Berkeley Faculty Research Lectures

Henry Brady is the Class of 1941 Monroe Deutsch Professor of Political Science and Public Policy at UC Berkeley. He served as dean of the Goldman School of Public Policy from 2009–2021 and as director of the University of California’s Survey Research Center from 1998–2009. He is past president of the American Political Science Association. Brady studies democracy and democratic performance using surveys and statistical methods. He is the coauthor, most recently, of Unequal and Unrepresented: Political Inequality and the New Gilded Age (2018), and The Unheavenly Chorus: Unequal Political Voice and the Broken Promise of American Democracy (2012). Brady’s previous works as coauthor include: Counting All the Votes: The Performance of Voting Technology in the United States (2001), Expensive Children in Poor Families: The Intersection of Childhood Disability and Welfare (2000), Voice and Equality: Civic Voluntarism in American Politics (1995), and Letting the People Decide: Dynamics of a Canadian Election (1992). He is an elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Carlos Bustamante is a professor of Molecular and Cell Biology, Physics, and Chemistry, and the Raymond and Beverly Sackler Chair of Biophysics at UC Berkeley. He is also a Biophysics Senior Faculty Scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Professor Bustamante is interested in understanding the dynamics of molecular motors and the mechanisms by which they convert chemical energy into mechanical work, through the development of force and displacement. In particular, his laboratory is investigating the physical basis of transcription regulation of RNA polymerase II by the nucleosomal barrier and the mechanism of translocation by the ribosome. His laboratory is also interested in establishing how proteins fold, which continues to be one of the most challenging questions in biophysics. To this end, Bustamante and his team develop and apply novel methods of single-molecule force and fluorescence spectroscopy, such as optical tweezers, magnetic tweezers, and fluorescence microscopy. Bustamante is a member of both the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and he is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator.