ReView
2026-08-13 01:00 - 2026-09-20 00:59, 2026-08-14 01:00 - 2026-09-21 00:59, 2026-08-15 01:00 - 2026-09-22 00:59, 2026-08-16 01:00 - 2026-09-23 00:59, 2026-08-17 01:00 - 2026-09-24 00:59 (America/Los_Angeles) | Mary Porter Sesnon Art Gallery, Baskin Service Road, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
Mary Porter Sesnon Art Gallery
August 13-September 19, 2026
Opening celebration and Artist Talk
Saturday, August 15, 2-4:30 p.m
Light refreshments will be served.
Summer Gallery Hours: Thursday-Saturday, 1-5pm
ReView: UC Santa Cruz Arts Alumni Exhibition features Arts Division alumni from the Monterey and San Francisco Bay Areas. Curated by Valéria Miranda, the Sesnon’s Director, ReView includes a wide variety of media and techniques highlighting the diversity of contemporary practice of alumni who graduated from 1972 to 2025. The exhibition title alludes to the portfolio critique process and suggests ideas of reflection and reevaluation—whether revisiting past work, rethinking materials, or tracing how a practice evolves over time.
This exhibition celebrates the creative path of artists who began their journeys at UC Santa Cruz. United by shared roots yet defined by distinct paths, the participating alumni reflect the lasting influence of the Arts Division programs. Their works speak to the spirit of inquiry, experimentation, and perseverance that has long shaped the university’s artistic community.
ReView presents an opportunity for the campus and larger community to see the professional practice of these artists who continue to build on the creative foundation that they received at UCSC and to inspire our current students, offering visualization of their own future artistic journeys after graduation.
ReView offers a unique opportunity for returning alumni to celebrate their creative expressions while reconnecting with classmates and the university community.
Admission is free and open to the public.
More Information

Graduate Preparation Program
2026-08-17 01:00 - 2026-09-11 00:59
The Graduate Preparation Program (GPP) is a four-week intensive non-credit course offered in person on the main campus prior to the fall quarter, which is open to all current and newly admitted international graduate students. It focuses on English for Academic Purposes (EAP), academic skills, and cultural orientation. The program also provides a foundation for transitioning into the Teaching Assistant role.
The course offers guided support with:

Seminar-style classroom discussion
Presentation and oral communication skills
Information on U.S. classroom culture; roles and responsibilities of faculty, Teaching Assistants, and students
Critical thinking: using evidence to support ideas
Research writing, citation, and avoiding plagiarism
Collaborative and project-based learning

A collaboration between the Graduate Division and Global Engagement, the Graduate Preparation Program provides a strong foundation for the U.S. classroom environment and university system, in addition to the opportunity to practice and master the language and academic skills needed for success.
For more information and to register, please visit our webpage.

Nikolakakis, M. (ECE) - Learned Gridless Representations of Cone Beam Computed Tomography Scans
2026-08-17 10:00 - 12:00 | Engineering 2, Engineering 2 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
Medical image representation has long been dominated by voxel-grid matrices. While
their inherent structure and order work efficiently for various linear transformations and
provide a seamless visualization method on monitors, they fail to preserve the topology
of the scan and to encode sparse information in a memory-efficient way. The recent emergence of machine learning-based continuous coordinate-based
scene representations such as neural radiance fields and Gaussian splatting has provided alternative representation techniques. These approaches overfit the weights of
a model by iterative differentiable rendering and have been shown to be more compact than grid representations. They are then able to perform novel view
synthesis from any given camera pose.
Off-grid representations translate directly to Cone Beam Computed Tomography
sparse-view acquisitions, where streaking and quantum noise artifacts are dominant.
Using differentiable rendering, a continuous representation is achieved, with interpolation providing a path to recover some of the lost signal.
In this dissertation, we apply a variety of methodologies, including Gaussian splatting, implicit occupancy fields, and Neural Attenuation Fields regularized with an
anatomic prior, to Cone Beam Computed Tomography reconstruction, and evaluate
their performance across a range of anatomic datasets. Our models show that learned
gridless representations achieve substantial memory reduction, recover signal under
extreme view sparsity, and preserve scene topology.
Event Host: Manolis Nikolakakis, Ph.D. Candidate, Electrical and Computer Engineering
Advisor: Razvan Marinescu
Zoom: https://ucsc.zoom.us/j/5964517596?pwd=[REDACTED]

Condon, C. (BMEB) - Genomic conflict across scales
2026-08-17 13:00 - 15:00 | Biomedical Sciences Building, 575 McLaughlin Drive
Genomes are often viewed as cooperative systems in which genes work together to support organismal function. Yet genetic elements can also act in ways that favor their own transmission or persistence, creating conflict within the genome. In this talk, I examine the evolutionary and functional consequences of such genomic conflict across three systems. First, I investigate segregation distortion in Arabidopsis hybrids and its potential role in the early evolution of reproductive isolation. Second, I characterize the population dynamics and functional effects of introners, mobile elements that generate new introns in the green alga Micromonas pusilla. Finally, I explore widespread splicing dysfunction in algal mating-type chromosomes and its consequences for transcript diversity. Together, these studies highlight how departures from genome cooperation can shape inheritance, genome evolution, and gene regulation.
Event Host: Chris Condon, Ph.D. Candidate, Biomolecular Engineering & Bioinformatics
Advisor: Russell Corbett-Detig

Build better chips
2026-08-17 18:00 - 19:00 | Silicon Valley Campus, 3175 Bowers Avenue, Santa Clara, CA, 95054, United States
Join us for an interactive discussion on current industry trends, emerging skills, and career opportunities, and learn how our Silicon Chip Design & Semiconductor Engineering courses are designed to help professionals build expertise, stay competitive, and achieve their educational and career goals.
Whether you’re looking to advance in your current role, transition into a new field, or expand your knowledge, this session is a great place to start.
Your speaker
Arvind Vidyarthi – M.S.E.E. is vice president of Silicon Design Engineering at Altera, where he leads SoC and IP physical design implementation, methodology, and automation. Arvind has served since 2022 as chair of the UCSC Silicon Valley Extension Silicon Chip Design & Semiconductor Engineering program, where he also sits on the VLSI engineering advisory group and mentors the next generation of design engineers.
Keep learning
The Silicon Chip Design & Semiconductor Engineering program presents this information session. Visit our program page for complete program details and a closer look at all upcoming courses.
Claim your seat today.

Nina Simon - My Sister Is Going To Kill Me
2026-08-17 19:00 | Bookshop Santa Cruz
What’s a family vacation without a little murder?

Bookshop Santa Cruz welcomes New York Times bestselling author Nina Simon (Mother-Daughter Murder Night) back to the store for a reading and signing of My Sister Is Going to Kill Me, another fun, family-centered whodunnit about two sisters who work together to find a killer as they raft down the rapids of the Grand Canyon.

Nina Simon writes crime fiction about strong women. She is the author of the New York Times-bestseller Mother-Daughter Murder Night, which was a Reese’s Book Club pick, a Golden Poppy Award winner, and a “best of 2023” selection for Amazon, Barnes & Noble, CrimeReads, and Library Journal. Before turning to fiction, Nina wore many hats: NASA engineer, slam poet, game designer, museum director, and nonprofit CEO. Her work on community participation in museums, libraries, parks, and theaters has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, NPR, and the TEDx stage. Born and raised in Los Angeles, Nina now lives off-the-grid in the Santa Cruz Mountains with her family. More information can be found on her website, ninaksimon.com.
More information at: Bookshop Santa Cruz – Nina Simon

Co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz.
