On May 2, 2017, UC Berkeley's Social Science Matrix was honored to welcome Helga Nowotny, Professor emerita of Science and Technology Studies, ETH Zurich, and a founding member of the European Research Council. Click through to view the video of this lecture, which includes an introducion by William Hanks, Director of Social Science Matrix.

On November 30, 2016, UC Berkeley's Social Science Matrix welcomed Arlie Russell Hochschild, Professor Emerita of Sociology, for a discussion of her new book, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right (The New Press, September 2016), a National Book Award Finalist.

On November 29th, Social Science Matrix will host a panel discussion entitled “Reflections on the 2016 Election and the Republican Party Under President Trump”. We spoke with one of the panelists—Dr. Lawrence Rosenthal, Founding Director, Chair, and Lead Researcher of the Center for Right Wing Studies—to hear his thoughts on the election.

Video is now available of the October 28 presentation by Viet Thanh Nguyen, an alumnus of the UC Berkeley Ethnic Studies program whose novel, The Sympathizer, is a New York Times bestseller and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

On September 16, 2016, Social Science Matrix hosted Cathy O'Neil, author of Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy. In her book (and presentation), O'Neil—a Harvard-trained mathematician and former hedge fund data analyst—discusses how many of the decisions that affect our lives—where we go to school, whether we get a car loan, how much we pay for health insurance—are being made not by humans, but by mathematical models. The problem, she explains, is that they are often WMDs—widespread, mysterious, and destructive—making them "Weapons of Math Destruction."

Social Science Matrix is honored to welcome our inaugural group of Matrix Dissertation Fellows, five Ph.D. students whose research has strong potential to generate effective solutions to critical global challenges.

Climate change. Immigration. Creating resilient rural communities. These are among the issues that Social Science Matrix Research Teams will take on during the coming academic year.d

Social science researchers are increasingly enlisting computer-driven textual analysis, or text mining, to support their research. This article provides an overview of the key steps required for this kind of analysis.