UC Berkeley’s flagship institute for social science research

Our purpose is captured in our name: we provide an organizational framework—a “matrix”—that supports cross-disciplinary research pursued by social scientists across the University of California, Berkeley campus and beyond.

Special Event

REGISTER

Event Date: May 8th, 2024
2:00pm-3:00pm

Global Economic Developments: A View from the IMF

UC Berkeley students, faculty, and staff are invited to join us on May 8, 2024 from 2:00pm-3:00pm for a town hall meeting with Gita Gopinath, the First Deputy Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund. The event will feature an interview of Dr Gopinath conducted by current UC Berkeley students on topics ranging from debt sustainability to economic fragmentation and the role of the dollar in the global economy, followed by an open question period.

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Health

Published April 13, 2020

Hand-washing in the Time of COVID-19

In the era of COVID-19, the public health directive to "wash your hands" is a challenge for people with limited access to clean water, writes UC Berkeley researcher Isha Ray.

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Cities

Article

Published April 8, 2020

Gangs, Labor Mobility, and Development

 A Q&A with Carlos Schmidt-Padilla, PhD Candidate in the UC Berkeley Department of Political Science, on his research showing the staggering economic toll of living within gang-controlled territory.

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Podcast

Interview

Published March 30, 2020

Matrix Podcast: Interview with Desiree Fields

In this episode, Michael Watts talks with Desiree Fields, Assistant Professor of Geography and Global Metropolitan Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Fields' research explores the financial technologies, market devices, and historical and geographic contingencies that make it possible to treat housing as a financial asset, and how this process is contested at the urban scale.

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COVID-19

Article and News

Published March 27, 2020

COVID-19: UC Berkeley Social Sciences Portal

A portal for insights about the COVID-19 pandemic from the UC Berkeley social science community

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Workshop/Symposium

Recap

Published March 21, 2020

2020 Advanced Workshop in Climate Change Economics

On January 31 to February 1, Social Science Matrix hosted the Advanced Workshop in Climate Change Economics, which brought together leading scholars from universities around the world to apply the tools of micro- and macroeconomics to understand and tackle the challenge of climate change.

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Matrix Lecture

Recap

Published March 20, 2020

Alexandra Gillies, “Crude Intentions”

Recorded on March 4, 2020, this video features a lecture by Alexandra Gillies, an expert on oil-sector corruption and author of the book "Crude Intentions: How Oil Sector Corruption Contaminates the World."

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