Past Seminars |

October 2025

Riley Owens (Astronomy): Our greatest telescopes are billions of light years away

Eleanor Greenspoon (Chemistry): Solving Cold Cases in Star-Forming Regions

September 2025

Matangi Kumar (Vision Science): The Eye Under Pressure: Glaucoma and Neuroinflammation

Tiffany Tran (Neuroscience): Magnetogenetics: controlling cell activity with magnetic fields

Watch the recording of the September 2025 seminar on YouTube

August 2025

Eliza Diggins (Astronomy): The Milky Way in a Box: Simulating the Formation of Galaxies

Sienna White (Civil & Environmental Engineering): The Mysteries of San Francisco Bay: How the Gold Rush, Sewage, and a Stowaway Clam Affected Water Quality

Watch the recording of the August 2025 seminar on YouTube

May 2025

Esther J. Y. Kim (Molecular & Cell Biology): T cells: Tiny Heroes of Immunity

Jenna Manske (Chemistry): Lowering the Barrier – Speeding up Chemical Reactions with Catalysts

Watch the recording of the May 2025 seminar on YouTube

April 2025

Dhruva Ganapathy (Physics): Why do physicists want to measure small things?

Sam Oaks-Leaf (Chemistry): Controlling Materials at the Smallest Scales

Watch the recording of the April 2025 seminar on YouTube

March 2025

Isaac Joyner (Chemistry): Enzymes, nature’s machines

Felipe Gonzalez (Vision Science): Journey to the Center of the Planets: Uncovering Their Hidden Secrets from their Atoms

Watch the recording of the March 2025 seminar on YouTube

February 2025

Sujit Modi (Civil and Environmental Engineering): Lignin for fueling future, not flames!
Sydney Hemenway (Materials Science & Engineering): Can table salt power the future? An
Introduction to Sodium Ion Batteries

Watch the recording of the February 2025 seminar on YouTube

January 2025

Jeremy Nicolai (Chemistry): The Marvelous Chemistry of Everyday Life
Kaihui Song (Energy and Resources Group): From Pledges to Progress: City and Regional Climate Action

Watch the recording of the January 2025 seminar on YouTube

October 2024

Macy Huston (Astronomy): Light-Bending Black Holes

Beatrice Le (Vision Science): Light-sensitive proteins outside of the Eye: Can we use them to restore vision?

Watch the recording of the October 2024 seminar on YouTube

September 2024

Lauren Walters (Materials Science, LBNL): Have we synthesized it yet? Creating materials road maps, from lead pipes to robotic chemical labs

Amir Bitran (Molecular and Cell Biology, UC Berkeley): The dance of proteins in the cell

Watch the recording of the September 2024 seminar on YouTube

August 2024

Stephanie Ribet (LBL Molecular Foundry): More than meets the eye: exploring atomic structure with scanning transmission electron microscopy

Natalie LeBaron (Astronomy): The (Life and) Death of Stars, Where the Elements Around Us Form

Watch the recording of the August 2024 seminar on YouTube

July 2024

Hyunchul Kwon (Chemistry): Single-Molecule Magnets: Chemists’ Blueprint for Future Data Storage

Anna Elleman (Molecular and Cellular Biology): Controlling electrical currents in the brain

Watch the recording of the July 2024 seminar on YouTube

June 2024

Lorenzo Washington (Plant and Microbial Biology): Putting Down Roots: How plant roots form intimate relationships with microbes

Justin Williams (Molecular and Cell Biology): Human cells repair tiny tears by patching and shedding

Watch the recording of the June 2024 seminar on YouTube

May 2024

Raymond Ehlers (Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, Nuclear Science): Getting to the heart of (the) matter: smashing nuclei at the Large Hadron Collider

Mauricio Lopez Luna (Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, Chemical Science): “What the people do” in that dome-like building on Berkeley’s hill

Watch the recording of the May 2024 seminar on YouTube

April 2024

Stefania Pezzoli (Neuroscience): Successful Cognitive Aging: Insights into the Aging Brain

Emil Rofors (Lawrence Berkeley National Lab): Hey drone, should I eat that banana?

Watch the recording of the April 2024 seminar on YouTube

March 2024

Ibles Olcina Samblas (Physics): Searching for dark matter from deep level underground

Ryan Hoque (Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences): Imitating Intelligence and the Quest for a Mechanical Mind

Watch the recording of the March 2024 seminar on YouTube

February 2024

Shubham Maurya (Herbert Wertheim School of Optometry): Gazing into the Future: How Science Illuminates the Path to Glaucoma Solutions

Haley Frey (Vision Science): To see or not to see: How does the brain decide what we see?

Watch the recording of the February 2024 seminar on YouTube

October 2023

Kelsey DeFrates (Bioengineering & Orthopedic Surgery): Engineered Living Materials –The future of therapeutics andsustainability

Carol Baumbauer (Electrical Engineering): The Secret Life of Nitrous Oxide, a Potent Greenhouse Gas

Watch the recording of the October 2023 seminar on YouTube

September 2023

Joseph Slivka (Physics): Special delivery! How your cells’ microscopic delivery service works

Rumi Sherriff (Molecular and Cell Biology, UC Berkeley): To Energize or not to Energize – Mitochondrial Control of Organismal Metabolism, Proliferation, and Differentiation

Watch the recording of the September 2023 seminar on YouTube

August 2023

Joe Brackbill (Chemistry): Uranium: Skeletons from its Past, Myths of its Present, and Questions for its Future

Rajiv Ramanujam Prabhakar (Chemical Science division, Berkeley Lab): Turning the tables on CO2 – Fuels from sunlight

Watch the recording of the August 2023 seminar on YouTube

July 2023

Signe White (Integrative Biology): Variety is the spice of life: how diverse host populations mitigate disease

Kanika Khanna (Molecular and Cell Biology): Opening windows into bacteria with cryo-electron tomography

Watch the recording of the July 2023 seminar on YouTube

June 2023

Thomas Elston (Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute): Context in the brain: how the brain enables context-dependent decisions

Alexia Cosby (Lawrence Berkeley National Lab): Shedding Light on the Mysteries of Radioactivity: From Discovery to Modern Medical Applications

Watch the recording of the June 2023 seminar on YouTube

May 2023

Briana Van Treeck (Molecular and Cell Biology): Harnessing Nature’s Machinery: Taming retroelements for use as a promising gene therapy tool

Yasmin Graham (Bioengineering): Unlocking Movement After Paralysis: Enhancing Motor Function Through Brain Computer Interfaces

Watch the recording of the May 2023 seminar on YouTube

April 2023

Naren G Kumar (Optometry & Vision Science): Antibiotic resistance and intracellular adaptation of Pseudomonas

Ruwan Thilakaratne (Epidemiology): Shades of risk: how safe are artificial food colors for kids?

Watch the recording of the April 2023 seminar on YouTube

March 2023

Ben Coughenour (Space Sciences Lab): Do Black Holes Get Dizzy?

Massimo Pascale (Astronomy): Nature’s Telescopes: The Incredible Magnifying Power of Gravitational Lensing

Watch the recording of the March 2023 seminar on YouTube

February 2023

Michael Kielstra (Applied Mathematics): Fake Physics, Real Results: The Many Uses of Hamiltonian Dynamics

Omer Sharon (Psychology & Neuroscience): Looking at Sleep and Aging

Watch the recording of the February 2023 seminar on YouTube

January 2023

Jason Cheng-Hsiang Hsu (Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, UC Berkeley): Beyond our usual fridge magnets: a new building block for future computing hardware

Elle Barnes (Joint Genome Institute, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory): Salamanders get by with a little help from their (microbial) friends

Watch the recording of the January 2023 seminar on YouTube

November 2022

Emma Turtelboom (Astronomy, UC Berkeley): A Zoo of Exoplanets and the Search for Another Earth

Jenna Tan (Chemistry, UC Berkeley): Silicon and Beyond: Exploring Semiconductor Processing and Applications

October 2022

Navya Pothamsetty (Public Health, UC Berkeley): Representation in Research: Who we study and why it matters

Nico Ciccia (Chemistry, UC Berkeley): Chemical Recycling and Upcycling of Plastic Waste

Watch the recording of the October 2022 seminar on YouTube

September 2022

Elliot Reynolds (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory): Particle Physics, the Higgs Boson, and the Theory of Everything

Victoria Chevée (Molecular and Cellular Biology, UC Berkeley): From barcoded groceries to barcoded bacteria: tracking Listeria from guts to brains

Watch the recording of the September 2022 seminar on YouTube

August 2022

Chandler Sutherland (Plant and Microbial Biology, UC Berkeley): It’s not easy staying green: Understanding Plant Immune Systems

Monica Donegan (Environmental Science, Policy, and Management, UC Berkeley): Plant Disease Evolution across California: Surviving Cold Winters

Watch the recording of the August 2022 seminar on YouTube

July 2022

Alisha Menon (Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, UC Berkeley): Augmented Prosthetics through Multi-Level Control

Additional resources:

Beyond bionics: how the future of prosthetics is redefining humanity (The Guardian)

Gregory Mohl (Institute for Neurodegenerative Diseases, UCSF): Untangling Tau to Understand Dementia

Additional resources:

ALZFORUM: https://www.alzforum.org/

Watch the recording of the July 2022 seminar on YouTube

June 2022

Magan Powell (Chemistry, UC Berkeley): Metals in biology: The star players driving many of life’s essential processes

Additional resources:

Lippard, S.J.; Berg, J.M. Principles of Bioinorganic Chemistry; University Science Books, 1994.

José Adan Arevalo (Integrative Biology, UC Berkeley): The Aging Mitochondria: Losing the Powerhouse of your Cells

Additional resources:

Mitochondrial Dysfunction is a common denominator linking skeletal muscle wasting

Watch the recording of the June 2022 seminar on YouTube

May 2022

Silu Wang, PhD (Evolution and Ecology, UC Davis): Speciation in Birds: A Time Travel

Additional resources:

Speciation in Birds 2008 by Trevor Price

Devon Comito (Integrative Biology, UC Berkeley): A bird’s eye view of behavior and physiology: How zebra finches cope with stress

Additional resources:

What can we learn about stress from birds?

Watch the recording of the May 2022 seminar on YouTube

April 2022

Xi Chen (Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute): Aging gracefully: cognitive aging and brain health

Natasha Abrams (Astrophysics): Black Holes: The Most Fascinating Zoo in the Universe

Additional resources:
1) Here’s some information on the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) and how they imaged the black hole
2) Beautiful black hole accretion simulations visualizations
3) Cool visualizations from LIGO about black hole mergers

Watch the recording of the April 2022 seminar on YouTube

March 2022

Guy Nir (Astronomy): Life on Other Planets

Additional resources:
1) Conway’s Game of Life (conwaylife.com)
2) A Simpler Origin for Life – Scientific American
3) CICLOPS – Official Source of Cassini images of Saturn, its rings & moons
4) Far-Off Planets Like the Earth Dot the Galaxy – The New York Times (nytimes.com)
5) Kepler and K2 Missions | NASA

Shivani Upadhyaya (Plant and Microbial Biology): Algae as small oil factories

Additional resources:
1) Algae to fuels video
2) Paper about the identification of various pathways

Watch the recording of the March 2022 seminar on YouTube

February 2022

Adam Schieferecke (Molecular and Cell Biology): Good Viruses: Powerful Tools Deliver a Next Generation of Life-Saving Medicines

Additional resources:
1) Gene therapy (Medline Plus)

Reem Almagati, OD (Vision Science): Cerebral Visual Impairments: A Childhood Brain-Based Visual Impairment

Additional resources:

Eyeless Mind, A Memoir About Seeing And Being Seen- Stephanie Duesing (book)
Visual Impairment in Children due to Damage to the Brain- Gordon Dutton (Book)
Cerebral Palsy And Visual Impairment In Children: Experience Of Collaborative Practice In Scotland

Watch the recording of the February 2022 seminar on YouTube

January 2022

Kirsten Virster (Integrative Biology): “Sharing is Caring: how gene exchange from viruses to insects
lead to protection from predators”

Additional resources:
1) David Quammen’s book “The Tangled Tree” is a great, accessible book about how horizontal gene transfer has changed our understanding of evolution.

Rebecca Whitman (Mathematics): “Redwood, Oak,…Acyclic?: Describing Mathematical Trees”

Additional resources:
1) One of my favorite sources of math puzzles is Ted Ed’s Riddles series. This one (Time Travel Riddle) is a great puzzle that makes substantial use of graphs.
2) The book “The Fascinating World of Graph Theory” by Benjamin, Chartrand, and Zhang is an interesting general-audience introduction, but can be hard to find.

Watch the recording of the January 2022 seminar on YouTube

November 2021

Michelle St. John and Emilie Richards (Integrative Biology): “Evolution: Stranger than Fiction
Investigating how weird traits arise using behavioral, morphological, and genetic approaches”

Additional resources:

Read about Michelle and Emilie’s work on Pupfish!
Watch a video made by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute describing how speciation occurs
Interact with a lab on evolution by PBS NOVA

Watch the recording of the November 2021 seminar on YouTube

October 2021

Dr. Eric Knudsen (Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute): “Getting lost in thought? How the hippocampus maps the unseen world in our heads.”

Additional resources:
1) The Curious Case of Patient H.M. – A brief history of how the hippocampus was first implicated in human memory (brainfacts.org)
2) Edward Tolman – a brief biography of Tolman’s work and contributions to psychology and academic freedom (American Psychological Association)
3) Lynn Nadel talks about cognitive maps – co-author of 1978’s influential book the Hippocampus as a Cognitive Map at UC Berkeley, 2014
4) Cognitive maps – Brain Inspired podcast interview with Tim Behrens

Daniel Brethauer (Astronomy): “CSI: Supernova, the Death of a Star”

Additional Resources:
1) Cosmos by Carl Sagan (Book)
2) How the Universe Works (TV series)
3) Zooniverse – a citizen science project where it teaches you how to identify certain things and what they are, then gives you real data and asks you to help identify them

Watch the recording of the October 2021 seminar on YouTube

September 2021

Maya Samuels-Fair (Integrative Biology): “Moss Animals? The Secret Lives of Overlooked Ocean Creatures”

Additional resources:
– Introduction to Bryozoa
– A bryozoan twitter feed: @BryozoanNhm
– (Advanced) “Bryozoan basics” by Dr. Carl Simpson
– Tide pool map in the San Francisco Bay Area to explore and find bryozoa shell/fossils

Scott Garner (Chemistry): “Quantum chemistry in service to modern X-Ray Science“

Additional resources:
– A link from NASA about how X-Rays can be used in many different scientific pursuits
– Department of Energy: about supercomputers
– An information source about the ALS at LBL above the city of Berkeley

Watch the recording of the September 2021 seminar on YouTube

August 2021

Anna Scharnagal (Integrative Biology): “Friendships Across Space and Time: Looking at Plants and their Microbial Partners”

Jennifer Cummings (UC Berkeley and UCSF BioEngineering): “Can I Pick Your Brain? Computational Methods for Brain Network Analysis”

Additional resources:
– The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks is a classic book about different case studies in neuroscience
– An article about Google’s new project to map 50,000 neurons in the human brain, with a link to the interactive 3d model
– A great short video about how MRI works

Watch the recording of the August 2021 seminar on YouTube

July 2021

QinQin Yu (Physics): “Chance in Microbial Evolution”

Additional resources:
– QinQin’s group’s research website with descriptions about their research
– Khan Academy video and article about genetic drift
– Computer simulation of genetic drift
– Veritasium episode about the E. coli Long Term Evolution Experiment

Elizabeth Dresselhaus (Physics): “Surprising properties of tiny, imperfect conductors: A short, electron-guided summer vacation to the quantum realm”

Additional resources:
– “More is Different” article by Philip Anderson
– Videos on quantum mechanics by 3Blue1Brown on Youtube
– Kurzgesagt video on Quantum Computers

Watch the recording of the July 2021 seminar on YouTube

June 2021

Teena Bajaj (Comparative Biochemistry): “Building a Stronger Postman: Improving the messenger RNAs (mRNAs)”

Daniel Murnane, Ph.D. (Computational Research Division, LBNL): “Cat, Dog or Higgs Boson? Can we train AI to recognize particles and save the future of fundamental physics?”

Additional resources:
Graph Neural Networks in Particle Physics
List of resources for machine learning in particle physics

Watch the recording of the June 2021 seminar on YouTube

May 2021

Evan Groover (Plant and Microbial Biology): “Sequester This!: A Critical Look at Humanity’s
Hopes of Removing CO2 from the Atmosphere”

Additional resources:
Carbon dioxide removal primer

Claire Magnani (Chemistry): “Nucleotide Mimics: Can Synthetic Chemists Imitate Nature to Make New Therapeutic Medicines?”

Additional resources:
Napoleon’s Buttons: How 17 Molecules Changed History by Penny Le Couteur

Watch the recording of the May 2021 seminar on YouTube

April 2021

Kaitlin Allen (Integrative Biology): “Elephant seals: Are they nature’s SCUBA divers?”

Additional resources:

Año Nuevo Research Facebook page
Mission Wild episode on northern elephant seals (featuring PhD student Rachel Holser from UC Santa Cruz)
Depths of marine animals

Valle Ojeda, Ph.D. ( QB3 – California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences ): “A day in the life of the green alga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii“

Additional resources:

Watch the recording of the April 2021 seminar on YouTube

March 2021

Steven Hanna (Chemistry): “Chemical Recycling of Plastics”

Additional resources:

– NPR Planet Money “So, Should We Recycle?”

Clarissa Bhargava (Towle) (Materials Science and Engineering): “From chocolate to steel: The materials science behind everyday life”

Additional resources:

Free MIT courses in materials science:
YouTube crash course on metals & ceramics:
YouTube crash course on materials, stresses, & toughness (The whole YouTube channel is a great resource!)

Watch the recording of the March 2021 seminar on YouTube

February 2021

Mattina Alonge (Integrative Biology): “Juggling Sickness, Self-care, and Parenthood : A bird’s eye view”
Michael Manoharan-Valerio (Molecular and Cell Biology): “Part of Me or Pathogen? How can you T(c)ell?”

Watch the recording of the February 2021 seminar on YouTube

January 2021

Priya Garg (Mechanical Engineering): “Effect of Moisture Content and Fuel type on Emissions”

Additional resources:

– Wildfire News
– Primary literature: Role of Composition and Particle Size on the Toxicity of Wildfire Emissions
– Primary literature: An examination of fuel moisture, energy release and
emissions during laboratory burning of live wildland fuels

Mallika Bariya (Materials Science and Engineering): “Sweat It Out – What can molecules in sweat tell us about our health?”

Additional resources:
– 2-min summary on recent activity in the field of sweat sensing on NPR’s All Things Considered
– A short article on Mallika’s group’s work on the Berkeley News website
– Mallika’s research group’s publications website, with direct links to their papers on sweat sensing

Watch the recording of the January 2021 seminar on YouTube

December 2020

Syamantak Roy (Chemistry): “Perils of Rising CO₂ Levels in the Atmosphere and Approaches to Mitigate It”

Dillon Acker-James (Electrical Engineering and Computer Science): “Small Robots Making Big Changes”

Additional resources:
– Overview of microelectromechanical systems (MEMS)

Watch the recording of the December 2020 seminar on YouTube

November 2020

Kristin Barker (Environmental Science, Policy, and Management): “Wolves, elk, moose, and… people?! Changing wildlife behavior in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem”

Additional resources:
– Is the Wolf a Real American Hero? (NYT)

Kiera Wilhelm (Chemistry): “How we use T cells to protect our health, even if we don’t quite understand them”

Watch the recording of the November 2020 seminar on YouTube

October 2020

Justin Ondry (Chemistry): “Seeing Atoms Using an Electron Microscope”

Additional resources:
1) Electron microscopy for the biosciences
2) Electron microscopy in materials science
3) A history of electrons microscopes (from a manufacturer’s point of view)
4) An electron microscope interactive tutorial

Sarina Patel (Earth and Planetary Science): “Earthquake Warnings, Predictions, and Forecasts – A Status Update of What’s Possible”

Additional resources:

1) Download the MyShake app (which delivers early warning in CA too!)

You can share your experiences if you felt an earthquake and become a citizen scientist where your device acts as an earthquake sensor, contributing to valuable data collection!

2) Reading about the Haywired Scenario, which depicts a possible outcome of a major earthquake on the Hayward Fault in the East Bay
3) Look through the UCERF3 earthquake forecast for California.
4) To prepare your family and your home for an earthquake, you can review the Seven Steps to Earthquake Safety

Watch the recording of the October 2020 seminar on YouTube