Cori Hayden, Professor Anthropology at UC Berkeley, has been appointed Director of Social Science Matrix. Hayden previously served as Interim Director during the Spring 2025 semester.
“Cori Hayden is an outstanding scholar and an experienced leader, so we are delighted to have her returning to join the Matrix team as Director,” said Raka Ray, Dean of the Division of Social Sciences.
Hayden will assume the role previously held by Professor Marion Fourcade, who stepped down following a highly successful six-year term as Director. Under Fourcade’s leadership, Matrix launched a variety of new initiatives and event series that spotlighted the research of both faculty and graduate students while provoking thoughtful conversations around important topics like the global rise of authoritarianism, the impacts of digital technology, and social challenges like homelessness, immigration, and climate change. (Read a letter sent by Marion Fourcade to members of the Division of Social Sciences.)
“We are deeply grateful to Professor Marion Fourcade for her dedicated leadership of Matrix over the past six years,” Ray said. “Marion consistently brought new ideas and energy to Matrix’s programming, sought out new ways of promoting interdisciplinary dialogue, nurtured young faculty through the wonderful book talk series, and ensured that conversations at Matrix reflected the urgent issues of our time.”
A Legacy of Intellectual Engagement on Pressing Issues
Under Professor Fourcade’s leadership, Social Science Matrix continued to grow its role as a center for cross-disciplinary dialogue for scholars across the UC Berkeley social science community (and beyond).
Early in her tenure, Fourcade launched the Solidarity Series, a series of panels focused on exploring questions related to connectedness, inclusiveness, tolerance, and equality. She also continued popular event series initiated by Professor Michael Watts (who served as Interim Director during the 2019-2020 academic year), including the popular Matrix on Point discussion series and the Authors Meet Critics series, which showcased books published by UC Berkeley social scientists.
Fourcade deftly steered Matrix through the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic, ensuring that programming continued in an online format while expanding the audience for virtual events. During her six-year term, Fourcade led the organization of dozens of lectures and panels featuring a wide range of globally renowned scholars, writers, and artists, including Katharina Pistor, Joan Donovan, Kevin Roose, Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar, Angelique Kidjo, and Alexis Madrigal. In 2023, Fourcade’s invitation led to a first-ever UC Berkeley lecture and roundtable featuring Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson.
To help ensure that Matrix’s programming remained relevant to Berkeley’s public mission, Fourcade launched the California Spotlight series, which addressed issues directly pertinent to the state, including wildfires, homelessness, and the challenges facing higher education institutions. She also ensured that Matrix planned events in response to current events: for example, she began coordinating a panel on the war in Ukraine within days of the start of the conflict.
Fourcade expanded Matrix’s role as a center for social engagement at Berkeley. She launched Matrix Salons, social gatherings of faculty from across the division designed to promote community around shared concerns (such as the use of AI in teaching and research), and she conceived of Matrix Teach-Ins, an event series that invited outstanding teachers from the Social Sciences Division to deliver a lecture of their choice.
Matrix has continued to convene annual cohorts of Matrix Research Teams, interdisciplinary groups of scholars working on cutting-edge research projects, and Fourcade launched the Matrix Faculty Fellows program, designed to support assistant- and associate-level faculty members in the process of completing publications. Fourcade regularly helped bridge Matrix to other programs on campus, for example through her participation with the Berkeley Economy and Society Initiative (BESI) and the Computational Research for Equity in Legal Systems (CRELS) program.
One of the hallmarks of Fourcade’s leadership of Matrix was her determination to showcase the research of graduate students, whose work she felt too often receives the spotlight it deserves. The Matrix New Direction series was launched to showcase graduate students from across the division working on shared topics, while the Matrix Communications Fellows program created opportunities for graduate students to contribute articles and produce interviews for the Matrix Podcast.
“We all owe Marion our thanks for the extraordinary intellectual curiosity, generosity, and expansive understanding of the Social Sciences that she brought to the Matrix,” Hayden said. “I am delighted to have the opportunity to build on the rich legacy of interdisciplinary collaboration with which the Matrix is now justly associated. “
A New Era of Leadership for Matrix
As the new Director of Matrix, Professor Hayden brings extensive experience in leading cross-disciplinary research and dialogue. Her research and teaching focus on the anthropology of science, technology, and medicine. She received her PhD in Anthropology from UC Santa Cruz in 2000 and has held fellowships at the Center for US-Mexican Studies in San Diego, the University of Cambridge, and the Center for Advanced Studies in the Social and Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) in Palo Alto. At Berkeley, she has served as the Chair of the Department of Anthropology and was the Director of the Center for Science, Technology, Medicine, and Society from 2010-2013.
Hayden is the author of When Nature Goes Public: The Making and Unmaking of Bioprospecting in Mexico (Princeton University Press, 2003), and The Spectacular Generic: Pharmaceuticals and the Simipolitical in Mexico (2023, Duke University Press). Her more recent research and writing projects explore, respectively, the reanimation of crowd theory as an avenue for exploring contemporary market formations, political atmospheres, and modes of inquiry; and the sciences of Long Covid in a moment of resurgent authoritarianisms.
“I am excited about Matrix’s ability to generate intellectual energy and new research agendas in the social sciences, precisely at a moment when ‘the social’ – the shared, flexible object around which our disciplines orbit — is under such duress and transformation,” Hayden said. “During my tenure as interim director in Spring 2025, I was able to appreciate, from within, just how unique Matrix is, not least due to the leadership and intellectual energy and capaciousness of the outgoing director, Professor Marion Fourcade.”
“I am grateful that Cori has agreed to be the next Matrix faculty director,” Fourcade wrote in her letter to members of the Division of Social Sciences. “A creative thinker whose work spans the anthropology of the biochemical sciences, global pharmaceutical politics, crowds, and the post-liberal politics of knowledge, she knows Matrix well, having served a brilliant term as interim director in Spring 2024. Cori’s intellectual range, natural charisma and boundless energy make her precisely the right person for drawing people and ideas together across disciplines. Matrix could not be in better hands.”
