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When Rachel Dzombak and Vivek Rao began planning for the spring 2020 Development Engineering course “Innovation in Disaster Response,” part of their motivation was to get students to think about the use of technology during past disasters. But by early March, it was clear to Dzombak and Rao that the COVID-19 pandemic was increasing the relevancy of their class in ways no one could have predicted. The post A Class for the Pandemic appeared first on Blum Center.

For the third straight year, UC Berkeley topped the list as the nation’s best public university for startup founders, and it remains the second-best university among both private and public schools, according to Pitchbook’s 2021 annual rankings of universities released today (Nov. 17).

Ripple wants to bring the NFT hype to the XRP Ledger. The company announced Wednesday a "creator fund" worth $250 million to support non-fungible token (NFT) projects building on the XRP Ledger.

One year after admitting its most diverse freshmen class in 30 years, the University of California, Berkeley, has met or exceeded last year’s success in its admission of underrepresented minority students for fall 2021.

“We have admitted a class almost identical to the record-breaking class of last year,” said Olufemi Ogundele, UC Berkeley associate vice chancellor of enrollment management and dean of undergraduate admissions. “Faced with a pandemic and a 28% increase in freshman applications, we remained focused on our values of access, excellence and diversity. We have a lot to be proud of.”

UC Berkeley’s new Life Sciences Entrepreneurship Center Provides Company Start-Up and Launch Support to Berkeley’s Life Sciences Innovators

The University of California, Berkeley is excited to announce the launch of the Life Sciences Entrepreneurship Center (LSEC). The Center was established to foster the creation of innovative and transformative life sciences companies for the betterment of society and the Berkeley campus life sciences community. LSEC is designed to complement and catalyze the many existing resources of Berkeley’s innovation and entrepreneurship ecosystem, not compete with them.

UC Berkeley ranks second in the world at producing venture-funded startups, ahead of MIT, Harvard, and Penn, and a close second to Stanford. (Pitchbook(link is external)(link is external)). Much of this success is due to Berkeley’s superpower resources in life sciences entrepreneurship. These include the recently announced(link is external)(link is external) Bakar BioEnginuity Hub(link is external)(link is external) (BBH) and Bakar Labs(link is external)(link is external) opening on campus this fall, the preeminence of the Innovative Genomics Institute(link is external)(link is external) (IGI) founded by Berkeley professor and Nobel laureate Jennifer Doudna, the California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences(link is external)(link is external) (QB3), and the Bio Track(link is external)(link is external) at Berkeley SkyDeck(link is external)(link is external), which ranks in the top five for university startup accelerators. (For a comprehensive list, see begin.berkeley.edu(link is external)(link is external).)

Another campus resource is the groundbreaking Robinson Life Science, Business, and Entrepreneurship(link is external)(link is external)(link is external)(link is external)(link is external) (LSBE) dual science and business degree program for undergraduates, which was enabled by a generous gift(link is external)(link is external)(link is external) from Berkeley alumni Mark and Stephanie Robinson. This gift, with additional support from alumnus and adjunct Professor David Kirn and his wife Kristin Ahlquist, also created the LSEC, which builds upon the student-supporting framework established by the dual-degree program. Mr. Robinson and Dr. Kirn have agreed to join the LSEC’s Board of Directors.

Most of us will never win a Nobel Prize, but the University of California, Berkeley, is offering everyone the opportunity to purchase the next best thing: nonfungible tokens (NFTs) for the patent disclosures at the heart of two Nobel Prize-winning inventions from the university’s research labs.

The NFTs link to online digitized documents — internal forms and correspondence that document the initial research findings that led to two of the most important biomedical breakthroughs of the 21st century: CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing, for which UC Berkeley’s Jennifer Doudna shared the 2020 Nobel in Chemistry; and cancer immunotherapy, for which James Allison shared the 2018 Nobel in Physiology or Medicine. UC Berkeley will continue to own the relevant patents.

The university minted an NFT for Allison’s cancer immunotherapy invention today (May 27) in advance of a 24-hour auction that will begin after the piece is listed as early as Wednesday, June 2. The auction will take place on Foundation (foundation.app), an Ethereum-based NFT auction platform. Ethereum is a blockchain network that uses ether, or ETH, for transactions. The proceeds of the auction in ETH will fund education and innovative research at UC Berkeley, including work in the campus’s blockchain hub, Blockchain at Berkeley.

In the face of daunting global challenges, such as climate change and a catastrophic pandemic, it is evident that the world urgently needs science-based solutions to tackle society’s greatest problems.

At the University of California, Berkeley, the next generation of emerging scholars and entrepreneurs will work to confront those challenges in the Bakar BioEnginuity Hub (BBH), a new campus initiative that aims to launch the world-changing startups of today, while cultivating the innovative leaders of tomorrow. These innovators can launch their startups at BBH’s Bakar Labs, a world-class incubator open to teams from around the world — a space where anyone can leverage all that Berkeley has to offer.

After experiencing on-line learning, just about everyone is waiting to get back to classrooms. Neither students, nor their parents, think that plugging into a computer all day to watch recorded lectures is a reasonable substitute for higher education.

With 17 startups participating, Berkeley SkyDeck’s Demo Day isn’t the largest cohort we’ve seen by any stretch. The collection of companies is, however, defined by a wide range of focuses, from pioneering diabetes treatments to retrofitting autonomous trucking, curated by the SkyDeck’s small team and a number of advisors.

Founded in 2012, the accelerator is focused on developing early-stage companies tied to the University of California system. Applicants must be affiliated with either one of the 10 UC schools or their national laboratories in Berkeley, Livermore and Los Alamos. Notable alumni include micromobility unicorn, Lime, and delivery robotics firm, Kiwi.

In 2020, SkyDeck — along with much of the rest of the world — went virtual.

“While flight restrictions did cause some international founders to pull crazy hours from our home countries to participate in the sessions, virtual sessions allowed additional members of our teams to participate that would otherwise not have been able to do so,” the accelerator’s organizers said in a TechCrunch post last year. “We are also hearing chatter that Demo Day will be larger than ever before because virtual events are much more scalable.”

UC Berkeley Changemaker – Oakland, a new program for 200 incoming UC Berkeley first-year students on the Mills campus, offers a small, collaborative learning environment focused on questioning the status quo and serving the community.

“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.” The post Blum Center for Developing Economies Statement of Solidarity for Racial, Social, and Economic Justice appeared first on Blum Center.

When Rachel Dzombak and Vivek Rao began planning for the spring 2020 Development Engineering course “Innovation in Disaster Response,” part of their motivation was to get students to think about the use of technology during past disasters. But by early March, it was clear to Dzombak and Rao that the COVID-19 pandemic was increasing the relevancy of their class in ways no one could have predicted. The post A Class for the Pandemic appeared first on Blum Center.