America 250: Berkeley and the Future of the American Experiment
Chancellor Richard K. Lyons and a panel of faculty experts explore how ideas of citizenship, democracy, participation, and higher education have shaped the American experience — and how they will continue to evolve in the decades ahead.
Speakers:
Rich Lyons is the 12th chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley, beginning his tenure as the first undergraduate alum to serve as Chancellor in July 2024. Prior to serving as chancellor, he was the associate vice chancellor for innovation and entrepreneurship from 2020-2024, leading the development and expansion of innovation and entrepreneurship campuswide. Lyons also served as the dean of UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business from 2008 to 2018.
Lisa García Bedolla uses the tools of social science to reveal the causes of educational and political inequalities in the United States, considering differences across the lines of ethnorace, gender, class, geography, et cetera. She believes an intersectional and interdisciplinary approach is critical to recognizing the complexity of the contemporary United States. She has used a variety of social science methods – participant observation, in-depth interviewing, survey research, field experiments, and geographic information systems (GIS) – to shed light on this question. While doing all of this, she is the proud mom of three young adults.
Professor García Bedolla earned her Ph.D. in political science from Yale University and her B.A. in Latin American Studies and Comparative Literature from UC Berkeley. From Lisa’s approach to research, we see she is very much at home with us today in seeking to better serve our students.
Jake Grumbach studies the political economy of the United States, with interests in democratic institutions, labor, federalism, racial and economic inequality, and statistical methods. His book, Laboratories Against Democracy, investigates the causes and consequences of the nationalization of state politics.
He was previously associate professor of political science at the University of Washington and a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for the Study of Democratic Politics at Princeton.
Before graduate school, Grumbach earned a B.A. from Columbia University and worked as a public health researcher. Outside of academia, he's a nerd for 70s funk/soul and 90s hip hop, as well as a Warriors fan.