The Gateway fulfills the promise of what a place of possibility can be. Here, Berkeley will convene and connect brilliant faculty and students from our core disciplines of computing and data science with others across campus. With a shared purpose to improve human health, social justice, and environmental sustainability, the Gateway community will catalyze interdisciplinary collaboration to solve the most pressing problems of our time.
A physical Gateway: the focal point at the north edge of campus to welcome our community. An intellectual Gateway: the expansive connector between diverse voices, perspectives, and disciplines — uniting computing and data science with human perspective and purpose.
Within this space, academic and cognitive boundaries yield to imagination and the collective commitment of hundreds of faculty, students, and staff to form a uniquely collaborative culture.
The Gateway will be home to the Division of Computing, Data Science, and Society (CDSS), a new entity that reimagines academic collaboration and co-creation to tackle the technical, scientific, social, and human dimensions of the most urgent challenges. The division is building platforms to accelerate scalable solutions in biomedicine and human health, climate and sustainability, and human welfare and social justice.
“It is time for students and faculty to work with people on the ground — public health experts, local environmental officials, criminal defense attorneys — to build a society which embodies our values and realizes our goals. There is no place like Berkeley to lead the way.” —Associate Provost Jennifer Chayes, dean of the School of Information.
The key to making real progress is to create a team culture for faculty and student researchers in a shared space that fuels inspiration, imagination, and innovation. That’s why completing the Gateway is currently the highest priority of Light the Way: The Campaign for Berkeley. An anonymous donor’s lead gift of $252 million — the largest single contribution in Berkeley’s history — plus significant commitments from additional generous partners have provided a strong foundation on which Berkeley can build.
As the first campus building designed for a post-pandemic world, the Gateway will model novel and flexible ways of working, learning, and interacting. Connections and fortuitous “collisions” between individuals and ideas are crucial to innovation, so the Gateway’s interior features an interconnected landscape that encourages exploration and interaction. Extended sightlines and natural light-filled corridors create connection across and between floors. Communal gathering centers link distinct neighborhoods and districts in a continuous flow to facilitate cross-fertilization of ideas and insights.
This is the Gateway.