Teaching chemistry citizenship

Graduate school is typically a time for extreme focus on research, but in the chemistry program at the University of California, Berkeley, first-year graduate students are required to take a step back to consider the impact of their work on the world. They do this as part of Scientific Responsibility and Citizenship—a discussion-based class about chemistry’s effects on people and the planet. The seminar course was developed primarily by Kay Xia, who completed her PhD research at UC Berkeley in 2023 and is now a postdoctoral scholar at the California Institute of Technology. “I always found it really curious that there’s so little discussion of the social impacts of scientific research, even though our research does end up having these really big impacts,” she says. So when Xia was the first person recognized with UC Berkeley’s College of Chemistry Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Scholar Program in early 2022—her third year