The Energy and Resources Group (ERG) is a collaborative community of graduate students, core faculty, 150 affiliated faculty and researchers across the campus, and over 600 alumni across the globe. We award MA, MS, PhD, and Minor degrees to students working across disciplines and departments to create potentially transformative knowledge for the planet and its people. ERG is a world-renowned program with a 50-year history of outstanding research, education and outreach to government, industry, and civil society at the state, national and international levels.
With its five-decade history of transformative teaching and research, ERG has reframed ecological and social problems in terms that borrow from, and yet can be understood across, many traditionally separate disciplinary cultures. The ERG model combines a rigorous core curriculum, a shared learning environment, and the freedom to access the entire Berkeley faculty.
The core curriculum provides students with relevant analytical tools from ecology, economics, engineering and the social sciences. ERG research is strongly evidence-based and hypothesis-driven; its interdisciplinary culture equally encourages student- and faculty-led research. The value of such a culture is hard to quantify: it has evolved through the commitment to systemic thinking, and the vision of a just and sustainable planet, over generations of ERGies.