Robert J. Birgeneau 

Chancellor and Professor of Physics
University of California, Berkeley

Office of the Chancellor
200 California Hall # 1500
University of California
Berkeley, CA 94720-1500

Phone (510) 642-7464
Fax (510) 643-5499
chancellor@berkeley.edu

If you look west from the Berkeley hills as the sun sets, framed by the Golden Gate, you will see what was once the far edge of the Western frontier. Today Berkeley is positioned at the leading edge of new frontiers -- the frontiers of knowledge and education. In our age the threshold of the unknown is intellectual rather than geographic. Nobelist Glenn T. Seaborg, the last scientist who served as Chancellor of U.C. Berkeley, observed, "The spirit of our pioneering past is the spirit we must seek for our present and future. . . . Learning and discovery are the New Worlds and the Old West, the lands of opportunity."

Berkeley's role as a model public university is so important that we must summon ourselves to its highest aspirations. Any failure to lead as a pre-eminent research and teaching university not only diminishes Berkeley but also diminishes the standards to which public education in this nation aspires.

Three themes must resonate in all of our minds and all of our lives -- in order to provide the foundation on which modern education can continue to build. These themes are Leadership, Connection and Inclusion, and they constitute my vision for Berkeley.

Robert J. Birgeneau
Chancellor

photos UC News Center

The Energy Biosciences Institute BP invests $500 million in bioscience energy research led by UC Berkeley and with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as partners.

UC Deal Should be Celebrated
Sacramento Bee
(April 29, 2007)

On Our Energy Future
San Francisco Chronicle
(April 15, 2007)