Our Story - Fung Fellowship

The Fung Fellowship is a model of discovery education at UC Berkeley—an immersive undergraduate learning experience that inspires students to become innovators for social good.

Partnering with the School of Public Health and the Rausser College of Natural Resources, the Fung Fellowship offers two tracks for students to choose from based on their passion, interest, and desired area for impact.

Health + Innovation

Conservation + Innovation

Fellows work to address real-world challenges, engage with communities to understand needs, and develop viable solutions alongside industry and community partners. The fellowship’s learner-centered approach allows students to co-design their experience from crafting course content to sourcing future projects and collaborators.

Fellow diversity spans across academic disciplines, life experiences, and career aspirations, providing an enriched learning environment, supporting students underserved in innovation programs. Fellows learn from one another as they participate in campus service projects, professional development, and peer-to-peer mentorship. Fellows are offered space to explore new ideas while gaining valuable skills in leadership, teaming, emerging tech, storytelling, and inclusive design.

Students leave the fellowship prepared to make an impact. Alumni continue their engagement in the program as mentors as they pursue higher education, enter the workforce, or launch their own ventures.

Our Founding Principles:

Diversity:
We seek diversity in our fellows to spark new insights and innovations.
Student Engagement:
Each year our fellows co-design and adapt their experience to meet their cohort’s current needs and interests.
Collaboration:
Fellows learn, grow, and work as members of interdisciplinary teams alongside organizations and experts in the field.
Real World Experience:
Fellows develop tech innovations to address real world health and conservation challenges.

Student Driven LearningGoing beyond the typical flipped classroom model, the fellowship simulates real life and allows fellows to co-design their experience.

Teamwork in ActionFellows work on diverse teams in an environment that encourages collaboration, exploration, and risk-taking.

Our History

Philanthropist, entrepreneur, and ‘resident troublemaker’ Coleman Fung has never been one to be confined by the status quo. After pushing the boundaries of innovation and engineering with the successful establishment of the Fung Institute for Engineering Leadership in 2010, Coleman was once again ready to rework the UC Berkeley student experience.

With Coleman’s vision for revolutionizing undergraduate education, the Fung Fellowship launched in fall of 2016, in collaboration with the School of Public Health and College of Engineering. Coleman sought to create an undergraduate program that embodies the real world and engages students to drive their learning opportunities.

The fellowship offers a sustained innovation + experience with students working in interdisciplinary teams alongside community and industry partners. Throughout the fellowship, fellows develop as leaders and innovators as they design breakthrough technology solutions to society’s most pressing health and conservation challenges.

In 2020, the fellowship launched a new track in conservation, partnering with the Rausser College of Natural Resources and the Blue Oak Ranch Reserve, part of UC Berkeley’s Natural Reserve System.

Coleman Fung and PearlInspired the Fung Fellowship which launched in Fall 2016.

Land Acknowledgement

The Fung Fellowship recognizes that UC Berkeley sits on the territory of xučyun (Huichin), the ancestral and unceded land of the Chochenyo speaking Ohlone people, the successors of the sovereign Verona Band of Alameda County. We recognize that every member of the Berkeley community has, and continues to benefit from, the use and occupation of this land, since the institution’s founding in 1868. Read more about the Ohlone land.