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Kavli Center Weekly Colloquium

About

The weekly Colloquium is part of the core programming for the Kavli Center Fellows. Meetings alternate between formats to bring training, discussion, and in-progress support to the fellows.

Formats include:

Group Meeting: Group meetings may include topics such as brainstorming, discussions, work-related planning, etc.

Journal Club: 1-2 people select 1-3 papers, recent or foundational, to present to the group for discussion.

Work in Progress: 1-2 people present their work in progress for input from the group

Speaker: A speaker(s) gives a talk or...

Berkeley Ethics and Regulation Group for Innovative Technologies

The Berkeley Ethics and Regulation Group for Innovative Technologies (BERGIT) is an ideas exchange and a meeting ground for discussions across disciplines to integrate ethics, regulation, and policy with science. Our goal is to provide space for discussion, facilitate insight, and instigate a proactive cultural shift in responsible innovation. BERGIT is led by an interdisciplinary team with expertise in...

Two Kavli Center Fellows collaborate to publish a journalistic piece on a unique form of public engagement with science

May 30, 2024
Kavli Center News

Two of the Kavli Center's first Ethics, Science, and the Public fellows, Arik Shams and Leana King, collaborated to research and author a piece featured this month in Undark on creative efforts to engage the public in decisions about science.

Arik and Leana, two scientists in genome editing and neuroscience respectively, took part in a pilot project...

https://undark.org/2024/05/16/opinion-science-courts-public-trust-science/

Reflections on the 2024 Falling Walls Science Summit

December 11, 2024
Narayan Sankaran

Kavli Center Affiliate and Civic Science Fellow Narayan Sankaran shares reflections from the 2024 Falling Walls Science Summit in Berlin:

Just two days after the U.S. election, as we were still digesting the implications, we flew to Berlin for the annual Falling Walls Science Summit, arriving in Germany the same day that country’s coalition government dissolved amidst growing economic and social tensions. It was against this backdrop of political instability and resurgent right-wing nationalism that leaders in science, business, and the public sector had gathered...

https://civicsciencefellows.org/stories/narayan-sankaran-falling-walls-reflectio…

Wired Minds: Community Conversations on Hopes, Fears, and Choices in Neurotech

Project Overview

In the last decade, our ability to measure and manipulate the brain activity underlying our thoughts, emotions, and actions has grown by leaps and bounds thanks to advances in sensor technology and machine learning capabilities. These advances have brought new hope to people with various disabilities, ranging from speech paralysis to major depressive disorder, but have also spurred controversy stemming from the concern that neurotechnologies such as brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) would fundamentally threaten our ability to think and act freely....

In Utero: A Podcast on Prenatal Genetic Technologies

Project Overview

Pregnancy and the anticipation of what to expect has never been more complicated. The next decade of the genome era will see significant improvements in genetic testing and molecular and gene therapy, with in utero applications holding the potential to prevent genetic disease altogether. However, technological innovation is outpacing examination of the broader ethical and social implications and efforts to engage prospective patients and the public. Families are too often left on their own to navigate emerging evidence and inadequate support systems. ...

Fellowships

About the Fellows Program

Discoveries in science and technology are moving quickly from basic research to real-world applications, sometimes with societal-scale impact, and scientists are increasingly encountering challenges that fall outside their expertise. We need a new kind of training that prepares scientists to confront the current and future ethical challenges of their fields, and that creates social scientists, philosophers, journalists, and policymakers who are able to work with scientists and diverse communities to ensure that the applications of scientific...

Graduate Seminar: Skillful Ethical Reasoning

A new, mini-course created in connection with the Kavli Center and offered through the School of Public Health will give students the skills to identify and analyze ethical challenges in innovation (with an emphasis on public health topics). This course is case-based yet takes an unusually systematic approach. Each week introduces one of four major ethical theories relevant to public health, showing how the theories relate to each other. Students will learn how to identify the core ethical issues at stake in real examples and which theoretical approach to take for which types of challenges...

Visiting Scholars and Students

The UC Berkeley Kavli Center for Ethics, Science, and the Public invites applications for visiting appointments from national and international scholars and graduate students in the sciences, humanities, social sciences, and professional fields who are interested in exploring ethical challenges, advancing solutions, or identifying ways of involving impacted communities and the public in science and technology and its governance....