On February 1, global energy firm BP announced that it had selected UC Berkeley, in partnership with Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, to lead an unprecedented $500 million research effort to develop new sources of energy and reduce the impact of energy consumption on the environment.

In this edition of Bear in Mind, UC Berkeley's ongoing series of webcasts about campus issues, Chancellor Robert Birgeneau delves into the details of the university's winning proposal and emerging plans for a new Energy Biosciences Institute.

Part one: The chancellor is joined by two people who played a significant role in crafting the proposal: Vice Chancellor for Research Beth Burnside and Dan Kammen, a professor in the campus's Energy Resources Group (ERG). They discuss their goals for the institute's research endeavors, its potential impact on graduate and undergraduate education, and the proposal's intellectual property provisions.

Part two: Steve Chu, director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, joins Birgeneau to review the scientific challenges the new institute will confront, the role and importance of public-private partnerships in addressing the energy crisis and climate change, and the roots of Chu's passionate commitment to developing renewable, carbon-neutral sources of energy.