With a faculty that’s claimed nearly 50 Nobel Prizes, some 40 MacArthur Foundation Fellowships, and more than its fair share of rocket scientists, it’s a pretty good bet that on any given day, someone, somewhere on the Cal campus is generating an idea that will change the world. Naturally, not every breakthrough is as mind-boggling or earth-shattering as, say, the discovery of plutonium (Glenn Seaborg, 1942) or the first scientific imaging of the infant universe (George Smoot, 2006). But stir the cauldron of Cal ingenuity, and you’ll find no shortage of professors and researchers whose quiet work is poised to make a profound impact on our lives.
The Accidental Celebrity: Mark Twain worked hard to burnish his reputation. Not so Robert Hirst, the general editor of Cal’s massive Mark Twain Papers and Project. But suddenly last fall, with the publication of the outrageously best-selling Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume I—a project that Hirst oversaw—he and his colleagues found themselves basking in the limelight.
The Good News Guy: Think racial tension is inevitable? Rodolfo Mendoza-Denton, director of Cal’s Relationships and Social Cognition Lab, begs to differ. According to his fascinating research, we can all get along—and happily, too.
The Panic Doc: Neuropsychologist Sonia Bishop believes that anxiety is all in your head—literally. Her promising new study shows that variations in brain structure account for why some of us flip out more easily than others, a finding that bodes well for better treatment.
