News
Faculty Recognition
- VLDB 2007 Best Paper Awards
- Prof. Jim Whitehead selected as one of four Distinguished Paper Award winners
- UCSC professors receive Best Paper Award at the IFIP Networking 2007 Conference
- UCSC Awarded Sun's Center of Excellence plaque for OpenSPARC
- Computer scientist Phokion Kolaitis elected to Finnish Academy of Science and Letters
- Phillip Berman appointed to Baskin Endowed Chair in Biomolecular Engineering
Research News
UC Santa Cruz awarded $7.2 million grant for stem cell research center
Wednesday, May 7, 2008The California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM) has approved a $7.2 million grant to fund a new stem cell research center at the University of California, Santa Cruz. The center will house an interdisciplinary program involving faculty from five departments at UCSC and collaborators at other institutions.
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UCSC computer scientists develop solutions for long-term storage of digital data
Monday, April 21, 2008Although the digital age is well under way, one crucial detail remains to be worked out--how to store vast amounts of digital information in a way that allows future generations to recover it.
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UC Santa Cruz engineering students win national robotics competition
Monday, March 17, 2008A team of four students from the Baskin School of Engineering at UC Santa Cruz won the first-place trophy in a national student robotics competition for their design of a solar-powered robot that can climb up a vertical ribbon while carrying a payload. Such a robotic climber would be an essential component of a "space elevator," a concept for transporting material into space via a cable or tether extending from the surface of the Earth into space.
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New program color-codes text in Wikipedia entries to indicate trustworthiness
The online reference site Wikipedia enjoys immense popularity despite nagging doubts about the reliability of entries written by its all-volunteer team. A new program developed at the University of California, Santa Cruz, aims to help with the problem by color-coding an entry's individual phrases based on contributors' past performance.
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Silicon chip beams light through a liquid-core waveguide to detect one particle at a time
Monday, July 2, 2007By guiding light through liquid-filled channels smaller than a human hair, researchers at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and Brigham Young University have succeeded in building a silicon chip that can detect tiny particles one at a time. The research, published online this week in the journal Lab on a Chip, could revolutionize the fields of medical and environmental sampling by making analyses sensitive, portable, and fast.
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UCSC engineer Claire Gu honored by International Society for Optical Engineering
Claire Gu, professor of electrical engineering at the University of California, Santa Cruz, has been elected a Fellow of the International Society for Optical Engineering (SPIE). Gu is among 56 new Fellows honored by the society this year as members of distinction who have made significant scientific and technical contributions in the fields of optics, photonics, and imaging.
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Student Profile: Feeling the Heat
David Munday and Matthew Minolli could have graduated last June with degrees in computer engineering. Instead, they got so wrapped up in their senior design project they decided to stay at UCSC for a fifth year as undergraduates so they could see the project through to completion. By the end of this year, they hope to have their wireless sensor network deployed in Yellowstone National Park by the scientists who track one of the world’s largest active volcanic systems.
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Senior Design Contest features interdisciplinary student projects
Undergraduate students in computer engineering and electrical engineering presented their senior design projects before a panel of judges in the Baskin School of Engineering's Senior Design Contest on Friday, March 23. Contributions from individual donors provided $1,000 in prize money, which was divided among the top three teams.
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HP joins UC Santa Cruz and NASA in groundbreaking collaborative venture
HP has joined the University of California, Santa Cruz, and NASA in a new venture focused on developing revolutionary science breakthroughs in the coming decades.
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UC Regents press UCSC, other campuses to intensify energy research
Something to ponder next time you fill up your gas tank: Two-thirds of the energy produced by burning that fuel in your car's engine will be wasted as heat, while only one-third will be used to get where you want to go. UC Santa Cruz researchers are trying to change that.
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UCSC programming prowess gets kudos for protein structure prediction
Every second summer, professor of biomolecular engineering Kevin Karplus and his laboratory of bioinformatic scientists forgo the beach so that they can come out ahead in the biggest bioinformatic competition in the world. This year was the seventh such competition: the Critical Assessment of Techniques for Protein Structure Prediction (CASP 7).
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Engineers participate in high-speed network demonstration
UCSC computer engineers contributed to a demonstration of high-speed networking technology by a team of industry leaders at an international conference in November. The team--including Finisar, Infinera, Internet2, Level 3 Communications, and UCSC--implemented the first demonstration of 100 Gigabit Ethernet (100GbE), successfully transmitting a signal at a rate of 100 billion bits per second.
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Biomolecular engineer Jonathan Trent wins Nano 50 award
Jonathan Trent, an adjunct professor of biomolecular engineering, was chosen by Nanotech Briefs magazine to receive a Nano 50 award. The Nano 50 awards recognize the "top 50 technologies, products, and innovators that have significantly impacted, or are expected to impact, the state of the art in nanotechnology."
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NIH award supports research on nanopore DNA sequencer
William Dunbar, an assistant professor of computer engineering at UC Santa Cruz, has received a career development award from the National Institutes of Health. The Mentored Quantitative Research Career Development Award is designed to encourage researchers with backgrounds in quantitative science and engineering to focus on questions relating to health and disease.
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Researchers tackle problem of data storage for next-generation supercomputers
The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has awarded a five-year, $11 million grant to researchers at three universities and five national laboratories to find new ways of managing the torrent of data that will be produced by the coming generation of supercomputers. The Petascale Data Storage Institute includes researchers at the University of California, Santa Cruz, Carnegie Mellon University, University of Michigan, and the DOE's Los Alamos, Sandia, Oak Ridge, Lawrence Berkeley, and Pacific Northwest National Laboratories.
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UCSC posts record growth in research funding in 2005-06
Tuesday, August 8, 2006Researchers at the University of California, Santa Cruz, attracted a record $128.5 million in external grants and contracts to the campus in the 2005-06 fiscal year. The increase continues an upward trend in research funding at UCSC that has brought in almost half a billion dollars over the past five years.
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Go Deep: Marine Mammal Marker for At-Sea Monitoring
The observation technology used by wildlife researchers can limit their understanding of the behavior of marine mammals. Surface tracking using geolocation and Service Argos tags have shown that these mammals range much farther than previously thought. Relatively simple time/depth recorders (TDRs) show that they dive more than 1,000 meters deep and for longer than one hour. To further the understanding of these aquatic creatures, we developed a smaller and more capable tag with more sensing capabilities that can be deployed for longer durations. The MAMMARK tag, measuring 2.5 ? 4 centimeters, carries a low-power microprocessor and a set of sensors that can be multiplexed through a high-resolution analog-to-digital converter (ADC).
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UCSC receives funding for training grants from stem cell institute
The University of California, Santa Cruz, has received $375,000 from the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM) to fund the first year of a new training program in stem cell research. CIRM announced today that it has distributed $12.1 million in grants to 16 California institutions as part of the CIRM Training Program.
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UCSC researchers receive $1.6 million grant for biosensor project
Researchers at the University of California, Santa Cruz, have received major funding from the National Institutes of Health to develop new sensor technology for biomedical applications. The project builds on earlier advances by UCSC researchers in optical and electrical sensing technologies and involves a broad interdisciplinary group of collaborators at UCSC and Brigham Young University.
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UCSC chemist explores the membranous origins of the first living cell
Blowing bubbles is child's play, showing how easily soap molecules can assemble into a sheet and curl around to form a bubble. To David Deamer, professor of chemistry and biochemistry and acting chair of biomolecular engineering at the University of California, Santa Cruz, the formation of a soap bubble is no mere curiosity--it illustrates an essential property of the kinds of molecules that compose the membranes of all living cells. While other researchers debate whether DNA or proteins came first, Deamer traces the origin of life to microscopic bubblelike membranes.
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