The University of California at Santa Cruz (UCSC) Police Department, with assistance from the Alameda County Sheriff's Office and the California National Guard, used military surveillance to suppress the UC Santa Cruz graduate student wildcat strike earlier this year, according to emails acquired through the California Public Records Act.

Vice first reported the content of the emails on May 15 which provided insight into the coordinated efforts between the UC Santa Cruz Police Department, Alameda County Sheriff's Office, and the California Governor's Office of Emergency Services, to police the protests. As Salon has previously reported, police and campus officials reacted to the nonviolent labor action with threats, arrests, firings, and violence from the police with batons, according to grad students at the strike, for months as grad students demanded a Cost-of-Living Adjustment (COLA) to help alleviate the rent burden of living in a pricey coastal California town.

The new emails, which have been reviewed by Salon, dive deeper into the efforts to police the protests that went beyond what the grad students observed on the picket line. They show the UC Santa Cruz Police Department requested mutual aid from the Alameda County Sheriff's Office to police the protests as early as December 31. Notably, UC Santa Cruz is located in Santa Cruz County, not Alameda County — which is about 40 miles north.

"It's disturbing to be part of a labor action like this and to see the militarized nature of the university's response," Will Parrish, a PhD student in UCSC's History of Consciousness program, told Salon in an interview. "I felt disturbed to see both the level of militarization and the casualness of their discussions in their email threads."

Specifically, the UCSC Police Department requested deputies, trucks and vans in the case of arrests. All expenses, including food and lodging, were paid for by UCSC police for at least 65 officers. At the time, grad students were on a wildcat strike, withholding final grades for the fall quarter until their demand for a Cost-of-Living Adjustment (COLA) was met. Withholding grades evolved into a full wildcat teaching strike in February, meaning they withheld teaching, grading, and office hours, as their demands continued to be dismissed.

According to emails dated February 11 and 13, the California National Guard provided "friendly force trackers," which is a military surveillance technology, as part of the effort. Police also had access to a federal surveillance portal operated by the FBI called LEEP, an acronym for "Law Enforcement Enterprise Portal." The FBI's page on LEEP describes it as "a secure platform for law enforcement agencies, intelligence groups, and criminal justice entities" that "provides web-based investigative tools and analytical resources" to help said groups "collaborate in a secure environment, use tools to strengthen their cases, and share departmental documents." Some of the sample use cases for LEEP that the FBI cites include "active shooter incidents," "child abductions" and "takedown operations."

The emails don't specify exactly how these technologies were used, nor do they specify the amount spent on the efforts. However, grad students believe that it could be in the millions.

"Rather than meet us at the bargaining table the UC instead spent close to five million dollars in deploying dozens of UCPD from across the state, California Highway Patrol, and Alameda County sheriffs, and even solicited assistance from counterterrorism intelligence agencies," UCSC Literature PhD student Hannah Newburn said in a statement. "Since when did asking for a raise become a threat to Homeland Security?"

Carlos Cruz, a UCSC PhD student in the history department, told Salon he was given evidence, and an audio clip that Salon listened to, to add to speculation that he was being surveilled by police during the protests. In the audio clip, presumably a police officer is stating Cruz's whereabouts and said his name "Carlos." He also had an alarming in-person encounter with a sergeant.

"I had a sergeant who was able to identify me by first, middle and last name and date of birth," Cruz said, adding there were racist undertones to the exchange. "It's really scary to see how they got my info and knew who I was."

In an emailed statement to Salon, Scott Hernandez-Jason, the Director of News and Media Relations at UC Santa Cruz, told Salon: "Throughout the strike, UC Santa Cruz police officers were focused on supporting the safety of our community on and off campus and protecting the rights of everyone in our campus community, including those engaged in expressive activity."

Hernandez-Jason said the department used the trackers "to know the location of on-duty officers who were helping keep people safe."

"To infer anything else about the use of the trackers would be erroneous. UC Santa Cruz is built across 2,000 acres of hilly land with two entrances, so understanding the location of officers was vital to coordinate their efforts," Hernandez-Jason said. "There was no tracking of students or strikers."

The emails also revealed that after Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) tweeted on February 19 in support of striking graduate students at UC Santa Cruz, an officer from the Governor's Office of Emergency Services emailed the California State Threat Assessment Center commander Eli Owen to request assistance to "verify/validate Mr. Sanders schedule." The email referred to the tweet as "intel" that Sanders might appear on the UC Santa Cruz campus.

Hernandez-Jason said about this email that "UC Santa Cruz was paying attention to his publicly posted campaign schedule so that it could begin planning in case he chose to visit the campus."

This isn't the first time military tactics have been used to spy on protesters. The Intercept previously reported on how FBI emails and intelligence reports suggested federal surveillance of Black Lives Matter protests. Similar surveillance happened in the 1960s and 1970s during anti-war protests. Sara Hinkley, a Policy Research Specialist at UC Berkeley Labor Center, told Salon in an emailed statement that whether such a move was worth it for UCSC will be calculated by how tarnished its reputation is for the handling of the wildcat strike.

"In the case of UC, the loss of reputation and academic stability will likely have repercussions for many years," Hinkley said. "It's unfortunate that they chose to treat their own students and employees as an enemy meriting military surveillance."

Hinkley added: "I think it's likely that decision will end up costing them much more than if they had recognized the students' demands and fairly bargained a solution to the real financial stress that graduate students are experiencing."

NICOLE KARLIS

Nicole Karlis is a news writer at Salon. She covers health, science, tech and gender politics. Tweet her @nicolekarlis.

===

Alex Garland, the brilliant mind behind the Academy Award–winning sci-fi thriller Ex Machina and acclaimed films Annihilation and 28 Days Later, brings his unique perspective to television for the first time with FX’s Devs.

This mind-bending tech thriller, filmed on

the UC Santa Cruz campus, follows a young software engineer as she investigates the secret development division of her employer, which she believes is behind the disappearance of her boyfriend. Join writer/director Alex Garland for a screening and Q&A about this highly anticipated limited series.

How many familiar campus spots can you find in the trailer?

Admission is free, seating is limited; first come, first served.

Devs premieres March 5 exclusively on FX on Hulu.

===

ucsc

https://news.ucsc.edu/2019/08/patents.html

UC Santa Cruz researchers were awarded 26 new patents in the last fiscal year, a record number for the campus. The new patents include novel compounds with potential medical uses, innovations in computer chip architecture, and new methods for genome assembly and analysis of genomic sequencing data.

“Thanks to the outstanding efforts of our campus innovators, this represents a new high water mark for the UCSC campus, 27% more than our previous best of 20 patents in a single year,” said Vice Chancellor for Research Scott Brandt.

Brandt also credited this milestone to the Office of Research’s recent innovation and entrepreneurship initiative, funded by the AB2664 grant from the State of California, and the proactive leadership of the Industry Alliances and Technology Commercialization office led by director of intellectual property management Jeff Jackson and senior intellectual property officer Christopher Reed.

“The quality of the innovation at UCSC is reflected in the fact that about half of these issued patents are licensed to companies working to develop them into products. The majority of those companies are startups based in Santa Cruz,” Jackson said. “While issued patents are one indication of the health of the IP portfolio, another is the number of new inventions disclosed, and the last fiscal year also was an all-time high in new inventions disclosed (up 10% over last year.)”

Several faculty members received multiple patents, including Mark Akeson, professor of biomolecular engineering, with five patents related to nanopore DNA sequencing, a concept invented and pioneered at UC Santa Cruz for analyzing DNA and other molecules as they pass through a tiny pore called a "nanopore." The technology has been commercialized by Oxford Nanopore Technologies (U.K.), whose cell-phone-sized DNA sequencing device has been used at remote sites such as the Arctic, rural West Africa, and the International Space Station.

Patents with potential applications in clinical medicine include bacterial inhibitors discovered by Victoria Auerbuch Stone, professor of microbology and environmental toxicology, that could lead to the development of new antibiotics effective against multi-drug resistant bacteria.

The following UCSC researchers were lead inventors on patents issued last year:

• Mark Akeson, Professor of Biomolecular Engineering (5 patents)

• David Haussler, Professor of Biomolecular Engineering (4 patents)

• Matthew Guthaus, Professor of Computer Science and Engineering (2 patents)

• William Sullivan, Professor of Molecular, Cell, and Developmental Biology (2 patents)

• David Bernick, Assistant Adjunct Professor of Biomolecular Engineering (2 patents)

• Ted Holman, Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry (2 patents)

• Victoria Auerbuch Stone, Professor of Microbiology and Environmental Toxicology

• Ed Green, Professor of Biomolecular Engineering

• JJ Garcia-Luna-Aceves, Professor of Computer Science and Engineering

• David Deamer, Research Professor of Biomolecular Engineering

• Phil Berman, Professor of Biomolecular Engineering

• Ricardo Sanfelice, Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering

• Bakthan Singaram, Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry

• Chris Vollmers, Assistant Professor of Biomolecular Engineering

• William Scott, Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry

More information about patents awarded to UCSC researchers is available on the web site of the Inventor Recognition Program, created by the Office of Research to acknowledge researchers on a quarterly basis for their U.S. patent awards and to showcase the groundbreaking research that is conducted on the UCSC campus every day.

===

indep film, performance art? riot grrrl

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miranda_July

actor criminal minds

tisch school

Matthew Gray Gubler - Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org › wiki › Matthew_Gray_Gubler

Matthew Gray Gubler is an American actor, filmmaker, fashion model, painter, and author. He is best known for his role as criminal profiler Dr. Spencer Reid in ...

Years active‎: ‎2004–present

Born‎: ‎March 9, 1980 (age 39); ‎Las Vegas, Nev...

Occupation‎: ‎Actor; filmmaker; model

Alma mater‎: ‎New York University

‎Paget Brewster · ‎68 Kill · ‎Suburban Gothic · ‎How to Be a Serial Killer

12/19

https://news.ucsc.edu/2019/12/tedx-santacruz.html

Nine UCSC affiliates will join novelist Jonathan Franzen and a host of other speakers for TEDx Santa Cruz, a daylong extravaganza focused this year on the "Art of Hope," on Saturday, Dec. 7.

TEDx Santa Cruz is an independently organized event that builds on the popularity of TED Talks, which feature expert speakers addressing topics as diverse as education, business, science, technology, and creativity.

Each speaker delivers an impactful, curated talk or performance intended to inspire those in the audience. The event takes place at the Rio Theatre from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tickets are available online.

Speakers with a UCSC affiliation include:

Roxanne Beltran, postdoctoral fellow in ecology and evolutionary biology
Ryan Coonerty, lecturer in politics and chair of the Santa Cruz County Board of Supervisors
David Deamer, research professor of biomolecular engineering
Sylvanna Falcón, associate professor of Latin American and Latino studies and founder of the Human Rights Investigations Lab
Phil Hammack, professor of psychology and director of the Sexual and Gender Diversity Laboratory
David Lee, assistant professor of computational media
Kyle Robertson, lecturer in philosophy and co-founder of The Center for Public Philosophy
Karelle Silliez, postdoctoral researcher in astronomy
Barry Sinervo, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology

Nada Miljkovic, the lead organizer of TEDx Santa Cruz, is also an alumna (MFA '09, digital arts and new media) and an instructor on campus.

11/19

Radical excellence: UC Santa Cruz joins Association of American Universities

The University of California, Santa Cruz, has joined the Association of American Universities, an achievement that underscores the impact and quality of the campus’s research and graduate and undergraduate education. Membership in the AAU provides UC Santa Cruz greater opportunity to shape and advocate for the future of higher education. more »

https://news.ucsc.edu/2019/10/falcon-humanrights.html

New Human Rights Lab trains students to investigate wrongdoing

Students use high-tech sleuthing tools to help hold perpetrators accountable

tool:

https://guides.library.ucsc.edu/ucsc-campus-history

srch University of California, Santa Cruz--History

Conservative nutrition: The industrial food supply and its critics, 1915--1985

Renner, Martin;

University of California, Santa Cruz. History

2012

Dissertation Abstracts International 74-02A(E)

Introduction to the UCSC Campus History & Current Affairs Guide

The purpose of this guide is to help all types of researchers discover and use local and related printed and online collections when researching UC Santa Cruz campus history and current affairs. Also included are links to relevant research tools.

hayden white, dizikes sp

Teaching writing in the company of friends : an oral history with Carol Freeman

Freeman, Carol, interviewee.;

Rabkin, Sarah, interviewer, editor.;University of California, Santa Cruz. University Library.;University of California, Santa Cruz. Regional History Project.

https://news.ucsc.edu/2019/04/martin-fieldguide.html

This spring's wildflower "superbloom" is good news for residents of Santa Cruz County, where impressive displays of California poppies, Sky lupine, and Douglas iris are popping up in grasslands from Davenport to Watsonville.

Dozens of less familiar blooms will emerge in coming weeks and months, and a beautiful, full-color Field Guide to Plants of UC Santa Cruzmakes exploring the landscapes of the campus—and the county—fun and rewarding.

The guide was a labor of love for author Nathalie Martin (College Nine '17, environmental studies), who hopes the 173-page volume filled with photographs, maps, and tips will inspire others to build their knowledge of local plants "and all the curiosities and wonders that accompany them."

"This project was sort of like a botanical treasure hunt for me," said Martin, who became involved with the project during a winter-quarter internship her sophomore year, during which she explored, identified, and photographed plants all over campus....

ronnie l fall 2018 plenary talk on UC history (and future, a bit): https://opencast-player-1.lt.ucsc.edu:8443/engage/theodul/ui/core.html?id=86eac6f4-f6e7-4664-a70f-5f309696269b

Climate scientist Nicole Feldl wins NSF Award: Grant includes funding for climate research and for a cross-disciplinary environmental game project for students to develop a learning game about climate science 6/18.

Harry Potter course leaves students spellbound

Renee Fox, an assistant professor of literature at UC Santa Cruz, was not quite sure what to expect when she offered a class on Harry Potter for the first time this winter. Then the course became a surprise hit with students.

4/18 alums

Created in 1968, just three years after the university itself was founded, KZSC was initially called KRUZ. The studios were in the basement of Stevenson College dormitories. The station’s studios had relocated to the Communications Building on Science Hill by the time the FCC gave the station a toehold on the FM radio band, with a 10 watt signal at 88.1 FM. The studios moved to its current location above Crown College in 1980 and starting broadcasting at 10,000 watts in 2002 before amping up to its current 20,000 watts in 2007.

But along with celebrating its technical evolution that has facilitated the station’s broad reach on California’s Central Coast, KZSC is reaching out to alumni and collect the stories of the innumerable students that passed the radio station—and its unique student-run culture—from one year to the next down through the decades.

“We keep discovering amazing things about the people who passed through these doors, who helped make KZSC into something special,” Rozendal said as he digs through several boxes of fading paper files.

Those unorganized records have gradually yielded a directory of KZSC alumni, who have been invited back to the station’s 50th Anniversary celebration—set for Alumni Weekend April 27–29.

Throughout the weekend, alumni programmers will return to the airwaves to spin some classics and share personal reflections about their glory days on the air. KZSC takes over the Quarry Amphitheater at 7 p.m. on April 28 to present a live radio variety show featuring personalities, artists, and other creative types who were part of the 50-year history of student radio at UCSC. It’s a free event, open to the public to celebrate KZSC’s mission and history. A Sunday brunch, by invite only, will celebrate the more than 40 year history of the Women’s Radio Collective—currently broadcasting as Breakfast in Bed, Sundays at 9 a.m. on KZSC.

=====

Medicinal chemist Thomas Webb and physicist and entrepreneur Susanne Hering are being honored by the UC Santa Cruz Division of Physical and Biological Sciences (PBSci) as the recipients of the PBSci Distinguished Alumni Awards.

The division established the awards to honor graduates of the division who have gone on to extraordinary accomplishments in diverse fields and whose careers are characterized by sustained and exemplary contributions to society through research, practice, education, policy, or service. The Physical and Biological Sciences Distinguished Alumni Awards will be presented annually to a former graduate student and a former undergraduate student.

Webb, who earned a Ph.D. in synthetic organic chemistry from UC Santa Cruz in 1980, is being honored for the impact of his work in basic science and drug discovery. He is currently the director of medicinal chemistry in the Center for Chemical Biology at SRI Biosciences, where he leads small-molecule drug discovery for cancer and influenza. His accomplishments include development of an innovative anti-tumor drug which will enter clinical trials in 2019.

Before joining SRI, Webb worked on discovery of new cancer therapeutics in the Department of Chemical Biology and Therapeutics at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, where he held a senior faculty position and directed the high-throughput chemistry center. He has also held key positions at ChemBridge Corporation, Neurocrine Biosciences, Corvas International, and Genentech, Inc. An active inventor, Webb holds 32 U.S. patents. He has written two book chapters and 72 peer-reviewed publications, and he has served as a reviewer for more than 30 major scientific journals.

Hering, the founder and president of Aerosol Dynamics in Berkeley, is being honored for her impact as both a scientist and a developer of novel instruments that are advancing atmospheric science. She entered UC Santa Cruz with the pioneer class in 1965 and graduated in 1969 with a joint major in physics and history.

“Both inside and outside the classroom, Santa Cruz heightened my joy of learning and showed me the thrill in intellectual discovery,” Hering said. “UCSC gave me the idealism and the academic background to pursue an unusual career, and enabled me to focus on one specific, small way in which I felt I might contribute to a better world.”

Hering continued her education at the University of Washington, earning a Ph.D. in low temperature physics in 1974. She studied atmospheric aerosols as a postdoctoral researcher at the California Institute of Technology and continues to focus her research on the fine airborne particles that create haze in the atmosphere.

In 1991, Hering founded Aerosol Dynamics to develop effective methods to measure and characterize these particles. She and her team have developed a host of new measurement techniques that have been broadly used in air quality monitoring and research. They are currently working on a miniature system that could be worn or deployed on unmanned aerial vehicles.

Hering is a past-president of the American Association for Aerosol Research (AAAR), a founding AAAR Fellow, and a recipient of AAAR’s Benjamin Y. H. Liu Award. She edited the 1989 edition of Air Sampling Instruments, a guide for industrial hygienists, and most recently she was an editor for the journal Aerosol Science and Technology.

Arts Dean's Lecture Series on Creative Entrepreneurship Spring 2018.

4/03
"The Da Vinci Mindset"
Speaker: Arts Dean Susan Solt
http://arts.ucsc.edu/dean-lecture-series-2018/da-vinci-mindset

04/10
"Arts and Ecology"
Speakers: Newton Harrison, David Dunn, T.J. Demos
http://arts.ucsc.edu/dean-lecture-series-2018/arts-and-ecology

04/17
"Finding the Money"
Speakers: Sally Jo Fifer, Meklit Hadero
http://arts.ucsc.edu/dean-lecture-series-2018/finding-money

04/24
"Arts Practice as For Profit Enterprise"
Speakers: Robin Hunicke, Annie Morhauser
http://arts.ucsc.edu/dean-lecture-series-2018/arts-practice-profit-enter...

05/01
"From Employee to Employer"
Speaker: Stephanie Allain
http://arts.ucsc.edu/dean-lecture-series-2018/employee-employer

05/08
"Arts Practice as a Non-Profit Enterprise"
Speaker: Marianne Weems
http://arts.ucsc.edu/dean-lecture-series-2018/arts-practice-non-profit-e...

05/15
"Principles for Creative Work and Life"
Speaker: Rick Vargas
http://arts.ucsc.edu/dean-lecture-series-2018/principles-creative-work-a...

05/22
"Branding Matters"
Speaker: Margaret Wolfson
http://arts.ucsc.edu/dean-lecture-series-2018/branding-matters

05/29
"Artists in Civic Practice"
Speakers: Shannon Scrofano, Jessica Balboni, John Jota Leaños
http://arts.ucsc.edu/dean-lecture-series-2018/artists-civic-practice

06/05
"Artists as Enterprise Consultants"
Speaker: Jonathan Foster
http://arts.ucsc.edu/dean-lecture-series-2018/artists-enterprise-consult...

Location:

Second Stage

Admission:

Free

Admission details:

Lectures begin at 5:20PM, every Tuesday evening during Spring quarter.

FREE and open to the public.

Parking $4 by permit (available from paystation vending machine in the Arts parking lot #126 after 4:30PM).

Harry Noller: The excitement of the lab

Stand under the redwoods outside the Sinsheimer Labs building most mornings and you will see bushy-haired Emeritus Professor of Molecular, Cell and Developmental Biology Harry Noller heading to work.

At 76, Noller has retired from teaching, but the excitement of what is happening in his lab draws him like a thirsty man to water.

Noller, who came to UC Santa Cruz in 1968, is a decorated scientist who studies the ribosome, a kind of bilingual molecule that bridges the gap between DNA and RNA on one hand and proteins on the other. It is one of the core mysteries of science and is essential to all forms of life. Over the years, Noller’s research has turned the understanding of the mysterious ribosome on its head.

He discovered that the RNA component carries out key functions of the ribosome — the inverse of what most scientists believed. He has done atomic-level mapping of the structure of the ribosome, a basis for the development of targeted antibiotics. Now, he is piecing together the actual movements of the ribosome as it does its job.

“The thing is alive as you look at it,” Noller says, enthusiasm seeping into his words. “It is flexing and reaching to grab things and pulling them through at the atomic level. This is the basis of life. This is how the genetic code is read in all of our cells every minute.

“That’s what excites me,” Noller says. “That’s why I go to work every day.”

Adrienne Zihlman: The exhilaration of discovery

It is that same sense of excitement that keeps Professor of Anthropology Adrienne Zihlman on the job, three years after her supposed retirement.

Zihlman, 74, first shook up the field of anthropology with research that showed female gathering activities could just as easily account for our big brains as men’s hunting behaviors did. Then, at a time when the common chimpanzee was considered the model for the human-ape ancestor, she proposed that the rare pygmy chimpanzee was a better model in its anatomy and behavior.

While both these ideas were met with strong opposition at first, more evidence has made them generally accepted in academia today.

Now, Zihlman is pulling together decades of that research into a beautifully illustrated text — a kind of “Gray’s Anatomy” for apes.

Working with illustrator and former UC Santa Cruz student Carol Underwood, Zihlman’s tome will tell an evolutionary and anatomical tale designed for both scientists and lay people.

It’s the exhilaration of discovery, of shining a light on apes and evolution, that keeps Zihlman working.

Quoting Freud that “anatomy is destiny,” Zihlman added, “It’s also the key to the mystery of human evolution.”

David Kaun: The joy and pleasure of teaching

At 83, Emeritus Professor of Economics David Kaun is quick to laugh about why he will soon embark on his 50^th year of teaching.

“I’m a labor economist,” he says. “I spent my entire career trying to figure out why people work.”

Kaun came to the campus in 1966 from a teaching job at the University of Pittsburgh, drawn by the beautiful setting and the offbeat experiment that was UC Santa Cruz. Like Griggs’s students, Kaun would usually bring his dog, a long-legged basset hound named Greta, to class.

But long after most retirees are lounging on cruise ships and driving across the country in motor homes, Kaun will be teaching two classes this year: one on the Political Economy of Capitalism and the other on the Economics of the Arts, a course born out of his love for music and his talent on the clarinet.

Kaun will also lead his popular Labor Wars in Theory and Film class, which leaves most of its students saying they can never quite watch a movie the same way again.

“I have been extremely fortunate, blessed, and lucky to wind up doing something that has been such a joy and pleasure,” says Kaun of his work.

“Besides, if you spend your life around 20-year-olds,” he says, “how can you possibly get old?”

G. William Domhoff: Explaining concepts leads to deeper insights

Psychology professor Domhoff feels much the same way.

Twenty-one years after his alleged retirement, the 79-year-old academic most known for his study of dreams and his work on the psychology of power, says student inquiries and the need to explain concepts in his field often bring new insights.

“In a dialogue with students, trying to explain something, makes you understand the subject better,” Domhoff says, “and that really matters to me."

It’s part of the reason, besides being a member of an academic community, that Domhoff will teach two courses this year. He is also continuing work on a book that presents his theory of dreams as “a form of intensified mind-wandering that dramatizes an individual’s main, personal concerns.”

As one of only two working professors who began teaching the same year UC Santa Cruz was born — Emeritus Professor of Literature Harry Berger will teach a course on Plato in the spring — Domhoff finds satisfaction in his profession.

It’s the same gratification that became clear to Griggs when he learned that one of his students, a former language major named Kathryn Sullivan, credited part of her success to him.

Inspired by his oceanography course and Griggs’s answers to her many questions, she got her Ph.D. in that subject, went on to become the first American woman to walk in space, and is now undersecretary of commerce for oceans and atmosphere and administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Sullivan will be master of ceremonies at UC Santa Cruz's Founders Celebration Fiat Fifty dinner on September 26.

“It made … me appreciate how critically important our roles are at UCSC, or any university,” Griggs says. “It has been the rewards and satisfaction of events like this, and others, that continue to inspire and motivate me.”

Other pioneer faculty who continue to work at UC Santa Cruz include:

Ralph Abraham
Frank Andrews
Murray Baumgarten
Edmund Burke
Robert Coe
Walter Goldfrank
John Jordan
Peter Kenez
H. Marshall Leicester
Michael Nauenberg
Harold Widom
Donald Wittman

Pioneer staff and faculty will receive the Fiat Lux Award at this year's Founders Celebration Fiat Fifty dinner.

Gabby Rivera spoke at UCSC 2/18 is currently writing the plot for America Chavez — the first Latinx and queer Marvel superhero.

https://specialevents.ucsc.edu/kraw-lecture/

VIDEOS archived online

From research to patents and products: UC Santa Cruz faculty and students are an innovation powerhouse. Their inventions and research breakthroughs deliver social and economic benefits to our local—and global—communities. On January 31, we will hear from three professors whose research is driving real-world innovation in early-stage startups:

Holger Schmidt, Professor of Electrical Engineering, Narinder Singh Kapany Chair of Optoelectronics and the Associate Dean for Research, Baskin School of Engineering
Nader Pourmand, Professor of Biomolecular Engineering
Richard E. Green, Assistant Professor of Biomolecular Engineering, Co-director of the Paleogenomics lab

UC Santa Cruz Treehouse Cancer Initiative
Making precision medicine personal for kids: How researchers and doctors are giving new hope to kids with cancer using big data genomics

There are several truisms about childhood cancer: it tends to be aggressive, differs from adult cancers, and when treatments fail, time runs out quickly. Precision medicine powered by big data becomes personal when university researchers and doctors team up. The Treehouse Cancer Initiative at UC Santa Cruz uses comparative cancer genomic analysis to help doctors treat kids with few options. Learn more about how a new project partnering our Treehouse researchers with Stanford doctors is bringing new hope to families.

Featuring members of the UC Santa Cruz Treehouse Cancer Initiative:
Olena Morozova, co-founder
David Haussler, co-founder
Isabel Bjork, director
Lauren Sanders, Ph.D. student

UC Santa Cruz Silicon Valley Campus
3175 Bowers Avenue, Santa Clara

View the lecture
Nov 1

Carrie Partch: Circadian Rhythms: When Our Biological Clocks Go Bad . . .

Carrie Partch joined the UC Santa Cruz faculty in 2011. In her lab, Partch recently identified a gene that suppresses circadian rhythms in cancer, allowing tumor cells to escape daily controls on cellular growth. Now her lab is developing new therapeutic strategies that leverage circadian control over physiology to improve human health. She just received the 2018 Margaret Oakley Dayhoff Award from the Biophysical Society for her ground-breaking combination of biophysics and cell biology.

UC Santa Cruz Silicon Valley Campus
3175 Bowers Avenue, Santa Clara

Lecture video still to come.
Jun 22

Exploring Biology’s Dark Matter: RNA
Recognizing Harry Noller, winner of the 2017 Breakthrough Prize

Noller, professor emeritus of molecular, cell, and developmental biology, recently received the 2017 Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences for his discoveries about ribosomes, the tiny structures of the cell that Noller calls the “mothership of life.” His insights are taking us right to the brink of understanding the very origins of life on the planet.

From his unexpected discovery of the role RNA plays in the functioning of the ribosome has grown the world’s premier center for RNA research. The 16 research labs that comprise the UC Santa Cruz Center of Molecular Biology of RNA are forging new discoveries in the treatment of diseases like rheumatoid arthritis and cancer and developing new technological tools to advance the sciences.

Noller will be joined on stage by three Center researchers, Jeremy Sanford, Susan Carpenter, and Daniel Kim, who will discuss their work in the frontiers of molecular biology and the implications of RNA research on treating diseases and saving lives.

Silicon Valley Capital Club
50 W San Fernando Street, San Jose

View the lecture
May 16

Mark Akeson: Sequencing DNA from Remote Villages to the Space Station: The Nanopore Revolution

Akeson is a professor of Biomolecular Engineering at UC Santa Cruz. He earned his B.A. in History from UC San Diego, and his Ph.D. in Soil Microbiology from UC Davis, then came to UCSC following a post-doctoral fellowship at the National Institutes of Health. Akeson is one of the pioneers of nanopore sequencing and leads the UC Santa Cruz nanopore group. The nanopore group has made important advances in nanopore sequencing technology by analyzing DNA molecules directly from the nucleus of eukaryotic cells. Nanopore technology brings modern genomics out of the lab and into the field—think Ebola or Zika outbreaks—with tremendous potential for human health.

UC Santa Cruz Silicon Valley Campus
3175 Bowers Avenue, Santa Clara

View the lecture
Mar 22

Jonathan Fortney: How Common is the Earth? The Discovery and Characterization of Rocky Planets Around Other Stars

Fortney is an astrophysicist who focuses on understanding the structure and composition of planets in our solar system and "exoplanets" around other stars. He has been involved with NASA's Kepler spacecraft since its prime mission. He is also one of 15 principal investigators for a new NASA initiative, the Nexus for Exoplanet System Science (NExSS), which is a quest to find life on planets around other stars. Fortney is one of four new participating scientists NASA has chosen for the last phase of the Cassini Mission to Saturn, as the spacecraft dives between the planet's rings and its atmosphere to collect unprecedented data.

UC Santa Cruz Silicon Valley Campus
3175 Bowers Avenue, Santa Clara

View the lecture

~ NAS

https://senate.ucsc.edu/committees/caf-committee-on-academic-freedom/index.html

book, We Will Not be Silenced, teach us about activism and academia

http://mondoweiss.net/2017/07/palestine-academic-repression/

WE WILL NOT BE SILENCED: The Academic Repression of Israel’s Critics
Edited by William I. Robinson and Maryam S. Griffin
Forward by Cynthia McKinney and Preface by Richard Falk
280 pp. AK Press, 2017. $19.95.

There are many ways to try to silence people whose ideas you don’t like. You can bully, blackmail, violate, isolate, punish, and smear them until they shut up, back down, and/or lose the platform upon which they were speaking.

It’s not just autocratic despots or crooked attorneys who wield such strategies with tyrannical efficacy. The forces of the pro-Israel lobby have long carried out systematic campaigns of vilification and repression with a pugnacious energy that rivals even the mob’s. Anyone in the public eye who dares to level a critique of the State of Israel could find themselves targeted. And if you are a prominent and vocal Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) activist: fuggedaboutit.

This climate of censorship is especially hard felt on college and university campuses where a historic upsurge in successful pro-Palestine activism has led to a corollary increase in McCarthyist pressure by the dozens of Zionist organizations who have formed into a network called the Israel on Campus Coalition. Characterized by their shameless meddling in internal university proceedings, well-organized groups like the AMCHA Initiative, Stand With Us, Campus Watch, Canary Mission, and ADL are the most visible tip of a slander-industrial complex whose mission is to purge professors and students who challenge their own narrative.

When fear of reprisal has become the norm, speaking out becomes an act of courage and resistance. This is the premise of “We Will Not Be Silenced,” AK Press’s excellent new collection of first-hand testimonial accounts penned by pro-Palestinian scholars who have been targeted on U.S. campuses. With more than a dozen essays by some of the luminaries in the movement such as Richard Falk, Saree Makdisi, Rabab Ibrahim Abdulhadi, Nadia Abu El-Haj, Steven Salaita, Joseph Massad, members of the Irvine 11, and many others—”We Will Not Be Silenced” serves as an instructive compendium of the pro-Israel lobby’s bag of underhanded tricks and an invaluable playbook for how to preempt and defeat them.

Across the breadth of these infuriating yet illuminating essays, a consistent pattern of tactics emerges. Most of these tactics are predicated on the lobby’s willingness to breach basic standards of academic freedom and common decency to achieve their aims.

In their helpful opening essay, David Theo Goldberg and Saree Makdisi discuss the alarming implications of the Hasbara Handbook that is distributed by organizations like StandWithUs to help train pro-Israel campus activists to be effective propagandists. The handbook explicitly encourages its acolytes to avoid legitimate argument and debate with pro-Palestinian activists in favor of deceitful strategies like point scoring, emotional manipulation, and name calling—to create negative connotations “without allowing a real examination of that person or idea.”

The direct and damaging results of these methods are on full display in the pages of “We Will Not Be Silenced” where victim after victim narrates the life-altering consequences they have faced for their criticism of Israel.

William Robinson, one of the co-editors of the book, was brought up on spurious charges at UCSB for circulating a photo-essay that juxtaposed images from Operation Cast Lead in Gaza with the images of the Warsaw ghetto, accompanied by a text condemning Israel’s human rights record. After a strenuous fight, Robinson was cleared of all charges, but at a steep cost to his research and reputation.

David Delgado Shorter, whose only “crime” was to offer his students the option of researching the BDS movement as a case study in his “Tribal Worldviews” course, survived a demoralizing ordeal at UCLA at the hands of AMCHA that included death threats and false accusations of anti-Semitism that damaged his professional and personal life.

David Klein, a math professor at Cal State, Northridge and prominent BDS activist, was subjected to a similar coordinated campaign of censorship that stretched out for years and may not even be over yet. Unlike most of the scholars in this collection, Klein was fortunate that Harry Hellenbrand, the president of CSUN at the time, was an outspoken supporter of Klein’s academic freedom.

Most of these political witch hunts have been instigated and/or vigorously pursued by outside lobbyists, powerful politicians, or alumni donors. While these forces hold no contractual or professional affiliation with the universities, they often interfere with impunity in internal governance procedures. In some cases they help pro-Israel students file official complaints against pro-Palestinian faculty members, but often dispense with even that “nicety.”

What is especially disturbing is the alacrity with which many upper administrators quickly cave and often collude with pressure groups who have no interest in research and knowledge production, but rather have a vested interest in censorship and knowledge suppression.

The Israel on Campus Coalition has shown few scruples about smearing its opponents as supporters of terror, self-hating Jews, or anti-Semites. Groups like AMCHA, Hillel, StandWithUs have worked with political allies around the clock to cement the erroneous notion that opposition to Zionism is tantamount to anti-Semitism, and that a hatred of Israel’s policies of racism, ethnic cleansing and dispossession is the same as hatred of Jews qua Jews.

Given the horrific history of anti-Semitism, and the deplorable reality of its continued existence, even among some who identify as “supporters” of Palestinian rights, the grave charge of anti-Semitism is not to be taken lightly. As several of the essayists in this book point out, this highly fraught context gives the lobbying groups the perfect straw-man weapon to combat its opponents; and they wield it with a vengeance, in reckless disregard of the lives and livelihoods ruined in the process, and in reckless disregard of the important task of defanging the real anti-Semites.

The question becomes why—why are these extra-academic interests given such wide berth to operate on U.S. campuses? The answer, in part, has to do with the rise of the neoliberal university and the decline of faculty protections across the board. Kristofer J. Petersen-Overton, a doctoral candidate at the CUNY Graduate Center, situates his own persecution within the broader context in higher education—the increasing reliance on vulnerable adjunct labor, the steady elimination of tenure, and a prevalent “boardroom mentality” where administrators have become chiefly concerned with protecting “carefully cultivated brands.”

Lisa Rofel and Steven Salaita both draw pointed and sustained attention to the decline of the public university and its traditional commitment to the common good. In an era of “neoliberal graft,” where students are viewed as consumers, adjunct labor is exploited, and administrators command exorbitant salaries, we see a sharp increase in the profit-motives of upper management. In such a climate, wealthy donors, lobby groups, and board members are able to sway and even dictate hiring decisions and curriculum.

Though the death knell of academic freedom is tolling, all is not lost. The apt title of this book “We Will Not Be Silenced” indicates that the tables are beginning to turn. Despite cause for anger and outrage, these stories are leavened with encouraging lessons. In nearly every case, some small victory has been snatched from the jaws of defeat. With the unwavering support from scores national and international progressive and civil rights organizations, most of these scholars were eventually vindicated.

Despite appearances, the pro-Israel lobby is not winning these campus skirmishes. All of us who work for social justice should take heart and fight smart. We should embolden ourselves to speak out and assert our rights. We should donate and build stronger alliances with the organizations like the AAUP, the National Lawyers Guild, the ACLU, FIRE, Palestine Legal, and many others that have been steadfast in support of civil rights. We should denounce anti-Semitism where we find it, and strenuously educate on the immense difference between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism.

Those of us working in academia should purchase the book, read it, and lend it our colleagues and administrators so they too can strengthen their resolve to defend our campuses from these unseemly and costly attacks. Rather than squelching discourse and avoiding “controversy,” campus leaders—whether students, faculty, staff, or administrators—should help cultivate an atmosphere of intellectual debate based on time-tested principles of academic freedom.

Professors and students have a right to engage in research and to disseminate that research, even it challenges long-cherished dogma. Colleges and universities are sites traditionally dedicated to the dialogical process of learning where ideas are put forth, tested, and debated, then accepted or rejected on the merit of the arguments. The misuse of money and power to warp this process is not just damaging to the brave individuals who refuse to be silent, but to the entire project of participatory democracy.

In the latest analysis of the world’s top universities published by Times Higher Education (THE), UC Santa Cruz ranked third in research influence as measured by the number of times its faculty’s published work is cited by scholars around the world.

Published as part of the THE World University Rankings 2018, the analysis measured overall research influence based on the average number of citations per paper, using a database of almost 62 million citations to more than 12.4 million research publications published over five years, from 2012 to 2016.

With a citation score of 99.9, UC Santa Cruz is tied for third place with Stanford University. St. George’s University of London and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology were tied for first. UC Berkeley ranked just behind UCSC and Stanford with a citation score of 99.8.

The 2018 rankings list the top 1,000 universities in the world, comparing them in five areas: teaching (the learning environment); research (volume, income, and reputation); citations (research influence); international outlook (staff, students, and research); and industry income (knowledge transfer).

The research influence indicator looks at the role of universities in spreading new knowledge and ideas. As explained on the website for the World University Rankings, "The citations help to show us how much each university is contributing to the sum of human knowledge: they tell us whose research has stood out, has been picked up and built on by other scholars and, most importantly, has been shared around the global scholarly community to expand the boundaries of our understanding, irrespective of discipline."

UCSC’s overall ranking in the THE World University Rankings 2018 was 162 out of 1,000 institutions worldwide. In the United States, UC Santa Cruz ranked 55 out of 154 institutions.

https://alumni.ucsc.edu/year-of-alumni/index.html

Year of Alumni

UC Santa Cruz has designated 2018 as the Year of Alumni, a time to savor, celebrate, and promote the legacy of proud Banana Slugs who have made their mark as they've gone on to successful careers. Below we share profiles of alumni who embody the values and qualities that represent UC Santa Cruz—social justice, public service, environmental stewardship, a dedication to exploring the human condition, and a determination to change the world.