UC Berkeley faculty and key benefactors gathered or a ribbon-cutting ceremony on May 13 to celebrate nearing completion on the Barbara and Gerson Bakar Gateway building, the new home of the College of Computing, Data Science, and Society (CDSS).
Since becoming Berkeley’s newest college in the spring of 2023, CDSS has supported a diverse array of researchers and scholars who are not only developing cutting-edge new computing and AI technologies, but also harnessing the power of these technologies to provide ethical solutions to the world’s most pressing challenges.
The Gateway will bring these efforts together in a beautiful and functional new space, creating a dedicated campus hub for AI-driven discovery and interdisciplinary collaboration.
“In creating CDSS, we recognized how much computing and generative AI was going to permeate all these other fields — from law and public policy, to chemistry and materials science, to climate science and astronomy — and conceived of the college as the place where we could seize opportunities and mitigate potential harms,” said Jennifer Chayes, Dean of CDSS. “We have created the intellectual infrastructure to support this work, and now we have a stunning new physical space to support it as well.”
Located on the north side of campus, the state-of-the-art facility includes research laboratories, classrooms and social kitchens, along with collaborative space for more than 1,300 faculty, students and researchers. The building was designed by Weiss/Manfredi in collaboration with Gensler. The open, light-filled design prioritizes collective space over individual space, with interconnected work and meeting spaces to foster community and encourage face-to-face interactions.
“Even with generative AI and Zoom and all the ways we have to digitally connect, I don't think we have a better alternative than human-to-human collaboration: breaking bread together, brainstorming together, the serendipity of chance encounters leading to new joint projects and sometimes new fields,” Chayes said.
In addition to advancing Berkeley’s leading AI research, the Gateway will also support CDSS students The building’s garden level and entry level are devoted to undergraduates, and include classrooms, advising offices and the Gateway Café. The upper floors include graduate student and faculty offices and laboratories, as well as meeting rooms for speakers and seminars.
The building is nearing completion, with faculty and department staff planning moves over the summer. Classrooms, lecture halls and event spaces are expected to be completed by mid-August, in time for the start of the fall semester.
“The design of this extraordinary building is carefully tuned to how world-changing discoveries actually happen on the UC Berkeley campus,” said Chancellor Rich Lyons. “Amazing things unfold when we make it easy for people from different fields and areas of expertise to collaborate, cooperate and communicate. Berkeley is at its best when we illuminate each other. I can’t wait to see what the future holds.”
Berkeley is the birthplace of a long line of world-changing computing technologies, including RISC, a microprocessor architecture used in most computers today; the Network of Workstations; which helped lay the foundation for modern data centers; and Apache Spark, a platform that enables distributed data processing and machine learning across clusters of servers. Many Berkeley technologies are open source, meaning their underlying code is available for anyone to use and build upon.
Ion Stoica, a professor of computer science and a principal investigator for Apache Spark and other widely used software systems, attributes Berkeley’s success to its collaborative spirit and its tradition of organizing “five-year labs.” These labs bring together researchers from diverse fields and industry partners to tackle major challenges. Having everyone in one space will make collaboration even more seamless, Stoica said.
“Interdisciplinary research has been the foundation of much of Berkeley’s most impactful work,” said Stoica, who contributed a substantial gift toward the Gateway project in 2021. “I believe the Gateway will encourage more ambitious projects and create an environment that helps us grow while making it even easier to attract the brightest talent in the field.”
In addition to housing Berkeley’s core computing and data science expertise, the Gateway will also be home to CDSS’s many multidisciplinary units where researchers are using AI to advance new breakthroughs at record pace.
Among these is the Bakar Institute of Digital Materials for the Planet (BIDMaP), which is using machine learning to speed the development of new materials to meet the world’s climate challenges. BIDMaP’s team includes Omar Yaghi, who won the 2025 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for creating nano-scale porous materials that can capture carbon dioxide from the air. By introducing AI into the experimental cycle, Yaghi and collaborators have knocked down the time it takes to develop these materials from years to weeks.
Rose Niousha, a third-year Ph.D. student and co-president of the Computer Science Graduate Entrepreneurs student group, will speak at the ribbon-cutting ceremony as a student representative. Niousha has actively held leadership roles and chose Berkeley in part because of its strong track record of turning high-impact research into successful companies. In her research, Niousha studies how AI systems can better collaborate with humans to augment human capabilities, starting in learning environments.
“What I'm most excited about is how the Gateway will bring different fields together and make collaboration much more seamless,” Niousha said. “For me, that means faster iteration from research ideas to collaboration and real-world applications, and more opportunities to connect my work in human-centered AI with people across domains.”
Through her research and the entrepreneurs group, Niousha regularly engages with scholars from many different fields. However, much of this interaction occurs through events and seminars that are spread out across campus. She’s looking forward to having a dedicated campus space where these conversations can occur.
“As AI continues to grow, it’s more important than ever for students to understand its real-world impact across fields,” Niousha said. “I hope the Gateway shifts the student experience from siloed to integrated, where students work across fields and apply what they learn to real-world problems.”