The University of California, Santa Cruz is a public land-grant research university in Santa Cruz, California. It is one of the ten campuses in the University of California system. Located on Monterey Bay, on the edge of the coastal community of Santa Cruz, the campus lies on 2,001 acres (810 ha) of rolling, forested hills overlooking the Pacific Ocean. As of Fall 2022, its ten residential colleges enroll some 17,500 undergraduate and 2,000 graduate students.
Santa Cruz County, officially the County of Santa Cruz, is a county on the Pacific coast of the U.S. state of California. As of the 2020 census, the population was 270,861. The county seat is Santa Cruz. Santa Cruz County comprises the Santa Cruz–Watsonville, CA Metropolitan Statistical Area, which is also included in the San Jose–San Francisco–Oakland, CA Combined Statistical Area. The county is on the California Central Coast, south of the San Francisco Bay Area region. The county forms the northern coast of the Monterey Bay, with Monterey County forming the southern coast.
TED Conferences, LLC is an American-Canadian non-profit media organization that posts international talks online for free distribution under the slogan "ideas worth spreading". It was founded by Richard Saul Wurman and Harry Marks in February 1984 as a technology conference, in which Mickey Schulhof gave a demo of the compact disc that was invented in October 1982. Its main conference has been held annually since 1990. It covers almost all topics—from science to business to global issues—in more than 100 languages.
Rafael Edward Cruz is an American politician, attorney, and political commentator serving as the junior United States senator from Texas since 2013. A member of the Republican Party, Cruz was the solicitor general of Texas from 2003 to 2008.
Chris Anderson is a British-American businessman who is the head of TED, a non-profit organization that provides idea-based talks and hosts an annual conference in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Previously he founded Future Publishing.
Fish Rap Live!, also known as FRL!, is a triquarterly alternative humor publication at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
The UCSC Silicon Valley Initiatives are a series of educational and research activities which together increase the presence of the University of California in Silicon Valley. To that end, UC Santa Cruz has set up a 90,000 square-foot satellite campus called the University of Santa Cruz Silicon Valley Campus (SVC), currently located on Bowers street in Santa Clara, California, where it has been since April 2016 The Initiatives, still in the early stages of their development, have had ambitious hopes attached to them by UCSC, among them the possibility of a home for the University's long-planned graduate school of management and the Bio|Info|Nano R&D Institute. It currently houses professional the SVLink incubator-accelerator program, programs and a distance education site for the UCSC Baskin School of Engineering, the UCSC Silicon Valley Extension, the Office of Industry Alliances and Technology Commercialization leadership, and the University of California's online learning program, UC Scout.
Ryan Coonerty is an American politician, businessman, professor, and author who served as the Third District Supervisor for California's Santa Cruz County, representing western portions of the county including Santa Cruz, Bonny Doon, and Davenport. Coonerty twice previously served as Mayor of Santa Cruz, the county seat of Santa Cruz County, in 2008 and 2011. In addition to holding elected office, Coonerty co-founded NextSpace Coworking, and is a lecturer for the Legal Studies department at the University of California, Santa Cruz and the Panetta Institute for Public Policy at CSU Monterey Bay. He is the author of Etched in Stone: Enduring Words From Our Nation's Monuments, published by the National Geographic Society (NGS) and co-author of The Rise of the Naked Economy - How to Benefit from the Changing Workplace, published by Macmillan-Palgrave. He is the cohost of An Honorable Profession, a NewDEAL Leaders’ podcast profiling emerging leaders in the Democratic Party, including Pete Buttigieg, Adrian Fontes and Mallory McMorrow.
David Haussler is an American bioinformatician known for his work leading the team that assembled the first human genome sequence in the race to complete the Human Genome Project and subsequently for comparative genome analysis that deepens understanding the molecular function and evolution of the genome.
Kenneth Vivian Thimann was an English-American plant physiologist and microbiologist known for his studies of plant hormones, which were widely influential in agriculture and horticulture. He isolated and determined the structure of auxin, the first known plant hormone. He spent most of his early career (1935–1965) at Harvard University, and his later career at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is credited with identifying indole-3-acetic acid as an auxin.
The Cesar Chavez Convocation was an annual event at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC) during the month of May, commemorating Cesar Chavez and his legacy. Keynote speakers were invited to partake in the convocation to honor Cesar Chavez by relating social justice issues to the Hispanic and Latino community on campus. The convocation aimed to create a space where students could have dialogue about engaging with social justice issues and leadership. This annual event was organized largely by the Chicanx/Latinx Resource Center, also known as El Centro, and students of UC Santa Cruz. The event was open to the Santa Cruz community and was free of charge. The 16th annual convocation took place in 2019, with a focus on community organization. In 2020, the event was renamed to Nuestras Raíces: The Art of Community Empowerment.
Constance "Connie" Mary Rockosi is a professor and former department chair in the Astronomy and Astrophysics Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She earned her PhD in 2001 and helped design the camera for the telescope that was used as part of the initial Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). She also was in charge of the SDSS-III domain for the Sloan Extension for Galactic Understanding and Exploration (SEGUE) project and is the primary investigator on SEGUE-2. Her focuses involve the study of the Milky Way galaxy, with a focus on the evolution that it took to reach its current state.
David Wilson Deamer is an American biologist and Research Professor of Biomolecular Engineering at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Deamer has made significant contributions to the field of membrane biophysics. His work led to a novel method of DNA sequencing and a more complete understanding of the role of membranes in the origin of life.
The UC Santa Cruz Banana Slugs are the athletic teams that represent the University of California, Santa Cruz. The Banana Slugs compete in Division III of the NCAA, mostly in the Coast to Coast Athletic Conference (C2C). There are fifteen varsity sports – men's and women's basketball, tennis, soccer, volleyball, swimming and diving, cross country, track & field, and women's golf. UCSC teams have been Division III nationally ranked in tennis, soccer, men's volleyball, and swimming. UCSC maintains a number of successful club sides.
Leomie Jasmin Francis Anderson is a British fashion model, television presenter, and activist. She has walked in four consecutive Victoria's Secret Fashion Shows from 2015 to 2018, and became a Victoria's Secret Angel in 2019. Anderson was included in a 2020 Forbes '30 Under 30' list for the art & culture category.
Clarice Evone Phelps (née Salone) is an American nuclear chemist researching the processing of radioactive transuranic elements at the US Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). She was part of ORNL's team that collaborated with the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research to discover tennessine. The International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) recognizes her as the first African-American woman to be involved with the discovery of a chemical element.
The 2020 Santa Cruz graduate students' strike was a wildcat strike launched against the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC).
The UC Santa Cruz Genomics Institute is a public research institution based in the Jack Baskin School of Engineering at the University of California, Santa Cruz. The Genomics Institute's scientists and engineers work on a variety of projects related to genome sequencing, computational biology, large data analytics, and data sharing. The institute also maintains a number of software tools used by researchers worldwide, including the UCSC Genome Browser, Dockstore, and the Xena Browser.
