Erika Perez

The Berkeley Frontier Fund (BFF) has made a $75,000 gift to accelerate leading-edge research at UC Berkeley’s Marvell Nanofabrication Laboratory at CITRIS (NanoLab), supporting early-career faculty advancing micro- and nanotechnology.

What took her mentor months to learn took Inna Dolinskiy only a couple hours in the lab. Studying genes implicated in Parkinson’s, she’s now passionate about her work. She has a clear talent for it – but she’s only just begun. Last fall was her first time working at the bench, in Helen Bateup’s lab at UC Berkeley.

Congratulations to our MCB PhD, MBT, and BA Class of 2025 graduates! The MCB Department is proud of our newest graduates and all that they have accomplished! Please help us celebrate the 2025 MCB Commencement Honors awardees listed below.

At UC Berkeley, Dylan Chiu embraced every opportunity to learn and grow his skillset. During his undergraduate years, he gained hands-on exposure to entrepreneurship through participating in the European Innovation Academy in Portugal and taking several SCET courses. He soon discovered that, although he enjoyed being on the founding side of the startup, he realized that he was more passionate about investing in and guiding entrepreneurs in their journey. While at SCET, Chiu became involved with the Venture Lab, SCET’s early-stage campus incubator. There, he supported four companies—three of which were accepted into Y Combinator. The opportunity to hand-select the most promising companies in the Berkeley ecosystem was fulfilling, which prompted his interest in working with startups in different capacities.

For more than four decades, the annual J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco has been the world’s biggest stage for biotech investment and innovation. It has given birth to some of the most transformative breakthroughs in healthcare.

The Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society and the Banatao Institute (CITRIS) is excited to welcome Rey Banatao, Dylan Chiu, former California Gov. Gray Davis, William Dean Donovan, Mindy Morton, George Rehm and Matt Sonsini to its advisory board.

Richard Chan was hosting a Hong Kong dinner with other UC Berkeley alums when he heard a startling fact: the state of California covers just 14 percent of the public university’s budget. Chan, a serial entrepreneur and investor, decided to investigate how his skills could be of service to his alma mater.

The new Berkeley Frontier Fund reinvents the venture capital model by building in donations to University of California, Berkeley.

Berkeley Frontier Fund (BFF) – which is the Berkeley venture capital fund focused on investing in the most successful and highest growth UC Berkeley-founded companies – recently announced its new fund, leading in turn to the largest possible donation back to University programs.