Faculty

Last week, the campus community lost an esteemed colleague as IB Professor Emerita Roberta “Robbie” Park passed away peacefully at the age of 87. Roberta had been an invaluable member of the Physical Education program for more than sixty years, from her time as an undergraduate to her service as a faculty member and department chair of the Department of Physical Education (later Human Dynamics, which merged with Integrative Biology in 1997).

Geckos are renowned for their acrobatic feats on land and in the air, but a new discovery that they can also run on water puts them in the superhero category, says a University of California, Berkeley, biologist.

“We just have a decade or two given the rapid pace of climate and land-use change,” said Brent Mishler, a UC Berkeley professor of integrative biology and director of the University and Jepson Herbaria. “Our opportunities, even 10 years down the line, are way more limited compared to what they are now. What we are going to save, we are going to save quickly. We don’t have forever to leisurely conserve California.”

Learn about the birth of the department, building a forest from fossil leaves, museum treasure troves, reconnect with your classmates, and much more!

The University of California, Berkeley seeks applications for up to five tenure-track positions in the Life Sciences with a potential start date of July 1, 2019.

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Evolutionary biologist Dr Alison Feder from University of California, Berkeley has been named winner of the very first Milner Prize by the Milner Centre for Evolution.

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The Department of Integrative Biology (IB) and the University of California Museum of Paleontology (UCMP) at the University of California, Berkeley invite applications for a full time tenure-track position in vertebrate paleontology at the Assistant Professor level. Potential start date is July 1, 2019.
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New research coming out of Assistant Professor Britt Koskella's lab found that spraying tomatoes with microbes from healthy tomatoes protected them from disease-causing bacteria, but that fertilizing the tomatoes beforehand negated the protection, leading to an increase in the population of pathogenic microbes on the plants’ leaves. Read more...

What is stress? According to IB's Professor Daniela Kaufer, stress can be a healthy response to a perceived threat. But there is a fine line between feeling a small amount of stress, which can make your brain stronger, and going through traumatic events, a kind of stress that brings on conditions like post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. The difference between the two has profoundly different long-term effects on the brain. Read more...

Noah Whiteman, an associate professor in the Department of Integrative Biology at UC Berkeley, has always known how to survive. He moved to Sax-Zim, a rural area in Minnesota, when he was 11 and spent the next seven years learning to fish and hunt with his naturalist dad and hiding that he was gay. When a boy he’d been friends with started to bully him at every chance he got, Noah knew it was time to get out.

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