Science@Cal Lecture 2014 lectures

Science@Cal is proud to present a series of free, public science lectures on the third Saturday of every month. These talks are given by renowned UC Berkeley scientists and aimed at general audiences. To sign up for our email list and receive notification about future talks, please visit our mailing list page and enter your email details. We won’t sell or give away your email and we won’t send you lots of messages.

Talk Details

Talks take place on the UC Berkeley campus at 11am. Doors open thirty minutes before the talk and seating is on a first-come, first-served basis. Each talk is planned to last an hour, plus time for at least a few questions at the end. We would like to start the talks on time, and avoid disruption from people entering the auditorium during the talks, so please try to arrive at least 10 minutes before the start. For 2014, most talks take place in Mulford Hall, Room 159, on the north-west corner of the UC Berkeley campus (see map or images below), but some do not – please check the calendar below. Limited hourly pay parking is available on weekends on and nearby campus — please check the signs. We encourage you to take public transport — BART and bus lines are within walking distance. We also record the talks and post them on this site (click on the speaker names for previous months below). If you’re nearby though we encourage you to come to the talks in person! All our upcoming talks are listed on our Berkeley Events Calendar, and our Science@Cal Blog.

2014 Talk Calendar

Date Venue Speaker Topic
Jan 18 159 Mulford Dr. Christian Reichardt Going to the Ends of the Earth to Study the Beginnings of Time
Feb 15 105 Stanley Prof. Marti Hearst Natural Search User Interfaces
Mar 15 159 Mulford Dr. Troy Lionberger What we can learn from reverse engineering biological, molecular machines
Apr 12 UC Berkeley Cal Day UC Berkeley’s Open House (no Science@Cal Lecture in April)
May 17 159 Mulford Prof. Robert Full Biological Inspiration: How We Learn from Nature to Design Robots, Exoskeletons and Adhesives
Jun 21 159 Mulford Dr. Amber Sciligo Native pollinators and food [production] security
Jul 19 159 Mulford Prof. Kathleen Collins Aging Versus Immortality
Aug 16 159 Mulford Prof. Michel M. Maharbiz Neural Dust and Neural Interfaces
Sep 20 159 Mulford Dr. Lisa Maher House and Home in Prehistory: Reconstructing Hunter-Gatherer Interactions in Eastern Jordan
Oct 18 159 Mulford Dr. Lina Nilsson Nerds vs. Wicked Problems: UCB technology research for global good
Nov 15 159 Mulford Prof. Matt Francis Food for Thought—The Delicious Chemistry of the Thanksgiving Kitchen
Dec 20 159 Mulford Dr. Ryan Trainor How to Grow a Galaxy

Previous Talks

You can watch the videos of previous talks in the series by checking out our Science@Cal Youtube Channel.

Other Talk Videos

You can also check out the video of “The Great Debate: Are We Alone?” with Geoff Marcy and Dan Werthimer discussing the existence of intelligent life in our Galaxy, and a lecture by Geoff Marcy on the “Discovery of the First Earth-Size Planets and Prospects for Life in the Universe”. Thanks to Chris Klein, Andrew Siemion, and James Anderson for producing these videos.

Cal Day 2013 Videos

Videos from UC Berkeley’s Cal Day open house are also available. You can see Raphael Bousso talk about “Black Holes, Information, and the Quest for a Unified Theory of Nature”, or Adrian Lee talk about “The Microwave Background: A Cosmic Time Machine”.

Archives of 2009 International Year of Astronomy Talks

The Science@Cal lecture series was preceded by a 2009 lecture series presented by the Department of Astronomy as part of the celebration of the International Year of Astronomy 2009. To see videos of these talks, visit the astronomy lecture series website.

Questions?

Contact Steve Croft at scroft@astro.berkeley.edu.