Carol Nekesa doesn’t know if she was ever infected by parasitic worms. But it’s likely, she says, since most kids in her community had them. “It was just a normal part of childhood,” she says. 

Carol grew up in the 1980s in a rural village in Busia County, Kenya. Like many regions in Sub-Saharan Africa at the time, Busia lacked the infrastructure for clean water and modern sanitation, leading to the pervasive spread of infectious diseases. 

Parents feared deadly outbreaks like malaria and cholera, often unaware of the slower, hidden damage caused by intestinal worms. The symptoms — fatigue, diarrhea, weight loss, stunted growth — rarely made headlines, yet they shaped children’s futures. At the time, more than a billion people worldwide, most of them children, were living with these infections, making parasitic worms one of the most widespread chronic health conditions on the planet.

In 1998, two researchers — Ted Miguel, who is now an economics professor at UC Berkeley, and future Nobel laureate Michael Kremer — launched the Primary School Deworming Project in Busia. They had no idea that their work would become a global model proving just how much a healthy childhood matters — not just for kids in the study, but for generations to come.

“It's kind of mind-blowing to be a researcher and know that your research is being cited and used as a justification for these large-scale programs,” says Miguel. “It’s amazing to see.”

Listen to the episode and read the transcript on UC Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu/podcasts/berkeley-voices).

Music by Blue Dot Sessions.

Photo courtesy of Ted Miguel.

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In the United States, the housing crisis can feel like an unsolvable puzzle. We talk of housing as something we navigate alone — a commodity we rent or buy, subject to the whims of a volatile market.

But in Thailand, they’ve pioneered a different model. A government program called Baan Mankong, or “secure housing,” treats shelter as a collective right — and proves that the U.S.’s individualist framework isn’t the only way.

As a Berkeley Ph.D. student in 2014, Hayden Shelby wanted to know if a similar strategy could work in the U.S. In order to decipher the complex policy, she enrolled in advanced Thai in the Department of Southeast Asian studies.

Now a leading expert on the program in the U.S., Shelby says speaking Thai on the ground with experts and community members was invaluable.

“People open up when they know you’ve made this really deep and difficult investment in learning their language,” she says. “It breaks down that expert/non-expert barrier.”

In this episode of Berkeley Voices, we look at how acquiring a new language can shift our worldview, and what happens when we stop asking what we can do for other countries and start asking what we can learn from them.

This is the fourth episode of our latest season, featuring UC Berkeley scholars working on life-changing research — and the people whose lives are changed by it.

Listen to the episode and read the transcript on UC Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu/podcasts/berkeley-voices).

Music by Blue Dot Sessions.

Photo courtesy of Hayden Shelby.

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At 3 months old, Victoria Gray wouldn’t stop crying. Blood tests brought devastating news: she had sickle cell disease, a genetic blood disorder that blocks blood flow and oxygen delivery to the body. It causes unbearable pain that Victoria describes as “getting struck by lightning and hit by a truck.”

As she got older, Victoria felt increasingly isolated and hopeless. She often spent her kids’ birthdays at the hospital, where she received regular blood transfusions. “I felt like I was cheating my children out of their childhood,” she says. “I didn’t look forward to a long life. I stopped dreaming. I gave up on school or doing anything … I thought that I was close to dying.”

But at age 34, Victoria got a new chance at life. 

In 2019, she became the first person in the world to receive a revolutionary new treatment for the disease — a gene-editing tool called CRISPR discovered in a UC Berkeley lab, which would go on to win a Nobel Prize just one year later. 

“It felt like an answered prayer for me,” says Victoria. “CRISPR not only freed me, it freed my children.” 

This is the third episode of our latest Berkeley Voices season, featuring UC Berkeley scholars working on life-changing research — and the people whose lives are changed by it.

Listen to the episode and read the transcript on UC Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu/podcasts/berkeley-voices).

Music by Blue Dot Sessions.

Photo courtesy of Victoria Gray; illustration by Neil Freese/UC Berkeley.

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After Wikipedia made its debut in 2001, some trends quickly emerged. Most editors were male, topics tended to skew toward geek culture interests like computing and gaming, and only a small fraction of biographies were about women. 

More than two decades later, biases and knowledge gaps on Wikipedia of all sorts remain, especially for marginalized communities. But a UC Berkeley professor and her students are working to change that.

Since 2016, ethnic studies professor Juana María Rodríguez has partnered with Wiki Education to teach a range of courses in which students create and edit Wikipedia articles about the contributions of LGBTQ people, especially queer and trans people of color.  

“Wikipedia is a public-facing project — it’s the largest encyclopedia in the world,” says Rodríguez. “In a political moment where these histories are actively being erased from public view, having students work on a platform like Wikipedia becomes even more important.”

This is the second episode of a new Berkeley Voices season, featuring UC Berkeley scholars working on life-changing research and the people whose lives are changed by it.

Listen to the episode and read the transcript on UC Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu/podcasts/berkeley-voices).

Music by Blue Dot Sessions.

UC Berkeley photo by Brandon Sánchez Mejia.

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Tyler Lee-Wynant grew up hearing stories about his great-great aunt, Edna Campbell Guerrero. Born in 1907 in Mendocino County, she was a native speaker of Northern Pomo, one of seven languages spoken by the Pomo people who are Indigenous to Northern California. 

“She was a no-nonsense person,” says Lee-Wynant, a UC Berkeley Ph.D. student in linguistics. “She was an amazing individual. She cared so deeply about passing on what she knew.”

For more than 50 years, Guerrero worked with Berkeley linguists to document her language and culture. These recordings are part of the campus’s California Language Archive. In them, she tells stories, describes cultural practices, says vocabulary and conjugates verbs. Whenever Lee-Wynant hears his aunt’s voice, strong and determined, he knows it’s his responsibility to carry on her work. 

As a graduate student researcher for the archive, Lee-Wynant is cataloging and analyzing a new collection that includes hours of recordings of his aunt, among other materials. “It's such a trove of information about ... my family's history,” he said. “I always get the chills whenever I listen to it because you never know what story is gonna come up.”

In this episode of Berkeley Voices, Lee-Wynant shares how his aunt's recordings have opened a portal to his family’s history and led him to teach their language to new generations.

And in this UC Berkeley News companion piece, learn more about the linguist who created the archive's newly acquired collection, her lifetime of research with Indigenous communities and how her collection of tapes and notebooks found their way to the archive. 

This is the first episode of a new Berkeley Voices season, featuring UC Berkeley scholars working on life-changing research and the people whose lives are changed by it. New episodes come out on the first Thursday of every month, from November through April.

Listen to the episode and read the transcript on UC Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu/podcasts/berkeley-voices).

Music by Blue Dot Sessions.

UC Berkeley photo by Brittany Hosea-Small.

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There’s so much incredible research and work that happens every day at UC Berkeley, on everything from artificial intelligence and quantum computing to linguistics and the study of social justice. It holds the record for the most Nobel Prize winners among any public university in the world, with two wins just this year.

This work can be highly theoretical and technical, taking decades to fully develop. Yet its impact extends far beyond academia, leading to world-changing results, from the invention of CRISPR gene editing that has saved lives to ethnic studies courses that foster a stronger sense of identity and critical consciousness. 

Within these broad impacts are millions of stories of how Berkeley’s research has transformed society. In this season of Berkeley Voices, we hear two sides of a story — from Berkeley scholars working on life-changing research, and from the people who’ve been changed by it.

New episodes will come out on the first Thursday of each month, from November through April. Listen to Berkeley Voices on your favorite podcast app or on YouTube @BerkeleyNews. You can find all of our podcast episodes, with transcripts and photos, on UC Berkeley News at news.berkeley.edu/podcasts.

Listen to the episode and read the transcript on UC Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu/podcasts/berkeley-voices).

Music by Blue Dot Sessions.

UC Berkeley design by Neil Freese.

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Last month, UC Berkeley researchers published a study about how they tricked the eye into seeing a new color. It was a highly saturated teal, a peacock green, the greenest of all greens. 

The scientists produced this color, which they named “olo,” by shining a laser into the eye and stimulating one type of color-sensitive photoreceptor cells called cones. 

Austin Roorda, a professor of optometry and vision science at Berkeley’s School of Optometry, developed the optical imaging platform they used in this project. It’s called Oz, after the story The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. In the 1939 film adaptation, the lead character, Dorothy, goes from her black-and-white farm in Kansas to the color world of Oz.

“Ozvision is really directly tied to the book and to the movie where the Emerald City is this unearthly green color,” said Roorda. “The intent and the aspiration was to elicit that same kind of response by going from a natural-colored world to a supernatural-colored world by a direct stimulation of these cones.” 

It has enormous potential, he said, to transform how we understand and treat eye diseases, and to expand the way we see the world around us.

Listen to the episode and read the transcript on UC Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu/podcasts).

Music by Blue Dot Sessions.

Photo via Unsplash+

This is the last episode of our Berkeley Voices series on transformation. In eight episodes, we have looked at how transformation — of ideas, of research, of perspective — shows up in the work that happens every day at UC Berkeley. We'll be back with a new series in the fall.

See all episodes of the series.

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When Ann Johnson had a rare brainstem stroke at age 30, she lost control of all of her muscles. One minute, she was playing volleyball with her friends. The next, she couldn’t move or speak. 

Up until that moment, she’d been a talkative and outgoing person. She taught math and physical education, and coached volleyball and basketball at a high school in Saskatchewan, Canada. She’d just had a baby a year earlier with her new husband. 

And the thing is, she still was that person. It's just that no one could tell. Because the connection between her brain and her body didn’t work anymore. She would try to speak, but her mouth wouldn’t move. 

Eighteen years later, she finally heard her voice again.

It's thanks to researchers at UC Berkeley and UC San Francisco who are working to restore people’s ability to communicate using a brain-computer interface. The technology, the researchers say, has enormous potential to make the workforce and the world more accessible to people like Ann. 

Listen to the episode and read the transcript on UC Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu/podcasts). There, you can also watch a video about Ann and the research team.

Music by Blue Dot Sessions.

Photo by Noah Berger, 2023.

This year on Berkeley Voices, we’re exploring the theme of transformation. In eight episodes, we explore how transformation — of ideas, of research, of perspective — shows up in the work that happens every day at UC Berkeley. New episodes come out on the last Monday of each month, from October through May.

See all episodes of the series.

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When Winnie Wong first saw Dafen Oil Painting Village in 2006, it was nothing like she’d imagined. 

The Chinese village was known for mass producing copies of Western art. She’d read about it in The New York Times, which described a kind of compound where thousands of artists painted replicas of famous artworks, like da Vinci’s Mona Lisa or van Gogh’s Starry Night, for European and U.S. hotels and condos.

“We had an expectation, which was that there would be this giant factory,” said Wong, a professor of rhetoric at UC Berkeley. “And in this factory, there would be these painters working in an assembly line fashion: One person would paint the rocks, and one person would paint the trees, and one person would paint the sky.”

But when she arrived in the small gated village, what she saw surprised her. In 2013, she published van Gogh on Demand: China and the Readymade, a book about her six years of research in Dafen and how it forever changed the way she thinks about art and authenticity and the nature of creativity.

See more artwork and photos of Dafen from 2015, when Wong and architecture professor Margaret Crawford took a group of graduate students on a 14-day trip to the Pearl River Delta region to study urban art villages.

Listen to the episode, read the transcript and see more photos on UC Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu/podcasts).

Music by Blue Dot Sessions.

Photo by José Joaquin Figueroa.

This year on Berkeley Voices, we're exploring the theme of transformation. In eight episodes, we explore how transformation — of ideas, of research, of perspective — shows up in the work that happens every day at UC Berkeley. New episodes come out on the last Monday of each month, from October through May.

See all episodes of the series.

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Have you ever seen letters from the 1800s? Aside from the pristine penmanship and grammar, the way friends expressed their fondness for each other is remarkable.

“Letters sent between friends are often full of the kinds of loving and affectionate language that today we would only associate with romantic or sexual relationships: ‘My darling,’ ‘I love you,’ ‘I can't wait to be near you,’” said UC Berkeley historian Sarah Gold McBride, who in 2022 created the course, Friendship in America, with Berkeley anthropologist Christine Palmer. 

Throughout history, with changes in cultural norms and communication technology, the ways we stay connected to each other has also changed, and not always for the better. While social media can make it easier to find people with similar interests, it can also make it easier to forget what it takes to build and keep meaningful relationships. 

Gold McBride and Palmer hope their class will inspire students to draw from the past and approach their friendships with the intentionality they require.

This is the fifth episode of our eight-part series on transformation. In eight episodes, we’re exploring how transformation — of ideas, of research, of perspective — shows up in the work that happens every day at UC Berkeley. New episodes of the series come out on the last Monday of each month. See all episodes of the series.

Key takeaways:

• Gender norms, throughout U.S. history to the modern day, influence the kinds of friendships we make and how we express affection for each other.
• As our dominant modes of communication shift, how we conceive of friendship evolves, too.
• By investigating friendship in a deeper way, we can better understand the role of friendship in our lives and become more intentional in how we make and maintain our connections.

Read the transcript, listen to episode and see photos on UC Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu/podcasts).

Find us on YouTube@BerkeleyNews.

Music by Blue Dot Sessions.

Photo by Sarah.rdguezz via Wikimedia Commons.

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