See my research page for my academic publications. Everything that follows on this page is just for fun.

Personal Essays

We are all rock climbers

Our energy vocabulary

Emissions from cement

Berkeley Science Review

The BSR is an outstanding magazine and website devoted to educating the public about the amazing science happening at Berkeley and beyond. It is written, edited and produced entirely by UC Berkeley students and postdocs. I was the founding editor of the BSR blog in 2010. A collection of my writing for the BSR is linked below for your enjoyment.

I switched research groups – and lived to tell the tale

Open access explained

Omar Yaghi’s scientific empire, and the growing trend of satellite labs

Data, data, everywhere

Teach graduate students to manage and lead

Rats learn to walk again after severe spinal cord injury

Do creative children become creative scientists?

Trusting your fellow scientist

Cleaning the air by cleaning the ocean

We are the 99% of scientists

The power of olfactory associations, or why I can never drink peppermint tea again

The old boys club

Too many authors

How I learned to stop worrying and love WikiLeaks

News from the Kepler observatory: our galaxy is really, really big

You can’t spell “prescience” without “science”

Surprises found in the “Science Hall of Fame”

Survival of the kindest

Letters to a pre-scientist, part 1

Mascheroni (Ph.D., ’68) indicted in conspiracy case

Gaming for good: human thought beats computer algorithms at solving protein structures

Funding science in a slow economy

Success from the Neanderthal Genome Project

Faculty profile: Steven Louie [PDF]