The University of California, Berkeley (also referred to as UC Berkeley, Cal Berkeley, Berkeley, or simply Cal), is a teaching and research university established in 1868 and located in Berkeley, California, USA. Berkeley is the most consistently well ranked university in the world overall as shown by a meta-analysis of subject/departmental data over the last sixteen years from the United States National Research Council, the US News & World Report, and Times Higher Education. Berkeley has the highest number of distinguished graduate programs ranked in the top 10 in their fields by the United States National Research Council. Among other honors, University faculty, alumni, and researchers have won 66 Nobel Prizes, 9 Wolf Prizes, 7 Fields Medals, 15 Turing Awards, 45MacArthur Fellowships, 20 Academy Awards, and 11 Pulitzer Prizes. To date, UC Berkeley and its researchers are associated with 6 chemical elements of the periodic table (Californium, Seaborgium, Berkelium, Einsteinium, Fermium, Lawrencium) and Berkeley Lab has discovered 16 chemical elements in total - more than any other university in the world.

UC Berkeley is the flagship institution of the University of California. The university occupies 6,651 acres (2,692 ha) with the central campus resting on approximately 200 acres (80.9 ha) in the San Francisco Bay Area. Berkeley offers approximately 300 undergraduate and graduate degree programs in a wide range of disciplines. The oldest of the ten major campuses affiliated with the University of California (UC), Berkeley was the result of an 1868 merger of the private College of California and the public Agricultural, Mining, and Mechanical Arts College in Oakland. Since its founding, Berkeley has been charged with providing both "classical" and "practical" education for the state's people.

Berkeley co-manages three United States Department of Energy National Laboratories, including the Los Alamos National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory for the U.S. Department of Energy. Berkeley was a founding member of the Association of American Universities. Berkeley physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer was the scientific director of the Manhattan Project that developed the first atomic bomb in the world, which he personally headquartered at Los Alamos, New Mexico, during World War II.

Berkeley student-athletes have won over 100 Olympic medals. Known as the California Golden Bears (often abbreviated as "Cal Bears" or just "Cal"), the athletic teams are members of both the Pacific-12 Conference and the Mountain Pacific Sports Federation in the NCAA. Cal athletes have won national titles in many sports, including football, men's and women's swimming, men's basketball, baseball, men's gymnastics, softball, water polo, rugby, and crew. The official colors of the university and its athletic teams are Yale Blue and California Gold.