The University of California, Berkeley School of Information (sometimes abbreviated as Berkeley I School) is a graduate school at the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California), is a Public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Berkeley, California, United States. Founded in 1868 and named after t ...

, a public university in

Berkeley, California Berkeley ( ) is a city on the eastern shore of San Francisco Bay in northern Alameda County, California, United States. It is named after the 18th-century Anglo-Irish bishop and philosopher George Berkeley. It borders the cities of Oakland, Cali ...

. The school was established in 1994 as the School of Information Management and Systems (SIMS) and was renamed to its current name in 2006. The school offers four degree programs: Master of

Information Management Information management (IM) is the appropriate and optimized capture, storage, retrieval, and use of information. It may be personal information management or organizational. Information management for organizations concerns a cycle of organiz ...

and

Systems A system is a group of interacting or interrelated elements that act according to a set of rules to form a unified whole. A system, surrounded and influenced by its environment, is described by its boundaries, structure and purpose and is exp ...

, Master of

Information Information is an Abstraction, abstract concept that refers to something which has the power Communication, to inform. At the most fundamental level, it pertains to the Interpretation (philosophy), interpretation (perhaps Interpretation (log ...

and

Data Science Data science is an interdisciplinary academic field that uses statistics, scientific computing, scientific methods, processing, scientific visualization, algorithms and systems to extract or extrapolate knowledge from potentially noisy, stru ...

, Master of

and

Cybersecurity Computer security (also cybersecurity, digital security, or information technology (IT) security) is a subdiscipline within the field of information security. It consists of the protection of computer software, systems and networks from thr ...

, and Doctor of Philosophy in information science.

Curriculum

MIMS program

The Master of Information Management & Systems (MIMS) program is a 48 unit, two-year program designed to train students for careers as information professionals. Students who complete the program are awarded the Masters of Information Management and Systems (MIMS) degree. During the first year MIMS students take required courses in Information Organization and Retrieval, Distributed Computing Applications and Infrastructure, Social and Organizational Issues of Information, and Information Law and Policy. During the second year students may choose from elective courses both at the I School and in other departments. The final prerequisite for the MIMS degree is the completing of a group or individual thesis project.

MIDS program

The Master of Information and Data Science (MIDS) program is a Masters program that trains

data science Data science is an interdisciplinary academic field that uses statistics, scientific computing, scientific methods, processing, scientific visualization, algorithms and systems to extract or extrapolate knowledge from potentially noisy, stru ...

professionals and managers. The MIDS program is distinguished by its disciplinary breadth with course requirements including research design, ethics and privacy, data visualization, along with data engineering, machine learning, and statistical analyses. The program is made up of 27 units with three program paths: a standard path that students complete in approximately 20 months where students are enrolled in 2 classes on average, per term; an accelerated path where students may take three courses per term and graduate in as few as 12 months; and a decelerated path where students may take one course per term and complete the degree program in no more than 32 months.

MICS program

The Master of Information and Cybersecurity (MICS) degree program advances a holistic approach to cybersecurity, engaging students in technical as well as human aspects of the discipline. Courses include cryptography, software security, operating system security, network security, privacy engineering, cyber risk management, applied machine learning for cybersecurity, usable privacy and security, and the economic, legal, behavioral, and ethical impacts of cybersecurity. The Master's in Cybersecurity is delivered online through weekly small class size video conferencing with faculty, and pre-recorded video lectures.

PhD program

The doctoral program is a research-oriented program in which the student chooses specific fields of specialization, prepares sufficiently in the literature and the research of those fields to pass written and oral examinations, and completes original research culminating in the written dissertation. The degree of Doctor of Philosophy is conferred in recognition of a candidate's grasp of a broad field of learning and distinguished accomplishment in that field through contribution of an original piece of research revealing high critical ability and powers of imagination and synthesis.

Notable faculty

This list is limited to current and past members of the faculty notable enough to have an individual page in Wikipedia. *

Michael Buckland Michael Keeble Buckland (born 1941) is an emeritus professor at the UC Berkeley School of Information and co-director of the Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative. Career Buckland was born and grew up in England. He entered library work as a ...

Karen Chapple Karen Chapple is an American city planning academic and currently holds the Carmel P. Friesen Chair in Urban Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Education Chapple received an undergraduate degree in Urban Studies at Columbia Univ ...

(affiliated faculty) *

Hany Farid Hany Farid (born February 10, 1966) is an American university professor who specializes in the analysis of digital images and the detection of digitally manipulated images such as deepfakes. Farid served as Dean and Head of School for the Univer ...

Morten Hansen Morten T. Hansen is a Norwegian-American professor, management theorist, motivational speaker and author. Biography Hansen obtained his Bachelor's degree, BA in political science from the University of Oslo in Norway. He received his Master of ...

Marti Hearst Marti Alice Hearst is a professor in the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley. She did early work in corpus-based computational linguistics, including some of the first work in automating sentiment analysis, and word s ...

Chris Hoofnagle Chris Jay Hoofnagle is an American professor at the University of California, Berkeley who teaches information privacy law, computer crime law, regulation of online privacy, internet law, and seminars on new technology. Hoofnagle has contributed ...

(adjunct) *

Peter Lyman George Peter Lyman (September 13, 1940 – July 2, 2007) was an American professor of information science who taught at the University of California, Berkeley School of Information, and was well known in U.S. academia for his research on online ...

Clifford Lynch Clifford Alan Lynch (December 31, 1954 – April 10, 2025) was an American computer scientist and director of the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) from 1997 to his death. He was also an adjunct professor at the UC Berkeley School of Inf ...

(adjunct) *

Jeffrey MacKie-Mason Jeff MacKie-Mason is an American economist specializing in information, incentive-centered design and public policy. He is the university librarian and chief digital scholarship officer of the University of California, Berkeley, where he is also ...

Geoffrey Nunberg Geoffrey Nunberg (June 1, 1945– August 11, 2020) was an American lexical semantician and author. In 2001, he received the Linguistics, Language, and the Public Interest Award from the Linguistic Society of America for his contributions to Nati ...

(adjunct) *

AnnaLee Saxenian AnnaLee Saxenian is a professor and the former Dean of the UC Berkeley School of Information, known widely for her work on technology clusters and social networks in Silicon Valley. She received her BA from Williams College in 1976 and her PhD fr ...

Hal Varian Hal Ronald Varian (born March 18, 1947, in Wooster, Ohio) is chief economist at Google and holds the title of emeritus professor at the University of California, Berkeley where he was founding dean of the School of Information. Varian is an econ ...

Steven Weber Steven Robert Weber (born March 4, 1961) is an American actor and comedian. He is best known for his role as Brian Hackett on the television series '' Wings'', and as Dr. Dean Archer on NBC’s Chicago Med. He also voiced Charlie B. Barkin in '' ...

Notable alumni

Ashkan Soltani Ashkan Soltani is the executive director of the California Privacy Protection Agency. He has previously been the Chief Technologist of the Federal Trade Commission and an independent privacy and security researcher based in Washington, DC. Ed ...

danah boyd Danah boyd (stylized in all lowercase, born November 24, 1977 as Danah Michele Mattas) She noted her mother added lowercase 'h' in birth name "danah" for typographical balance, reflecting the lowercase first letter 'd' and later changed her l ...

Heather Ford Heather Ford is a South African people, South African researcher, blogger, journalist, social entrepreneur and Open-source model, open source activist who has worked in the field of Internet policy, law and management in South Africa, the Unite ...

Holly Liu Holly Liu is an American businesswoman and venture capitalist. She is the co-founder of the mobile gaming company Kabam. She is currently Non-Executive Director and Strategic Adviser to Animoca's board of directors. Education She studied at the ...

Jack Liangjie Xu Jack Liangjie Xu (), more commonly known as Jack Xu in English, is a Chinese software engineer, technology executive, and venture capitalist. He is the former Co-President and Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of SINA Corporation, the operator of ...

South Hall

The School of Information is located in the historic South Hall. Built in 1873, it is the oldest building in the

University of California The University of California (UC) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university, research university system in the U.S. state of California. Headquartered in Oakland, California, Oakland, the system is co ...

system. South Hall is located in the heart of campus, near the Doe Library and the Campanile (also known as

Sather Tower Sather Tower is a bell tower with clocks on its four faces on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley. It is more commonly known as The Campanile ( , also ) for its resemblance to the Campanile di San Marco in Venice. It is a recog ...

). The small bear was added by Michael H. Casey, who did the ornamental castings for the restored façade in 1997.

References

External links

* {{Coord, 37, 52, 16.77, N, 122, 15, 30.71, W, region:US, display=title

Information schools Educational institutions established in 1994 Education in Berkeley, California 1994 establishments in California