The year 2023 was a year of innovation and major change at UC Berkeley. From emerging work on artificial intelligence to the announcement of Chancellor Carol Christ’s upcoming retirement to a flurry of new construction on campus, Berkeley faced and embraced the future.
Much-needed student housing, a renovated and expanded student engineering center and a home for the campus’s first new college in 50 years were among the buildings springing up campuswide. Berkeley also announced the creation of a new center for aviation and space exploration located at NASA Ames’ Moffett Field in Mountain View. And campus experts made headlines discussing how, in the 1940s, physicist Robert Oppenheimer — the focus of the blockbuster movie Oppenheimer — made the physics department the center of American thought about the field of quantum mechanics.
As always, faculty members continued to contribute their expertise, most notably on breaking news ranging from the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling on affirmative action to war crimes in Ukraine and the dangers of climate change. They even, for the first time, reconstructed Pink Floyd’s song, "Another Brick in the Wall, Part 1," from brain recordings.
Here’s a look back at our top stories of the year.