The Discovery Initiative is proud to present the first of hopefully several “Discovery Research Hubs”--sites for an expanded relationship between graduate student researchers, undergraduate mentees, and Berkeley’s distinguished faculty!
By empowering graduate students to lead and manage their own research clusters, these hubs support Berkeley’s innovative research agendas across fields by further entwining the individual learning experiences of undergraduate students with the larger academic pursuits of the university’s community.
The Program
The Kavli Discovery Hub is a program, in partnership with the Kavli Foundation and Berkeley Discovery, designed to provide research leadership experience to graduate students who are affiliated with the Kavli Energy NanoScience Institute (ENSI) faculty. This program enables graduate students to develop crucial leadership skills; conceptualize, propose, and lead research projects; and to gain real-world experience creating budgets, managing projects, and mentoring undergraduates. Additionally, to simulate real-world conditions, participants are provided with funding for necessary resources and have the autonomy to recruit undergraduate students as research assistants.
For Spring 2025, The Kavli Discovery Hub gathers 9 graduate student fellows, each of whom will convene groups of 2-4 undergraduates around research questions or experiments that either relate to their dissertation work or explore new research ideas.
What is Kavli ENSI?
The Kavli Energy NanoScience Institute (ENSI) at UC Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory is devoted to creating powerful new approaches to energy conversion, utilization and efficiency taking advantage of new insights in nanoscience. Since the physical world seems to deal with energy differently at the nanoscale, understanding these phenomena will open doors to new approaches to solving our energy challenges. Training the next generation of nanoscience experts has been an important goal of the Institute since its inception. Currently there are over 150 UC Berkeley graduate students affiliated with the faculty who actively participate in Kavli ENSI’s research programs.
Leadership Development
The Kavli Discovery Hub graduate mentors, selected from the students of the Kavli ENSI-affiliated faculty, meet regularly throughout the semester to network, build community, and discuss how to lead, mentor, and inspire their students. These meetings serve the dual purpose of fostering collaborations among the graduate students while helping to support them as they lead their independent research clusters. These meetings include guest speakers, structured workshop time, networking, and culminate in a symposium.
Research Clusters
Graduate fellows are asked to recruit 2 or more undergraduate research assistants who will join them in some aspect of their research. Fellows design a research agenda for the students and work with them throughout the semester to hone methods and ideas related to the field of their specific project. To close the semester, there is an opportunity for undergraduates and their graduate mentors to present the semester’s work.
Research Funding
For Spring 2025, we offered semester-long grants which can be extended into the summer or even into the next academic year, pending a subsequent funding review. Applicants were asked to consider this possibility for an extension when conceiving of their projects. In the coming years this funding will be for an entire year of mentorship, as well as a semester of leadership training. To lead their research cluster, graduate students receive a stipend of $2,000 - $4,000 for the semester (depending on the number of students they host) and may also apply for up to $1,800 of funding for supplies each semester.
In partnership with
