Audience: General Public
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Shanks, C. (BMEB) – Development and Application of Local Ancestry Methods for Population Genomics
Local ancestry methods classify the segments of DNA inherited from a specific ancestry (e.g., African, East Asian, European), improving analyses of admixed populations. Aim 1 applies ancestry-specific analysis to more than 1000 whole genome sequences across Polynesia, revealing strong bottlenecks in the voyagers who settled both Hawaiʻi and Rapa Nui, and confirming frequencies of Mendelian…
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Campo-Sano Climate Action Conference
Join us October 4th for a regional conference on California Farmworkers and the Environment! The conference will address the challenges of resilience amid the impacts of climate changes and the many other compounding risks farmworkers face. Free and open to the public.
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PMI Silicon Valley Symposium
Project managers today are navigating more change than ever—new technologies, evolving teams, and rising complexity. To lead effectively, PMs must blend emotional intelligence with digital fluency, balancing human connection with AI-driven insights. Join UCSC Silicon Valley partner, the Project Management Institute Silicon Valley Chapter (PMISV), at this year’s symposium as industry leaders explore how modern…
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Hawthorne, N. (ECE) – An Out-of-the-Incubator Platform for Fluorescent Neural Monitoring and Stimulation Experiments
Live-cell fluorescence microscopy enables high-resolution, non-invasive imaging and optical stimulation of biological processes, yet existing systems are often prohibitively expensive, mechanically complex, and poorly suited for wide field-of-view, high-speed, multi-channel experiments—particularly those involving optogenetics. To address these limitations, I developed a low-cost, modular fluorescence microscope constructed from 3D-printed mechanical components and off-the-shelf optics. I also…
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Leavitt, J. (BMEB) – Evolutionary Dynamics, Functional Adaptations in Stress Response, and Direct Detection of tRNA modifications in Archaea
Transfer RNA (tRNA) modifications are essential for structural integrity, decoding fidelity, and stress adaptation, yet their dynamics across phylogenetically distinct archaeal species and their functional roles during stress remain incompletely understood. This dissertation aims to address some of these gaps through a multi-scale investigation that spans the evolutionary dynamics, stress-responsive functions, and direct detection of…
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Fundraiser: Film Screening of “The Last Class”
The UC Santa Cruz Education Department is hosting a screening of the film “The Last Class” at the Del Mar on September 30th. The Last Class documents Robert Reich’s last time teaching his UC Berkeley class on wealth and poverty and has been called Reich’s “love letter to education.” This is currently the only local…
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Bhatia, N. (CSE) – Building Adaptive Intelligence into Wireless Sensing
WiFi-based indoor positioning is a widely researched area focused on determining the location of devices. Accurate indoor positioning has numerous applications, including asset tracking and indoor navigation. Despite advances, their adoption in practice remains limited due to several challenges such as environmental changes that cause signal fading, multipath effects, and interference, all of which reduce…
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Swaby, A. (ECE) – Improving X-ray Medical Imaging using Amorphous Selenium as a Photoconductive Layer
The presence of coronary artery calcification is a strong predictor for future cardiovascular events where cardiac risk categories are quantified depending on calcification size. Dual-energy chest X-rays provide high contrast visualization to improve opportunistic screening for quantifying coronary artery calcifications, determining bone mineral density (i.e., osteoporosis) and characterizing lung lesions. As a dual-energy imaging modality,…
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Lei, K. (CMPM) – Designing for Meaningful Large-Scale Online Communication, Connection, and Collective Insight
Digital technologies have made large-scale online interaction a central part of how people communicate, connect, and work together. Yet scaling often comes at the cost of depth, and interactions can become superficial and chaotic, drifting away from the richer interactional contexts of small-scale or in-person settings that support trust and meaningful exchange, and that make…
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Briden, M. (CSE) – Representation Learning and Generative Forecasting for Noisy and Limited Clinical Data: Applications in Wound Healing and EEG
The rapid integration of artificial intelligence and machine learning into clinical practice has driven advances in disease classification, segmentation, and clinical decision support. However, the complexities of medical data pose a challenge to widespread adoption. The rarity of medical conditions, ethical considerations, and varying acquisition protocols leads to limited and noisy data. The time-intensive process…