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.

Podcast

Interview

Published December 4, 2024

Emotion, Race, and Gender: Interview with Gold Okafor

Listen to our interview with Gold Okafor, a PhD candidate in social and personality psychology at UC Berkeley who investigates racial and gender disparities through emotion. The interview focuses on Okafor's paper, "Measuring Mindfulness in Black Americans: A Psychometric Validation of the Five Facet Mindfulness Questionnaire," as well as other research topics.

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Research Highlights

Article

Published August 6, 2014

Decline of the City-State

UC Berkeley historian Mark Peterson writes about the prominence—and ultimate decline—of city-states, using 18th- and 19th-century Boston as an example.

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Research Highlights

Article

Published August 4, 2014

The Happy App

Tchiki Davis, a Berkeley social psychology Ph.D. candidate, is building an app to boost happiness.

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Workshop/Symposium

Published August 4, 2014

Dangerous Knowledge

An interdisciplinary working group at UC Berkeley aims to better understand how breakthrough scientific discoveries have been—and should be—regulated.

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Research Highlights

Article

Published August 4, 2014

Playing with Kids Pays Off Economically

A groundbreaking study by UC Berkeley researchers shows that playing with children has a profound impact on their future incomes.  

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Interview

Published August 1, 2014

Reconstructing Disaster

UC Berkeley graduate student Siri Colom researches how politics shaped the reconstruction of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.

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Research Highlights

Article

Published August 1, 2014

If Then What?

A Social Science Matrix seminar is examining the creeping presence of algorithms in modern society.

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