A founding member of the Association of American Universities, Berkeley hosts many leading research institutes, including the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute and the Space Sciences Laboratory. It founded and maintains close relationships with three national laboratories at Berkeley, Livermore and Los Alamos, and has played a prominent role in many scientific advances, from the Manhattan Project and the discovery of 16 chemical elements to breakthroughs in computer science and genomics. Berkeley is also known for political activism and the Free Speech Movement of the 1960s.

Berkeley's athletic teams, which compete as the California Golden Bears primarily in the Pac-12 Conference, have won 107 national championships, and its students and alumni have won 207 Olympic medals (117 gold medals).

Berkeley alumni and faculty count among their ranks 110 Nobel laureates, 25 Turing Award winners, 14 Fields Medalists, 28 Wolf Prize winners, 103 MacArthur "Genius Grant" recipients, 30 Pulitzer Prize winners, and 19 Academy Award winners. The university has produced seven heads of state or government; six chief justices, including Chief Justice of the United States Earl Warren; 22 cabinet-level officials; 11 governors; and 25 living billionaires. It is also a leading producer of Fulbright Scholars, MacArthur Fellows, and Marshall Scholars. Berkeley alumni, widely recognized for their entrepreneurship, have founded numerous notable companies, including Apple, Tesla, Intel, eBay, SoftBank, AIG, and Morgan Stanley.