseltear Award from the American Public Health Association and was named a Choice Outstanding...
Jennifer A. Doudna is the Li Ka Shing Chancellor’s Chair and a Professor in the Departments of Chemistry and of Molecular and Cell Biology at UC Berkeley. Her groundbreaking development of CRISPR-Cas9 as a genome engineering technology, with collaborator Emmanuelle Charpentier, earned the two the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry and forever changed the course of human and agricultural genomics research. This powerful technology enables scientists to change DNA — the code of life — with a precision only dreamed of just a few years ago. Labs worldwide have re-directed the...
Johann Frick is a professor in the Department of Philosophy. His main interests span a range of topics in moral and political philosophy, practical reason, and applied ethics. His current work focuses on population ethics, the ethics of risk, moral dilemmas and moral luck, the notion of interpersonal justification, and the ethics of immigration and national partiality. His publications include "Contractualism and Social Risk" (Philosophy & Public Affairs, 2015), "What We Owe to Hypocrites" (Philosophy & Public Affairs, 2016), "On the Survival...
Jack Gallant is Chancellor's Professor and Class of 1940 Chair at UC Berkeley, and co-Director of the Henry J. Wheeler Brain Imaging Center. His research program focuses on computational modeling and high-dimensional, high-resolution imaging of the human brain under naturalistic conditions. As part of that work, his lab has created the most accurate brain decoding algorithms available today. He is actively involved in neuroethics and the potential implications of future neurotechnology for privacy, agency and the sense of self. He regularly gives presentations on implications...
Solomon Hsiang directs the Global Policy Laboratory at Berkeley, where his team is integrating econometrics, spatial data science, and machine learning to answer questions that are central to rationally managing planetary resources--such as the economic value of the global climate, how the UN can fight wildlife poaching, the effectiveness of treaties governing the oceans, and whether satellites and AI can be combined to monitor the entire planet in real time.
Hsiang is currently the Chancellor's Professor of...
Niko Kolodny is Professor of Philosophy at UC Berkeley. He works in moral and political philosophy. He has written on the ethical significance of personal relationships and the nature of rationality, especially instrumental rationality. More recent papers focus on the value of democracy, the justification of the state, and the future of humanity. He has designed a new course for both philosophy and data science majors, “Moral Questions of Data Science,” which explores, among other things, the implications of replacing human judgment in social decision-making with statistical...
Department of Physics; Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Saul Perlmutter is a 2011 Nobel Laureate, sharing the prize in physics for the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the universe. He is a professor of physics at UC Berkeley, where he holds the Franklin W. and Karen Weber Dabby Chair, and a senior scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He is the leader of the international Supernova Cosmology Project, director of the Berkeley Institute for Data Science and executive director of the Berkeley Center for Cosmological Physics. His interest in scientific-style critical thinking, and principled approaches to...
R. Jay Wallace, who holds the William and Trudy Ausfahl Chair in Philosophy at Berkeley, works in moral philosophy. His interests extend to all parts of the subject (including its history), and to such allied areas as political philosophy, philosophy of law, and philosophy of action. His research has focused on responsibility, moral psychology, normative ethics, and the theory of practical reason. Recently he has written on promising, constructivism, resentment, hypocrisy, love, regret, affirmation, obligation, and the relational structure of the moral...
Rebecca Wexler is an Assistant Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law, where she teaches, researches, and writes on issues concerning data, technology, and the criminal legal system. Her work focuses on fairness, transparency, and accountability for new data-driven criminal justice technologies. She is also a Faculty Co-Director of the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology. Before joining Berkeley Law, Professor Wexler worked as a Yale Public Interest Fellow at The Legal Aid Society’s criminal defense practice and a Lawyer-in-...
