CARA – California Research Alliance

Teaming together with major universities on the West Coast, we have set up a multidisciplinary research institute with an emphasis on new materials and their applications, formulations, biosciences, analytics and related technologies.

The California Research Alliance by BASF (CARA) brings together BASF experts with researchers from widely varied science and engineering disciplines at the US West Coast universities, such as University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley) and Stanford University. The collaboration started in 2014 with ten postdoctoral positions and extends the already existing cooperations with those major research institutes. As of 2023, the collaboration between BASF, faculty members, and students from 11 universities have initiated over 110 projects. They have also filed 47 patent applications and had 93 scientific publications.

The center operates under a “hub and spokes” model in which the research projects and activities are headquartered and coordinated by BASF researchers working in laboratories at UC Berkeley’s College of Chemistry.