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.

Matrix On Point

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Event Date: February 3rd, 2026
4:00pm-5:30pm

Matrix on Point: Corruption in America

This panel will bring together leading scholars from business, political science, and law to examine the many facets of corruption in the United States and the ways it is identified, constrained, and addressed. The panel will feature Sarah Anzia, Ernesto Dal Bó, and Erwin Chemerinsky, with Sean Gailmard moderating.

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Other Events

Recap

Published November 1, 2016

Viet Thanh Nguyen: “Beyond Victims and Voices: On Writing as a Radical Act”

Video is now available of the October 28 presentation by Viet Thanh Nguyen, an alumnus of the UC Berkeley Ethnic Studies program whose novel, The Sympathizer, is a New York Times bestseller and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

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Other Events

Recap

Published October 17, 2016

Weapons of Math Destruction

On September 16, 2016, Social Science Matrix hosted Cathy O'Neil, author of Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy.

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Grants and Opportunities

News

Published October 10, 2016

Matrix Welcomes 2016-2017 Dissertation Fellows

Social Science Matrix is honored to welcome our inaugural group of Matrix Dissertation Fellows, five Ph.D. students whose research has strong potential to generate effective solutions to critical global challenges.

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Interview

Article

Published September 6, 2016

Karen Barkey: “Shared Sacred Sites”

Dr. Karen Barkey, a sociologist joining UC Berkeley in Fall 2016, directs the Shared Sacred Sites initiative, which uses digital humanities methods to present fieldwork on sacred sites shared by different religious communities.

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Matrix News

Published June 28, 2016

Fall 2016 Matrix Research Teams Announced

Climate change. Immigration. Creating resilient rural communities. These are among the issues that Social Science Matrix Research Teams will take on during the coming academic year.

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Interview

Article

Published May 23, 2016

Mazda Farias-Virgens: “Birdsong and Human Language”

UC Berkeley anthropology graduate student Madza Farias-Virgens draws upon research into birdsong and genome sequencing to address questions related to the evolution of human language.

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