Audience: Faculty
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Designing for Today’s Digital World
Design digital experiences people love to use. In today’s rapidly evolving tech landscape, organizations need professionals who can combine empathy, usability, and aesthetics to create interfaces that engage and delight users. Learn how UX and web design specialists use research‑driven methods, prototyping tools, and inclusive design principles to build seamless digital experiences across platforms. Speaker…
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BIC 2026 | UC Systemwide Bioengineering Symposium
The 26th Annual UC Systemwide Bioengineering Symposium (BIC 2026) is taking place at UC Santa Cruz on August 22-23, 2026. The event will bring together faculty, researchers, students, industry representatives, non-profit organizations, and other stakeholders to explore bioengineering & AI in the heart of the redwood forest. BIC 2026 will foster new collaborations and showcase…
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Xu, D. (BMEB) – Interplay Between CENP-A, DNA Methylation, and H3K9me3 in Defining Centromere Identity
Centromeres ensure proper chromosome segregation during cell division, yet the organization and regulation of centromeric chromatin within satellite DNA arrays remain incompletely understood. Here, we leverage the complete diploid human genome benchmark (T2T-HG002) to provide a detailed study of centromeric sequence and chromatin architecture on individual haplotypes. Using adaptive-sampling-enriched, ultra-long-read DiMeLo-seq, we achieve single-molecule chromatin…
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Presenter: Sai Teja Peddinti, Google Abstract: As the digital landscape expands, traditional models of threat mitigation and user support are failing to keep pace with the unprecedented security, privacy, and safety challenges. Fortunately, the rise of large language models (LLMs) offers a powerful new paradigm for defense. This talk explores how LLMs are being leveraged…
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Insurance, Risk, and Resilience in a Changing World
Climate change is reshaping every system it touches. This panel examines one that most people haven’t much considered in climate terms: insurance. When the industry built to share risk retreats from it, the consequences fall hardest on communities least able to absorb them. Three panelists examine what that failure looks like from the inside, where…
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Figuerres, S. (ECE) – Ion Transport Mechanisms for Bioelectronics
Ion transfer as the movement of charged species across spaces and interfaces is the basis of signaling in nearly all biological systems. My research is grounded in the idea that precise control over ion transfer enables direct manipulation of biological function. Specifically, I focus on how ion transport can be engineered to regulate both collective…
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Morey, C. (BMEB) – Innovations in Interdependence: Genomic and Functional Evolution in Invertebrates and Their Intracellular Symbionts
Intracellular symbionts are microorganisms, such as bacteria, that live within host cells. These associations are widespread throughout the invertebrate tree of life, and can perform a diversity of key metabolic, immune-response, or other functions that the host is dependent on for survival or reproduction. Intracellular symbioses allow both the host and the symbiont to occupy…
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Okamoto, F. (BMEB) – Improving read-to-pangenome alignment in complicated genomic regions
Many genetics pipelines start by aligning sequencing reads to a reference genome. Aligners attempt to find the position in the reference sequence which best matches the read sequence, but this breaks down when the reads come from a sample with variation relative to the reference. A proposed alternative, pangenome graphs, is supposed to fix such…
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Meal Planning for Real Life: Making Meals Easier
Faculty & Staff Health and Well-being Program Location: Register for the Zoom link Struggling to figure out what to eat after a long workday or always heading to the vending machine at lunch? Meal planning can help with that, but it doesn’t have to mean spending your whole Sunday meal prepping or eating the same thing every…
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Bose, S. (ECE) – Learning-Augmented Optimization, Control, and Inference in Modern Power Systems
The electric grid is essential to modern society, and recent developments such as renewable energy sources (RESs), battery energy storage systems (ESSs), and microgrids (MGs) have necessitated novel computational methods for planning and operations. Machine learning offers a promising lever here, both as an accelerator for and proxy to traditional optimization-based problems. In this thesis,…