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Haas News

UC Berkeley Haas Magazine

Issue Spring 2026

Table of Contents

Featured Stories

Magazine cover showing person in a blazer and button up shirt with a stethoscope around their neck.

All Heart

Jason Bellet, BS 14, co-founded Eko Health to help reinvent the 200-year-old stethoscope as an AI-powered device—now used by more than 700,000 clinicians across five continents. UC Berkeley Haas honors him with its 2026 Leading Through Innovation Award for helping revolutionize cardiopulmonary care.

Black and white headshot of a person in a button up shirt.

Golden Bear

Real estate pioneer Ned Spieker, BS 66, who built one of the nation’s largest REITs and has given more than $80 million to UC Berkeley, receives UC Berkeley Haas’ 2026 Lifetime Achievement Award—and reflects on what fuels his philanthropy.

Insight

Illustration of a book with a blueprint of hospital beds overlayed by red arrows mimicking a playbook. Circles denote NP for nurse practitioner and MD for doctors.

Code Blue

A UC Berkeley Haas study of 1.1 million emergency-room visits finds that how hospitals deploy nurse practitioners and physicians matters as much as which they hire—with no difference in patient mortality but meaningful gaps in cost and follow-up care.

A professional golfer stares at a club he's just thrown into the air in front of a crowd of observers.

Teed Off

A UC Berkeley Haas study of more than 25,000 PGA Tour rounds finds that professionals perform measurably worse beside colleagues with opposing political views—a gap that nearly triples when national polarization runs high.

Person in a blue blazer and white shirt speaks in front of a screen that reads: "2026 Berkeley Culture Connect Conference."

Adaptive Leadership

At UC Berkeley Haas’ eighth annual Culture Connect Conference, more than 200 top business leaders and academics—including OpenAI chief economist Ronnie Chatterji and UC Berkeley Chancellor Rich Lyons—tackled how to guide teams through AI, economic uncertainty, and the changing nature of work while preserving culture and humanity.

A grid of portraits of more than 50 people of different ages and ethnicities.

Distorted Reality

A UC Berkeley Haas study in Nature, analyzing 1.4 million images and videos plus nine large language models, finds women are consistently portrayed as younger than men across online platforms—a distortion strongest in high-status jobs and amplified by AI in ways that could widen real labor-market gaps.

Smiling person covered in paint is wearing wearing a tie-dye shirt outdoors in front of a group of people.

Conjuring Magic

Iris Wedeking, MBA 08, founded Kesem—a free nationwide camp for children whose parents face cancer—which has since supported more than 90,000 young people. Decades later, it became a lifeline for the daughters of Emily Miller and Patrick DeNeale, both MBA 01, in an unexpected UC Berkeley Haas connection.

Five people hold a large check for $40,000 and a bicycle on stage.

Green Empowerment

A transformative $1.5 million gift from the Strauch brothers has renamed UC Berkeley Haas’ Cleantech to Market program, which pairs graduate student teams with cleantech startups. Since 2008, 660+ students have worked on 120+ projects, and participating startups have raised nearly $1.3 billion.

Illustration with yellow and green speech bubble characters exchanging a high five while another character resembling a wadded up piece of paper watches with an angry expression.

Talk Is Deep

A UC Berkeley Haas study forthcoming in Nature Communications finds that disagreement is less contentious and leads to better understanding when discussed by voice or video rather than in writing—even though most people instinctively prefer to hash out conflict over text.

Hands type on a laptop with a digital bar graph overlaid on the image.

Traffic Signals

A UC Berkeley Haas and Stanford GSB study of more than 1,000 major companies finds that website traffic can forecast revenue and stock prices months before earnings—more accurately than traditional metrics alone. Wall Street, the researchers say, is leaving money on the table.

Alumni Profiles

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Shreya Shekhar, BS 23, Partner, Greylock

Shreya Shekhar, BS 23, a graduate of UC Berkeley Haas’ M.E.T. dual-degree program, is now a partner at the venture firm Greylock—a decision-making role few women in Silicon Valley hold—investing in early-stage AI infrastructure startups.

Portrait of a person with gray hair in a black blazer and blue tie against a black background.

Frank McGorman, MBA 82, Retired Forensic Accountant, FBI

Frank McGorman, MBA 82, used his UC Berkeley Haas degree for two decades of Silicon Valley finance roles before making a surprising mid-career pivot: running the forensic accounting department at the FBI’s San Francisco field office, where his team worked cases including the Theranos investigation.

Person with dark chin-length hair wearing a black button-up shirt, earrings, and a nose ring sits in front of an ironwork railing.

Nancy Hoque, MBA 19, Sales Finance Director, Adobe

Nancy Hoque, MBA 19, a former engineer and entrepreneur, now directs sales finance and revenue strategy for Adobe’s multibillion-dollar sales organization—and is exploring how AI can transform the finance function, drawing on early advice from UC Berkeley Haas about leading through others.

Worldwide Events

Alumni Notes

Road to Success

Bags and plastic containers of salad mix made by Taylor Farms.

Taylor Farms

Bruce Taylor, BS/BA 78, a third-generation Salinas lettuce grower, founded Taylor Farms in 1995 and built it into a $7 billion enterprise—North America’s leading producer of salads and healthy fresh foods, with 25,000+ employees and 165 million servings of produce a week.

In Memoriam

More Reading

Read an accessible version of the Spring 2026 magazine.