Tyler Lee-Wynant grew up hearing stories about his great-great aunt, Edna Campbell Guerrero. Born in 1907 in Mendocino County, she was a native speaker of Northern Pomo, one of seven languages spoken by the Pomo people who are Indigenous to Northern California.

“She was a no-nonsense person,” says Lee-Wynant, a UC Berkeley Ph.D. student in linguistics. “She was an amazing individual. She cared so deeply about passing on what she knew.”

For more than 50 years, Guerrero worked with Berkeley linguists to document her language and culture. These recordings are part of the campus’s California Language Archive. In them, she tells stories, describes cultural practices, says vocabulary and conjugates verbs. Whenever Lee-Wynant hears his aunt’s voice, strong and determined, he knows it’s his responsibility to carry on her work.

As a graduate student researcher for the archive, Lee-Wynant is cataloging and analyzing a new collection that includes hours of recordings of his aunt, among other materials. “It's such a trove of information about ... my family's history,” he said. “I always get the chills whenever I listen to it because you never know what story is gonna come up.”

In this episode of Berkeley Voices, Lee-Wynant shares how his aunt's recordings have opened a portal to his family’s history and led him to teach their language to new generations.

And in this UC Berkeley News companion piece, learn more about the linguist who created the archive's newly acquired collection, her lifetime of research with Indigenous communities and how her collection of tapes and notebooks found their way to the archive.

This is the first episode of a new Berkeley Voices season, featuring UC Berkeley scholars working on life-changing research and the people whose lives are changed by it. New episodes come out on the first Thursday of every month, from November through April.

Listen to the episode and read the transcript on UC Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu/podcasts/berkeley-talks).

Music by Blue Dot Sessions.

UC Berkeley photo by Brittany Hosea-Small.

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There’s so much incredible research and work that happens every day at UC Berkeley, on everything from artificial intelligence and quantum computing to linguistics and the study of social justice. It holds the record for the most Nobel Prize winners among any public university in the world, with two wins just this year.

This work can be highly theoretical and technical, taking decades to fully develop. Yet its impact extends far beyond academia, leading to world-changing results, from the invention of CRISPR gene editing that has saved lives to ethnic studies courses that foster a stronger sense of identity and critical consciousness.

Within these broad impacts are millions of stories of how Berkeley’s research has transformed society. In this season of Berkeley Voices, we hear two sides of a story — from Berkeley scholars working on life-changing research, and from the people who’ve been changed by it.

New episodes will come out on the first Thursday of each month, from November through April. Listen to Berkeley Voices on your favorite podcast app or on YouTube @BerkeleyNews. You can find all of our podcast episodes, with transcripts and photos, on UC Berkeley News at news.berkeley.edu/podcasts.

Listen to the episode and read the transcript on UC Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu/podcasts/berkeley-voices).

Music by Blue Dot Sessions.

UC Berkeley design by Neil Freese.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Last month, UC Berkeley researchers published a study about how they tricked the eye into seeing a new color. It was a highly saturated teal, a peacock green, the greenest of all greens.

The scientists produced this color, which they named “olo,” by shining a laser into the eye and stimulating one type of color-sensitive photoreceptor cells called cones.

Austin Roorda, a professor of optometry and vision science at Berkeley’s School of Optometry, developed the optical imaging platform they used in this project. It’s called Oz, after the story The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. In the 1939 film adaptation, the lead character, Dorothy, goes from her black-and-white farm in Kansas to the color world of Oz.

“Ozvision is really directly tied to the book and to the movie where the Emerald City is this unearthly green color,” said Roorda. “The intent and the aspiration was to elicit that same kind of response by going from a natural-colored world to a supernatural-colored world by a direct stimulation of these cones.”

It has enormous potential, he said, to transform how we understand and treat eye diseases, and to expand the way we see the world around us.

Listen to the episode and read the transcript on UC Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu/podcasts).

Music by Blue Dot Sessions.

Photo via Unsplash+

This is the last episode of our Berkeley Voices series on transformation. In eight episodes, we have looked at how transformation — of ideas, of research, of perspective — shows up in the work that happens every day at UC Berkeley. We'll be back with a new series in the fall.

See all episodes of the series.

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