 I'm Dan Moguloff from the Campus Office of Communications and Public Affairs and thrilled to welcome Vice Chancellor Research Randy Kast to this edition of Campus Conversations. And as usual, I'll start off with a little introduction to biography and Randy will share a few thoughts about his impressions of the office and the UC Berkeley Research Enterprise and then we'll open it up to questions. So Randy serves as the Vice Chancellor for Research with overall responsibility for UC Berkeley's research endeavor and in that capacity he provides primary leadership and research policy planning administration. He received his undergraduate degree from Cornell and his MS and PhD from Berkeley. He joined the Berkeley faculty in 1983 and since 1996 he has been the United Microelectronics Corporation Distinguished Professor in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. On January 1st 2018 he was appointed as Vice Chancellor for Research at UC Berkeley. He's published over 350 referee technical papers, book chapters, and books and his introductory Computer Engineering textbook, Contemporary Logic Design, check it out if you haven't already, has sold over 100,000 copies in two editions and has been used at over 200 colleges and universities. In the late 1980s with colleagues at Berkeley he developed redundant arrays of inexpensive discs, otherwise known as raid, maybe we can find out more about that later. That has become a 15 billion dollar per year industry sector and then I stumbled on this Randy which we may need to talk about later. In 1993 when you were at DARPA you established White House.gov and connected the White House to the internet. Regrets? Anyway. Without further adieu. Thank you very much and thank you for that very kind introduction Dan. I know that that I'd like to sort of start the session with a little bit of reflections on the job that I took on on January 1st. As Dan mentioned I had worked at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency for a couple of years in the early 1990s and I've been a working researcher and teacher and professor on the campus for my entire professional life so I thought I understood what research is actually about at a major university like Berkeley. I can tell you that there were many things I was not prepared for. One of them is the entire legal context around Native American Graves and Repatriation Act which has been an item of some political controversy actually for many years but has been something that's taking a lot of our offices time at the moment as we rethink the way in which we will engage with the Native American community for the 21st century. Another thing I found myself responsible for much to my surprise is I'm the guy who had to say we are canceling the big game Bonfire this year because through a quirk of campus organizational reality the fire marshal works for the division of environmental health and safety which for whatever reason reports to me. So it's a very broad portfolio that goes well beyond you know thinking about our research infrastructure and how we support our research enterprise on the campus but as I tell my wife every day it's never a dull moment. I just want to step back and talk about research in general when I remember when I was an undergraduate it wasn't here and I had a professor told me flat out you know we don't really care about undergraduates. I mean we're here to do research and work with our graduate students and you guys are basically a nuisance and I know that a lot of the California public sees our mission as primarily being educational. What's the case for the combination? What's the case that you make for why it's important that our faculty and that are in our institution are involved in two very different things at least seemingly very different academic endeavors. Why research here? Well I think that's that's you know a very great and fundamental question. If you look at the roots of our university it goes back to the land grant act of 1862 where a land grant public institution and if you actually go back and read the law that created the University of California in that time frame think of it for a second it's in the midst of the American Civil War and somehow the Congress had time to think about the future and how to think about education training and the advancement of knowledge in the nation they were able to look beyond what was happening on a moment-by-moment basis for what was happening in that time frame of 1862 and their thinking was to make the United States powerful economically at the forefront of knowledge the nation would have to invest in a kind of higher education that was an augment to classical education which had been designed really to train clergy and by the way almost entirely men for careers in the clergy through a classical education that there was a need for a practical education as well and the thought was that we're gonna we're gonna educate people to go into agriculture and the so-called mechanical arts to advance the nation well part of the mission of a 21st century public institution public research institution is in order to train our students to be at the cutting edge of new knowledge they should be taught by the people who are creating that new knowledge who can bring into the classroom not using somebody else's textbooks but to use our textbooks that we wrote that's the person standing in front of you teaching you about these concepts so research is extremely important for the educational mission and I think in in a very large extent this is why the best and the brightest of California want to come to Berkeley to study is the access to the intellectual environment where the creators were not just the interpreters of what the state of the art and knowledge actually is and then again when you go back to that 1862 view of it's important for the economic goodness of the nation to be at the forefront of these areas the economic impact that we have through our research is so important we push forward the boundaries of knowledge in order to understand the world better and to share that understanding with our students but in the process of pushing forward those boundaries of knowledge we create new ways that can help people be better in the world that can help their health can create new industries can they create new opportunities for employment because they're solving society's problems through the kinds of products and services that come about so the university is not an arms length ivory tower creating knowledge for its own sake it's embedded in a system an ecosystem around where it's located in the state to have to to create an educated workforce to create the people who can think about the new industries to support the new industries and to have the kind of regional economic benefit that a great university has and should have so how does your office or maybe your own perspectives how do they relate to how faculty member maintains that balance in other words that it's just as important whether they're see still seeking tenure or in terms of how they look at their workload that balance between educational responsibilities pedagogical responsibilities and what they want to get done in the lab well I have Dan mentioned that that I'm a professor of electrical engineering and computer science I was chair of that department in the late 1990s and also had the opportunity to serve on the campus budget committee which unfortunately or fortunately has nothing to do with the university budget but it is a group of faculty that are representatives of the academic Senate who provide advice to the administration about faculty advancement and so I had the opportunity for three and a half years to sit on a committee where we reviewed the portfolio for advancement cases of probably over that period of time it was more than a thousand cases so almost every member of our faculty was in what one of that came up at least once in that three and a half year cycle and I can tell you that the you know sort of the academic Senate leadership and campus leadership really believe in that balance portfolio of research teaching and service everything everything we talk about is evaluating our faculty on those three dimensions where you are in your career maybe there's a different emphasis a younger faculty member has to create their their national and international reputation they have to demonstrate their leadership in research and scholarship it's so important to establish yourself as a member of the scholarly community that doesn't mean that you could be an awful teacher but as your career advances maybe making more investment in your time of advancing teaching developing new courses new sort of curriculum or ways of teaching become part of the way in which we we credit you know sort of the success of the faculty member and then our institution is very much based on service service to your professional society service to society at large and service to the university this is an insane asylum run by the inmates and so it's very very important that people engage and provide you know their expertise their energy and their insights into running the institution and Berkeley and the University of California is a very strong model of how the administration and the academic Senate and indeed other communities staff communities the community of lecturers all provide inputs and are part of the process of running this place so in your first answer you mentioned the land you know our legacy is a land grant institution and I want in that context I'd like you to talk a little bit about what I've heard referred to as the signature initiatives something that I think we've heard Chancellor Chris talk about that are part of our strategic planning process part of the vision for the future and I've heard you talk about them as sort of almost a reimagining of our land grant mission so tell us a little bit about what the sign signature initiatives are why they're important and what it all means for the institution's research endeavors yes so the Chancellor has initiated a process of strategic planning for the campus to think you know broadly of where does Berkeley wants sees itself in the next decade maybe 20 years in a variety of different very important elements of what the campus does a research is one part of that set of pillars how students experience the university is another very important pillar how we have a financial model that can sustain the university is another part of that pillar but the signature initiatives are part of that sort of research and scholarship dimension rethinking or building on the expertise that the the university has as we extrapolated 10 or 20 years into the future so many universities have these vision statements and you know plans for for where they want to go if a quote that I like to to say it is if you don't know where you're going all wins are favorable you need to know where you want to go to jump on you know those opportunities whether it's for funding or support or or negotiating with the legislature or talking to you know some great philanthropist who wants to support the university you want to know what is the direction that you're going into and so through a process of engagement with a lot of different communities on campus faculty staff many many different inputs the the strategic planning group came up with five signature initiatives that in total are about the major societal challenges that we are facing in the 21st century and there is an appetite of our faculty to address those issues but translate what we do in scholarship into intervening and doing something about those issues that society faces so the the sort of five and there's like a sixth overarching one is environment what as we as a as a society going to do about the environment how do we prepare if we can't mitigate climate change how do we prepare for climate change in the way that we organize society we could be Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos and have a rocket in the backyard and go to Mars but most of us are going to get stuck here and and so what are we going to do about that how can we bring to bear our business expertise to you know how do we create an industry to address this our scientific and an engineering expertise what is our technological and scientific approach to these things our social science expertise how do we build you know sort of the support politically to address these issues all of this is within the environmental signature initiative another major one is to think about work in the age of the intelligent machine we're in the age of the machine a different kind of machine and we're going to have just the set of opportunities of how to amplify human intellect that this new technology will build how do we deal with that how do we prepare ourselves for that and there will be disruptions as well how do we prepare for the way in which society will be affected by these new technologies an example is the inherent bias that's built into artificial intelligence algorithms there in some sense only as good as the set of data they're trained on how representative is that set of data when you think about it when Randy goes in to try and get a mortgage from a banker they're going to look at some data about me and they'll look at how I'm dressed and if I go in with you know sort of genes that are ripped and and maybe a holes in my t-shirt and so on I'm not going to get that loan even though I have the same financials than if I go dressed as I'm by chance or for research and so humans have an inherent bias we have to understand that that exists the systems that are going to in part automate their decision-making will also have some biases built into it but we're developing the mathematics to quantify what that bias is and as a society we can decide the system has a 2% probability of mischaracter characterizing someone who wants a mortgage is that acceptable should it be 1% a half a percent zero so I mean there's so many exciting things you could imagine around that so environment work in the age of the intelligent machine issues related to democracy in the current world that we live in with facts that are now weaponized or facts and anti-facts and how do we sort through that both technologically scientifically humanistically and as a society inequality huge issues of inequality there was an article in the New York Times just a few days ago about California is now the world's fifth largest economy I live in San Francisco and every time I walk from Bart home and to Bart I go down an alleyway spewn with you know all kinds of drug paraphernalia and people sleeping on the streets where the richest city in the richest state in the richest country in the world and we have not been able to deal with homelessness and these addiction problems and the implication it has from generation to generation so you know again how can the intellectual resources of the university be focused on understanding those issues but I take it one step beyond it's not enough to write papers about the problem and to propose solutions you have to go into the community and try those solutions and see how it affects society at large and in the Bay Area in the state of California we should be and are to many extents a living laboratory at the forefront of a lot of these kind of social issues so I sense an appetite of our research community to not just stop at understanding the problem but taking it all the way to doing something in partnership with municipalities state government someday maybe the federal government to adjust some of these issues I mean just want to explore a little bit one part of that a little bit more you talked about translation you sort of refer to it just now at the very end translation into our our discoveries into beneficial goods and services and policy so we going into business I mean were you setting up factories how do we take that more aggressive stance when it comes to that translation that you're speaking so again the faculty our researchers our research infrastructure is very motivated by having impact in the real world impact scholarship has impact if other people care enough about it to build their own work on top of it and not to dismiss any sort of scholarship that is influential in that way in its community but an appetite a sort of a relatively new and increasing amongst the generation of researchers that we have on campus now is translate from the laboratory from what you're thinking about in your research group into action in the community in the real world and so your question is how do we support that and isn't that just sort of like business well again going back to that comments about the role of the modern university as an economic driver why does the state invest in the University of California to the you know extent limited extent that it does invest is in part the return on that investment in an educated workforce a better California and part of that is the way in which we impact the economic development of our region and Berkeley has done more than a share at building up the Bay Area as a center point for information technology for semiconductor technology and increasingly for biotechnology and of course the future involves intersections of those areas the way in which Silicon Valley has moved from being in in Stanford's backyard into San Francisco which is our backyard is kind of an interesting multi-dimensional view so no we're not in the business of business we are in the business of translating new ideas into economic impact and we do have a set of you know services offices capabilities on campus to grease the skids in getting those ideas out of the laboratory to have an economic benefit for the Bay Area region and beyond so I I think it would be safe to assume that that entails increased partnerships with the private sector with corporations we already we already have a lot of those so maybe you could talk a little bit about how you see those partnerships how we protect academic freedom I remember when I started working on campus the campus was embroiled in the controversy of our partnership with BP at the time and concerns about the work that was going on in the lab and concerned about academic freedom and where do we stand in terms of how we're protecting ourselves but at the same time exploiting and using those partnerships to advance the very interest you were talking about first of all there are many issues related to conflict of interest again a big article the New York Times over the weekend about Sloan Kettering and how researchers at that very prestigious institution receive funding from the same drug companies that they were doing trials on and we have a lot of people you know like to throw stones at California Hall of you know bloated administration and so on part of it is that the world that we operate in is so complicated and the compliance issues and the conflict of interest issues are so complicated that we do need to have infrastructure for vetting these things for investigating them when when something goes wrong but to come back to your to your main point in terms of our ability to do research we depend on the state of California to support us primarily the federal government sometimes foundations philanthropic foundations but increasingly industry and Berkeley has had a long history of alliance funded research a group of companies that come together at the neutral playing field of a university to support if you would pre-competitive research and and what is the value of doing this well it extends our research dollars we have another source of funding it brings to the table the perspective that industry has on what are the problems that they do not know how to solve which is a fantastic concept and context for applied research and because it is an alliance you don't have a as much likelihood of a single sponsor directing the research it's kind of a collaborative environment of here are the set of issues this is what we know how to do don't work on the things we know how to do work on the things beyond that and and that kind of direction and feedback is tremendously valuable for the way in which we engage with industry you mentioned the BP engagement of you know now more than 10 around 10 years ago or so this provided a lot of strategic funding for the university to really make a giant critical mass bet on biofuels and sometimes to work with on some you know really essential moving the world forward in a particular direction you have to work with a very deep pocketed you know sort of organization and that was a case of that which has helped in a variety of directions including some fantastic facilities that we have on campus but again I have confidence in our conflict of interest you know sort of apparatus on campus to ensure that and it isn't really in the interest of BP to sort of do exactly what it is they want us to do they have their own science labs to do that they want to challenge us to work on the things they don't know how to do and in return for a strategic hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollar investment in campus researchers to do this they do get you know sort of early eyes on what those great ideas are and you know again we need to think of each one of those relationships on a one by one basis but you know I think in order to get that scale of funding and that scale of upgrade on our scientific facilities it was a good call to enter into that agreement so as long as we're talking about sources of funding for research obviously the federal government remains I believe correct me if I'm wrong far and away the largest provider when the new administration came into office there was a lot of concern about an agenda that seemed to forebode drastic cuts where do things stand how have things turned out what is our relationship with the federal government like right now so this Dan a great question so I want to come back to something you said before about Randy's experience in the White House a little bit so I took a leave from the university in 1992 to go work for a federal agency in Washington the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency in 1993 in 1994 and then I came back I started on January 2nd 1993 the inauguration is June January 20th so I actually worked in the George Bush the first administration for like two weeks before it became the Clinton administration and things really picked up of course when the new government takes over and we were approached by the agency I was working in was approached by two young very dynamic staffers who were working for at the time the vice president Al Gore and they were appalled by the technological infrastructure in the White House and it was kind of remarkable that George Bush's White House had you know plug peg switchboard in 1993 and they also described how they ran around you know on the the you go to the inauguration the president is sweared in then all the staffers rush back to the White House and the old executive office building it's kind of like a land grab of who will get what office so you kind of want to be there as soon as you know like the light switch flicks now Clinton is in charge so they're running around all the offices staking out their new space in the White House West Wing in the old executive office building and they're looking for computers and they can't find any so you may think that the executive branch of government runs the place but who had the best computer set up in the entire White House on the dawn of the Clinton administration in January of 1993 vice president Dan quail for those in the room old enough to remember who he even was and that's kind of shocking in some sense until you realize that the vice president is not only doesn't only have an office in the executive branch he or she also has a role to play in the legislative branch they break the tie if the Senate you know sort of this 5050 so through his Senate office he was able to buy as many computers as he wanted and Bush couldn't buy any computers because the Congress wouldn't give him any money to buy computers what is the point of that whole story it's just that the executive branch is not nearly as powerful as you might think and the people who actually decide on what the budget is and then write the checks are the House in the Senate and right now they are continuing to support in fact almost at historical levels support for research scientific research social science research they've even increased the funding for the national endowment for the art and the national endowment for the humanities even though the president and his OMB director went on record as saying I want to zero those activities so we have been very fortunate in terms of the budget picture thus far looking forward in time part of this is that the Congress voted to basically take the locks off the bank to suspend budget caps and so everyone went on a wild spree of I like this I like that let's put that in the budget let's put that in the budget which has been good for research I have to say but you know there is a reckoning down the road and so I'm sure you're all aware of of the difference between what the government brings in in terms of revenue and what is currently spending that eventually is going to come home to roost and so somebody is going to have to prioritize what the government is spending its money on but right now despite all the rhetoric that comes out of out of government funding remains strong for many dimensions of science take a little turn here take a question that came in from the audience and it goes so how important is it to foster diversity and inclusion in the campus research community and what steps are you taking and perhaps you could expand on that to talk a little bit about gender and ethnic and racial imbalances and the STEM fields and sort of that whole suite of issues and concerns that people have around diversity writ large again whenever individual faculty member let's say submits a proposal to the National Science Foundation of the National Institute of Health they need to articulate their plan you know what the bigger societal impact of the work is and very frequently the way that we can have that impact is by engaging a more diverse community in the research I think this is an area where the campus has done much but could do more particularly in terms of for example that the chancellor and the provost initiatives with respect to student discovery initiatives we want to get students as undergraduates at Berkeley involved in the research enterprise of the campus and in doing that we want to ensure it is a very broad and diverse set of students so for example more female students who are engaged in research in the STEM fields in computer science my field which is particularly egregious in terms of the represent you know the gender balance within that field we can provide help we can provide support to have those kinds of programs going because at the end of the day it's about building a pipeline a pipeline of engagement both to underrepresented groups on campus women in science fields minorities in science and mathematical fields to give them an opportunity to engage to have a plan for as undergraduates build the pipeline for graduate school build the pipeline for becoming faculty but also reaching into the K through 12 pipeline and get to students before they're turned off from careers in these kinds of fields and through our school of education and its engagement with the local municipalities in the Bay Area and the kind of work they're doing in community engaged research a particular focus for the school of education's research is how to open up the STEM fields in partnership with local school districts to a more diverse community of students it's all about the pipeline and so through our research through the programs will run for our own undergraduates through how our undergraduates can go into high schools and junior high schools as role models for hey there's a kid from my community who's studying advanced science at Berkeley I can do it too these are we need we have a lot that we do we are developing a strategy for doing even more and I believe that the resources will be there to lead to success let's stay with the gender issue just for a second unfortunately a lot of the reports about sexual harassment and violence on college campuses not just this one involved to some extent that relationship between a member of faculty and a graduate student how much of a concern is that to you and what is the campus doing or at least in in terms of your office how are you involved in that and what sort of efforts are are possible for somebody in your position to make to ensure that it doesn't happen well I can tell you as a faculty member zero tolerance on this when I was a department chair was many years ago there was a complaint brought forward and we dealt with it very very quickly and as you're sort of aware you know those of us who the room is is sort of faculty staff of a variety of people we go through a training program every two years about what to do how to support someone who has been harassed how to report it how to respond and I take that training extremely seriously and in fact it was several decades ago but the nascent training for new department chairs was very valuable in terms of the particular incident that occurred in my career where I had to report it and engage with the title the title nine office sorry is that right title nine title 11 whichever one it is to deal with these sort of issues I again within our within our complex of research institutes in my role as a faculty member zero tolerance and I think really the office on campus that is the point office on this is the sexual harassment and sexual violence office that Sharon Inklis leads but we work with her when allegations have been made and when this findings have been made in order to some extent our responsibility is to ensure that the individual is properly disciplined increasingly the federal agencies want to be made aware of what that disciplinary process is but we also have a role to play in protecting the research enterprise so imagine that a principal investigator is you know sort of forbidden from entering the campus and loses their principal investigator status for a number of years what happens to their graduate students what happens to their you know sort of postdocs what happens to their research staff and so we have to be very aware of punishing the person who deserves to be punished but also protecting the in some sense the innocent bystanders bystanders of the of the research enterprise so we get engaged on those kinds of things and certainly our supportive of the sexual violence and select sexual harassment office when a rendering of a decision has been made to be to act as quickly as we possibly can in in sort of response to that finding so the next question we're going to change terrain just a little bit come back to money the issue of money and I think the the question touches on some legitimate concerns that people haven't it's as follows given the ambitions of the university how do you reconcile with staff cutbacks 50 year old decaying bill buildings and poor technology support meaning I think what this person is asking you've painted a picture of this wonderful vision in the future and it's I think safe to assume that with that comes all sorts of expenditures what about that balance with some of the more mundane issues and challenges and expenses that we need to address here on campus so University of California Berkeley we face a lot of challenges and you know many of the people in this room have been on the forefront of that in the sense of a totally out of control budget and a huge budget deficit going forward that that was not in control I mean there was we were we have essentially been in financial receivership from the office of the president for the last several years and so our chancellor and the leadership team that we currently have in place have worked very hard to get our budget back in line with our expenditures in part by raising revenues by charging people for things that they you know that you can charge them for and you should be charging them for but part of that has also been reducing services which means letting people go I think the chancellor says two-thirds by revenue one-third by cutbacks and part of that is you know there has been a steady history of underinvestment in maintenance you know in order to make the budget balance and so on there have been a lot of sacrifices that have been made to get us to a point where the chancellor can now talk about we believe that our about a budget will be in balance by next summer and we can think more strategically of where we go from there but there you know seismic retrofit deferred maintenance restaffing essential services that have been you know sort of cut to the bone it's pretty clear when I look across you know the part of the campus that I'm responsible for research support services there is no fat to cut there really is no you know we are operating at a much level a much reduced level of service than we were three or four years ago and it's showing in terms of dissatisfaction and service longer times to process things it's very obvious risk risk to the institution are our lab safe as they should be and so on so I've made some you know sort of strategic decisions on how to staff up in order to you know sort of cover those vulnerabilities that I see in our portfolio but moving forward we're faced by the following challenge our budget you know we'll reduce staffing levels deferred maintenance seismic retrofit we got our budget in balance how are we going to grow out of this where's the money going to come from we know that the state is probably not going to be you know super generous going forward and the trend of less state support will continue we know that how politically charged and difficult it is to try and get some visibility and support for even tuition rises that track the cost of living very political set of issues around that so I think the future in order to implement those visions that I was referring to like the strategic plan and the signature initiatives we have to do philanthropy we have to think about how we increase the amount of money flowing into the campus and the good news is we just closed a year where the fundraising operation almost hit six hundred million dollars and exceeded five hundred million dollars for the first time in the university's history so you know it means everyone in roles like I have we have to up our game in terms of philanthropic development in order to really remain being the leading public research university because even though it's public the amount of support we get from public sources is diminishing we have to if you pardon the expression float on our own bottom in terms of getting the resources we need to run the world class operation that we both are and aspire to stay being and I think that's really going to be the way in which we're going to have to go forward and actually just touch on something that's the subject of another question that just came in so there's two I guess two primary revenue streams that come into the university from the state of California one about sort of general operation support and then also research about the research where do you think things are heading in terms of the amount of research support that we get from the state the nature of our partnership and relationship with the state not around the educational mission about around the research mission right so I should know than the amount of dollars we get from the state for in support of research it's in the general range of something something under a hundred million dollars how do you compare that just for people who don't follow this hundred about a hundred million from the state and more or less from the feds what does that look like our total research sort of incoming research dollars for the last year 2017-2018 was seven hundred million dollars by far the lion's share of that is federal dollars something in the general range of four hundred million I believe three to four hundred million and the largest piece of that interestingly enough is National Institute of Health and Berkeley for a campus without a medical school is is the number one or number two consumer if you would or expenditure of NIH research dollars NSF is next then Department of Defense the state is a partner in all of this and I think needs to be a bigger partner and I'm you know sort of thinking in terms of the new administration there will be a new governor in a couple of weeks how that person we think we know who it'll be but you never know how the university can partner with that new administration when you think of the big challenges that the state faces one area fire fire is a you know our state in the face of climate change in the face of consistent drought in the face of our you know incredible natural resources has been challenged enormously and it's had huge economic impact in the state in terms of insurance expenditure communities that are destroyed you know and the sort of urban the issues of urban planning and the way in which the state has evolved to be kind of like urban development on the doorstep of the natural environment big issues Berkeley has the probably the most distinguished collection of fire experts you sort of land management or forest management expertise and we are a 60-minute drive from Sacramento when they have an issue on what the state can do to address these these sort of problems that our state will have going forward they should the first people they should think of you know sort of talking on the phone should be our researchers at Berkeley we should remember that the border of the campus extends to the boundary of the state we are California State University we are the flagship campus if you need expertise on these issues come to us to help us help the state deal with it so fire is a huge one I was referring a moment ago to the article in the New York Times about California as the fifth largest economy part of that article was about the income inequality in the you know sort of in the wake of these technological and economic revolutions that have taken place largely on our doorstep so the biotech infotech the entertainment in industry is huge and successful in Southern California the agricultural industry the sort of US grown fruits and nuts are like some huge percentage comes from the Central Valley of California and it's a high tech industry these days if you think about winemaking it's a high tech industry these days we are advanced in so many different economic areas but we leave so many people behind we are a point of immigration from many parts of the world so there are large immigrant communities as a faculty member in engineering over my 35 years at Berkeley I saw the the Vietnamese kids whose parents were janitors and then there was a generation of Russian kids who came through who were studying computer science and then a generation of Korean kids and then so each immigrant community would take advantage of public access to an engineering education through the University of California at Berkeley you could see the different immigrant communities that did manage to make it to higher education but many were left behind and so how can our social scientists our school of public policy our school of education our school of public health in terms of engaging with these communities to get them on a path to greater economic success should also be a mission and a partnership between the University and the state government because we want to raise all boats not just the select who are the computer science trained students or the biotech trained students so you know I think that there is a huge role to play and I think I will I hope that whoever the new governor is that there'll be a new sort of engagement and compact between the University of California and the state government to be you know sort of consultants assistance to work with the state government through support for research to have this kind of translational effect on the state of California so we've been talking about things in the news recently and one of the things that's been in the news is this seemingly unending stream of Nobel Prize winners who had some connection to Berkeley they went here they taught here but let's just take one for an example James Allison why did he leave so of course I never knew Jim but as I took on this role and looking at you know sort of the way our intellectual property office works I've I've come to know a lot about the work that he did at Berkeley and so it's very interesting you look at both James Allison and Francis Arnold who was a student and a postdoc at Berkeley and Paul Romer who won the economics prize who was an assistant professor at Berkeley you know the thing is they got trained in some sense and started their careers and in Jim's case a lot of his career was spent here did not hear anymore so you know are we the you know AAA league and not the major league anymore but when you go back and look at Jim Allison's story he has a memoir that he's written and he's spoken very eloquently of he could not have done the work he did to come up with a breakthrough that led to his immunotherapy for melanoma cancer without the intellectual environment that was Berkeley he completely credits the development to the environment at Berkeley the colleagues the students the laboratories the freedom to pursue those ideas the region the reason that he left was that he needed to demonstrate to the world against a lot of doubt that it would ever work he needed to be able to oversee the clinical trials and that's not something you could do at our University you need a medical school and so he went to Sloan Kettering initially to pursue that and to get the approval for the drug that actually is a miracle drug for some kinds of melanoma cancers that literally people with a death sentence can now be cured by using that particular therapeutic approach and it is kind of interesting in a challenge as we look forward of we have a lot of young and not so young faculty who are you know engaged in that translation from laboratory to the practical impact on people where they need a clinical environment to test out their ideas and so this is a challenge for us because we don't have a medical school we have you know partner in UCSF but they're across the bay it's not exactly the same thing we have you know kind of like you know some connection with them but not deep connections so you know part of the strategic thinking going forward given the impact that we will have on the real world is is how do we create that environment for our faculty to have access to clinical capabilities. Paul Alavizatos the provost you know sort of thinking about these things mentioned to me a conversation he had with a very influential philanthropist of you know the the model organism up until fairly recently was the mouse if you want to be at the forefront of biological research in the 21st century the model organism is us and so we need to get on this we need to figure out how to do it if we are to stay preeminent in biological science. So is that part of what's driving it seems as if there's an expansion of multi institution partnerships and a grow a relationship with UCSF it seems to be getting closer is that a correct assessment is there gonna be more of that how does that fit in these mult these partnerships that we have with other institutions. So Dan I think what you're referring to is is an activity that the campus is involved in which I find to be extremely exciting is the Chen Zuckerberg Biohub so Priscilla Chen is Mark Zuckerberg's spouse she is a medical doctor of course they're richer than God the two of them and so they have a philanthropic foundation that they've established but the mission statement of their philanthropy is cure all human disease in two generations wow what a mission statement and one of their first key investments is to establish at a very high level of funding a research institute that draws together the expertise of Berkeley UC San Francisco and Stanford we're actually working with Stanford on something and so you know in some sense each one of the institutions has its own you know sort of strengths and complimentary strengths in this so Berkeley is contributing a lot in the dimension of data science healthcare informatics high performance computing and things of that nature to the enterprise that involves the UCSF access to clinical and Stanford which again has you know some very complimentary as well as competitive expertise in this area but the thing that excites me most about it is the way in which we should be thinking institutionally about leveraging our region where else in the world are is you know the number one public research university the number one health sciences university arguably you know the number one I hate to say it you know sort of private university are all within 50 miles of one another I mean and you can imagine what the challenge is for being in this close geometry geography how we can collaborate together how we can use new technologies how we can craft programs that go beyond what any single institution could even afford but get you know that horsepower of brainpower working on this big in this case health oriented societal challenge going forward I mean it's a very fascinating model really the only other place in the world that can do something similar is the Boston Cambridge area but you know again their private versus private you know it's it's not the same set of differences that we have here in the Bay Area there's really nothing quite like what's going on around here so this is you know sort of a tremendous model to see how it develops and how it could develop in other areas of you know societal challenge that we face so we only have time for one more question we've talked big so far this question I think there are a lot of clearly a lot of people here with us today who are part of the research enterprise and this question I think is in that sense kind of directed comes from and the answer directed to that community what is your office doing to ensure SPO campus regional research administration and either CGA or GGA and Ackerman I'm not familiar with okay to help them all work together do you think it's an issue that that those communities where is it an issue that these communities all seem to have long separate reporting lines that's probably an answer that could you could take days on but maybe a summary and then we'll invite the person to follow who asked the question to follow up with an email I'm going to commit you to providing a longer answer okay so I can follow up with email but I think Mark Fisher vice chancellor for administration is in the is in the audience here we work in a partnership so while it's the case that sort of the end-to-end life of a researcher starts with submitting a proposal all the way towards have you spent all your money and not over spent it and this on our campus spans three different domains sponsored projects research administration contracts and grants and you know I think we're working very collaboratively and really from the perspective of making as seamless as possible and by the way there's plenty of work to do in that regard of what is the process that that starts at the beginning and ends at the end across all of these and you know it's been a you know great opportunity to work with mark on these issues to work with other you know sort of campus leaders on trying to get our overall administrative processes as you know kind of smooth and friction free as possible but bear with us it's a learning process and we're committed to an iterative approach to making it better over time so with that I just want to let everybody know that our next campus conversation is going to be on November 14th it's going to be with Vice Chancellor Julie Hooper who oversees all of our development efforts I think those of you who have been coming have heard philanthropy come up in almost every conversation we're on the cusp of a new campaign a lot hangs in the balance I think it'll be a fascinating conversation and with that I just want to thank Vice Chancellor Katz for what was a really really interesting wide-ranging discussion and thanks to you