Keisha Ernst from the Catalyst Bio-Amendments and Compost Academy In Person Location: ISB 221 Zoom Link In this talk, Keisha will explore how biologically focused compost production differs from conventional composting systems designed primarily for waste diversion. She will discuss how microbial communities influence soil structure, nutrient cycling, plant resilience, and water dynamics—and how managing […]
Christopher Lang from the UCSC Environmental Studies Department In Person Location: ISB 221 Zoom Link Lang explores the politics of disposability in New Orleans, Louisiana, revealing how pollution intersects with Black community health, waste workers’ lives and livelihoods, and the city’s overall resilience in the face of increasing flood risk. Using a combination of methods […]
Presenter: Dr. Xun Tang, Stanford University Description: This talk covers an efficient numerical approach for compressing a high-dimensional discrete distribution function into a non-negative tensor train (NTT) format. The two settings we consider are variational inference and density estimation, whereby one has access to either the unnormalized analytic formula of the distribution or the samples […]
Presenter: Snigdha Panigrahi, Associate Professor, Department of Statistics, University of Michigan Description:Agglomerative hierarchical clustering is one of the most widely used approaches for exploring how observations in a dataset relate to each other. However, its greedy nature makes it highly sensitive to small perturbations in the data, often producing different clustering results and making it […]
Presenter Chenyu You, Stony Brook University Abstract In the rapidly growing area of machine learning, there is profound promise in crafting intelligent, data-driven methods for diverse real-world applications. Yet, in safety-critical domains like healthcare, some fundamental challenges remain: (1) The insufficiency of raw biomedical data emphasizes the need for data-efficient and robust learning approaches. (2) […]
Presenter: Dr. Newman, Associate Professor in the Department of Biomedical Data Science, Stanford University Description: Determining the factors that shape cell potency—the ability of a cell to differentiate into other cell types—is essential for understanding tissue biology in health and disease, including cancer. In previous work, we found that single-cell transcriptional diversity decreases across […]
Presenter: Richard “Ed” Green, Professor of Bimolecular Engineering @ UCSC Bio: Richard E. Green (Ed) was born in Atlanta, Georgia, USA in 1972. He graduated from the University of Georgia (B.Sc. […]
Presenter: Luat Vuong, Associate Professor in Mechanical Engineering, UC Riverside Description: Given the growing computational demands of machine learning, how can we scale approaches for sifting through large volumes of […]
Presented by: Edward Wang Description: “What does it actually look like to invent something? In this talk, I trace the decade-long journey of turning a smartphone into a blood pressure monitor, from […]
Sanya Cowal from the UCSC Environmental Studies Department In Person Location: ISB 221 Zoom Link One of the most pressing global challenges considers how to combine sustainable agricultural land use […]
Presenter: Riddhiman Bhattacharya, Postdoc, UCSC Description: We propose an active learning approach for dynamic fair resource allocation problems. In contrast to prior work that assumes full feedback from all agents […]
Presenter: Marcos Calegari Andrade, Assistant Professor, Chemistry and Biochemistry, UC Santa Cruz Description: In this talk, I will demonstrate how neural networks can represent the high-dimensional potential energy surfaces of […]
Presenter: Philipp Haller, KTH Royal Institute of Technology Abstract: Distributed programming is notoriously difficult. Not only are distributed systems concurrent, they pose additional challenges including data consistency and fault tolerance. […]
Presenter: Katherine Bonini, Senior Genetic Counselor @ Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai Description: It has long been argued that families are central to genomic medicine. Genomic risk, diagnosis, and management are rarely confined to a single individual, and separating patients’ interests from those of their relatives is often neither straightforward nor desirable. Despite this, […]
Presenter: Jaeyoung Lim, Postdoctoral Scholar at the Agile Robotics and Perception Lab at the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department, University of California, Berkeley Description: Monitoring large-scale environments is essential for natural hazard management, environmental process observation, and search and rescue operations. Yes, meaningful coverage of the target environment demands vast infrastructure and dense sensor […]
John Morgan from the UCSC Environmental Studies Department In Person Location: ISB 221 Zoom Link As outdoor recreation grows in popularity, its effects on wildlife remain poorly understood. This dissertation examines how outdoor recreational activity shapes the behavior of mountain lions (Puma concolor) in California’s Santa Cruz Mountains – a fragmented landscape where large carnivores […]
Presenter: Guan’ao Yan, Assistant Professor, Michigan State University Description: Single-cell and spatial transcriptomics technologies now let us map cellular diversity and tissue organization at high resolution, but the computational methods built to analyze these data are difficult to evaluate in a rigorous, reproducible way. Two key barriers are the lack of realistic synthetic data with […]
Presenter: Dr. Pulkit Dubey, Postdoc, UC Santa Cruz Description: Neural climate emulators such as NeuralGCM and LUCIE offer efficient, differentiable alternatives to General Circulation Models (GCMs), producing climate predictions at a fraction of the cost. While work to date has focused largely on predictive accuracy, we leverage differentiability to study control of long-horizon climatological targets. […]
Presenters: Prof. Karl-Erik Arzen (Co-Director of WASP and Lund University), Dr. Paul Townend (WASP Graduate School management and Umeå University), and Carl Magnus Bruhner (Linkoping University) Abstract: The Wallenberg AI, Autonomous Systems, and Software Program (WASP) is the largest research initiative in Swedish history, with a budget of over $700M and a research focus AI […]
Please join us for our BME 280B seminar series Thursday (5/7/26) in person at Biomed 200. The event will run from 11:40 AM to 1:15 PM and feature our 4th year grad talks. 11:40AM – 11:50AM: Jodie Jacobs Topic/Title: Impact of Wolbachia infection on host gene expression in pseudotime 11:53AM – 12:03PM: Ariana Cisneros Topic/Title: Engineering tunable […]