Ken Goldberg, Professor of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research, will be the featured writer in the Fall 2026 “Berkeley Writers at Work” series.
Join the event on Tuesday, October 27, from 12:00 to 1:30 pm in the Morrison Library, 101 Main Library, on the UC Berkeley campus.
Ken Goldberg is William S. Floyd Distinguished Professor of Engineering at UC Berkeley, President of the international Robot Learning Foundation, member of the US National Academy of Engineering, IEEE Fellow, co-founder and Editor-in-Chief emeritus of the IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering (T-ASE), Co-Founder of Jacobi Robotics, and Co-Founder/Chief Scientist of Ambi Robotics. Professor Goldberg leads research in robotics and automation: grasping, manipulation, and learning for applications in warehouses, homes, agriculture, and robot-assisted surgery. He has published 10 US patents, more than 450 refereed papers, and has presented more than 600 invited lectures to academic and corporate audiences.
He is the author of the books The Robot in the Garden: Telerobotics and Telepistemology in the Age of the Internet (MIT Press, 2000), and Beyond Webcams: An Introduction to Online Robotics (MIT Press, 2001), which both explore what is knowable at a distance.
In addition to his vast body of scholarly writing, he has been published in numerous mainstream media outlets, among them The Boston Globe and The Wall Street Journal, as well being featured in the popular podcast Armchair Expert. His TED Talk “Why Don’t We Have Better Robots” has been viewed and downloaded widely. With his wife, artist Tiffany Schlain, he co-wrote the short film “The Tribe,” which was selected for the 2006 Sundance and Tribeca Film Festivals.
The Berkeley Writers at Work series provides a venue for campus writers to discuss their writing process—from getting ideas, to drafting, to revising. Professor Goldberg will read from his work, be interviewed about his writing process, and answer questions from the audience.
The event is free and open to the public.
About Berkeley Writers at Work
The Berkeley Writers at Work series was begun in 1997 as a forum for campus writers of note to discuss their writing process.
Research and teaching are the two primary goals of a large research university like Berkeley. Research is highlighted in many ways on this campus; to a lesser degree, so is teaching. However, writing itself—the primary way that faculty convey the results of their research—is rarely discussed.
The most common kind of writing forum involves writers of fiction and poetry reading selections and talking about the content of their work. Berkeley Writers at Work differs from these in that we focus (although not exclusively) on writers of nonfiction, and then on the process, rather than the content, to the extent that these can be separated.
Most of the campus community (faculty, staff, and students) spend most of their time writing pieces other than poetry and fiction, and we believe that it is invaluable to make public the discussion of the kind of writing that most people at Berkeley are involved in, one way or another. How does a Pulitzer Prize winner in nonfiction get an idea? How does she start writing about it? How does he organize his work? Does she write in solitude? How does he revise? Edit? Who else reads the work in progress? These are all issues that many writers face, whether they are doing reports for the campus or books for publication.
Beyond developing a sense of community among the people who write on campus, we see this series as also simply highlighting writing on this campus. We have a number of truly gifted, award-winning writers whose work is more hailed elsewhere than here. This series provides a wonderful forum for writers on this campus.
Berkeley Writers at Work is aimed at the general campus community: faculty, staff, and students. College Writing instructors frequently ask their students to attend and assign them reading and writing assignments based on the interviews. Video and audio tapes and transcripts of the interviews are available, as well as selected works by the featured writers.
For more information, contact John Levine by email at jblevine@berkeley.edu