Events

CM Seminar - "Building SimCity: How to Put the World in a Machine"
2025-11-03 12:30 - 13:30 (America/Los_Angeles) | Engineering 2, Engineering 2 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
Presented by: Chaim Gingold

Description: As play is intrinsic to humanity, it should come as no surprise that the history of computing is veined with playful simulations and games of all kinds. From the Balinese cockfight to Los Alamos’s Monte Carlo simulations, play and games, in all their kaleidoscopic glory, reflect the diverse cultures and communities of those who make and play them.
This talk focuses upon SimCity, the genre-defying urban planning hit from 1989, and the people who made it. We’ll examine how SimCity’s design counts urban planning, videogames, graphical user interfaces, and complexity science among its many influences. This set the stage for SimCity’s reception and enabled Maxis, SimCity’s developer, to establish relationships with wide-ranging communities: Nintendo, the Santa Fe Institute, Wall Street venture capitalists, and more.
Focusing on people such as developers, managers, and investors sheds light on the messy process of software development—a negotiation between individuals, their aspirations and worldviews, and shape-shifting technologies. Springing forth from this mess came The Sims, which required an extraordinary amount of research and development. But this same mess also thwarted Maxis’s solvency and its attempts to bring The Sims to market. Ultimately, we’ll see how SimCity, Maxis, and The Sims—like games, play, and software more generally—reflect their time and place, and the people who make them.

Bio: Chaim Gingold is the author of Building SimCity: How to Put the World in a Machine (MIT Press), which Stewart Brand called “one of the best origin stories ever told and the best account I’ve seen of how innovation actually occurs in computerdom.” Gingold began his design career apprenticed to Will Wright on Spore, where his chief accomplishment was designing the critically acclaimed Spore Creature Creator. His projects, like Earth: A Primer, a science book made of interactive toys, have been featured by Wired, CNN, and the New York Times.

Hosted by: Professor Nathan Altice
When: Monday, November 3, 2025 from 12:30PM to 1:30PM
Location:
IN-PERSON @ UCSC Main Campus, E2-280.
Viewing room @ SVC 3212.
LUNCH WILL BE PROVIDED AT BOTH LOCATIONS! Faculty and students are highly encouraged to attend.
Zoom info:
https://ucsc.zoom.us/j/95438112782?pwd=[REDACTED]
Meeting ID: 954 3811 2782
Passcode: [REDACTED]

Statistics Seminar: Topological Clustering: from Multilayer Networks to Climate Resiliency and Beyond
2025-11-03 16:00 - 17:00
Presenter: Professor Yulia R. Gel, Virginia Tech
Description: Multilayer networks continue to gain significant attention in many areas of study, particularly, due to their high utility in modeling interdependent systems such as critical infrastructures, human brain connectome, and socio-environmental ecosystems. However, clustering of multilayer networks, especially, using the information on higher order interactions of the system entities, yet remains in its infancy. We discuss a new topological approach for multilayer network clustering, based on the rationale to group nodes not using the pairwise connectivity patterns or relationships between observations recorded at two individual nodes, but based on how similar in shape their local neighborhoods are at various resolution scales. We quantify shapes of local node neighborhoods using persistence diagrams and then consider either single linkage or k-means forms of topological clustering, which allows us to systematically account for the important heterogeneous higher-order properties of node interactions within and in-between network layers and to integrate information from the node neighbors. In case of topological k-means, we also show that casting it into an empirical risk minimization framework using reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces allows us to derive clustering stability guarantees, similarly to the Euclidean k-means, i.e., property that most existing topological clustering methods lack. We illustrate our topological clustering methods in application to assessing climate-induced risks in insurance and COVID-19 biosurveillance.
Bio: Yulia R. Gel is a Professor in the Department of Statistics at Virginia Tech. Her research interests focus on mathematical and statistical foundations of data science, topological and geometric methods in artificial intelligence and machine learning, risk analytics, and graph learning, with applications to assessing resilience of complex systems, digital twins, and early warning mechanisms. She holds a Ph.D in Mathematics, followed by a postdoctoral position in Statistics at the University of Washington. Prior to joining Virginia Tech, she was a tenured faculty member at the University of Waterloo, Canada and University of Texas at Dallas. She also held visiting positions at Johns Hopkins University, University of California, Berkeley, and the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences, Cambridge University, UK. In her recent stint (2021-2025) as Program Director in National Science Foundation (NSF) at the Division of Mathematical Sciences (DMS) and Directorate for Technology, Innovation and Partnerships (TIP), she has served as a cognizant officer for various inter-agency interdisciplinary research programs at the interface of mathematical sciences and artificial intelligence, including the NSF-FDA-NIH Foundations for Digital Twins as Catalyzers of Biomedical Technological Innovation (FDT-BioTech) and the NSF-NIH Smart Health and Biomedical Research in the Era of Artificial Intelligence and Advanced Data Science (SCH). She has authored more than 150 publications in top statistical, data mining and machine learning venues such as NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, AAAI, KDD, IJCAI, and PNAS and served as senior area chair for ICML and NeurIPS. Her research has been continuously supported by ONR, NASA, and NSF. She is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association (ASA), recipient of the NSF2023 Director’s Award, NSF STARS Awards, and has multiple Best Paper Awards from the ASA Section on Statistics for Defense and National Security.
Hosted by: Professor Paul Parker

AM Seminar: In Search of Stratified Turbulence
2025-11-03 16:00 - 17:00
Presenter: Colm-cille Patrick Caulfield, Professor, DAMTP, University of Cambridge
Description: Statically stable density stratification is ubiquitous in geophysical flows, with the atmosphere, lakes and oceans all typically having an average density distribution that decreases upwards in a gravitational field. Due to the associated stabilising effect of the buoyancy force, it would seem intuitive that such statically stable density distributions should suppress vertical motions, relative to horizontal motions. Such inevitable anisotropy complicates even further developing an understanding of turbulence in density-stratified fluids. Stratified turbulence is not just a fascinating (and inherently complicated) research challenge in classical physics, but also a key component of the global climate system, as stratified turbulence has a leading order effect on the transport of heat and other scalars such as carbon dioxide, pollutants etc in the world’s oceans and atmosphere. Indeed, how stratified turbulence can actually be `born’ and then `survive’ for a significant period, hence irreversibly mixing significant scalar quantities, are open questions, associated with ongoing controversy in the global research community. In this talk, I will review some recent studies by my collaborators that have advanced our understanding of various key properties of stratified turbulence and mixing, while also demonstrating that there is still much more to learn about this fascinating and vitally important class of fluid flows.

Bio: Colm-cille P. Caulfield is Professor of Environmental and Industrial Fluid Dynamics in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics (DAMTP) at the University of Cambridge, and a faculty member of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Flows (IEEF). He is also a Professorial Fellow in Mathematics at Churchill College, Cambridge, and the Co-Director (Science) of the University’s Institute of Computing for Climate Science (ICCS), which studies and supports the role of software engineering, computer science, AI and data science within climate science. Prof. Caulfield’s personal research interests include instability, turbulence transition and turbulent mixing processes in stratified flows, with particular focus on understanding and improving the modelling of heat transport in the world’s oceans. His undergraduate studies were at the University of Ulster at Coleraine, graduating with a BSc in Mathematics in 1987. He then studied for his Masters and PhD in Fluid Mechanics at DAMTP under the supervision of Prof Paul Linden FRS, defending his thesis on stratified shear instabilities in 1991. Following postdoctoral training in the Department of Physics at the University of Toronto and the Department of Engineering Science at Hokkaido University, he was a lecturer in the School of Mathematics at the University of Bristol from January 1995 to June 1999. Prof. Caulfield subsequently joined the faculty of the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the University of California, San Diego for the period July 1999 to June 2005. Following tenure at UCSD, Prof. Caulfield joined the BP Institute (now IEEF) and DAMTP in July 2005. Prof. Caulfield is the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Fluid Mechanics, the Chair of the European Mechanics Society (Euromech) Turbulence Conference Committee, and served as the Head (ie Dept Chair) of DAMTP January 2020-September 2025. He was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society (Division of Fluid Dynamics) in 2014.

Hosted by: Professor Julie Simons

Stand Out in Your Job Search: Tips from Veeva
2025-11-04 11:00 - 13:00
Are you an upcoming grad passionate about purpose-driven work?
Come join Katie Groth, a University Recruiter at Veeva, as she shares valuable insights on how to make your resume, job applications, and interviews stand out. You’ll also have the chance to ask your own questions and get personalized advice on these topics.
During the session, Katie will also provide insight into the Engineering Development Program, a unique program at Veeva designed to support new grads entering the software engineering space.
If you’re exploring full-time or internship opportunities for Summer 2026, this is a great chance to connect with us!
What we look for:

Bachelor’s Degree with a 3.0 GPA or higher
Strong computer science fundamentals, including operating systems, compilers, and algorithms
Proficiency in Java

If you have disability-related needs, please contact the Career Success office at csuccess@ucsc.edu or (831) 459-4420 as soon as possible.
YOU BELONG HERE
Programs and services are open to all, consistent with state and federal law, as well as the University of California’s nondiscrimination policies. Every initiative—whether a student service, faculty program, or community event—is designed to be accessible, inclusive, and respectful of all identities. To learn more, please visit UC Nondiscrimination Statement or Nondiscrimination Policy for UC Publications.

Top Grad Schools in International Relations
2025-11-05 10:00 - 11:00 | Cervantes and Velasquez Conference Room – Bay Tree Conference Center, 420 Hagar Dr, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Georgetown SFS, Columbia SIPA, Johns Hopkins SAIS, and Tufts Fletcher will be visiting UCSC! This is a great opportunity for students to hear from all four schools at the same time. We will cover the following topics:

The Graduate School Application Process (how to stand out in your applications, and what grad schools are looking for)
Admissions Requirements & Timeline
Financial Aid and Scholarships
Career Opportunities in Public Policy & International Affairs

If you have disability-related needs, please contact the Career Success office at csuccess@ucsc.edu or (831) 459-4420 as soon as possible.
YOU BELONG HERE
Programs and services are open to all, consistent with state and federal law, as well as the University of California’s nondiscrimination policies. Every initiative—whether a student service, faculty program, or community event—is designed to be accessible, inclusive, and respectful of all identities. To learn more, please visit UC Nondiscrimination Statement or Nondiscrimination Policy for UC Publications.

CSE Colloquium: Mitigating Data Scarcity via Simulation by Roozbeh Mottaghi
2025-11-05 11:00 - 12:15 | Engineering 2, Engineering 2 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
Presenter: Roozbeh Mottaghi, University of Washington
Abstract: Data has revolutionized progress across AI fields like natural language processing and computer vision. Yet, in robotics, data collection remains a significant challenge: robots must interact with complex, dynamic environments, making the process slow, costly, and difficult to scale. In this talk, I will discuss how simulation is transforming the landscape of robotics research by addressing these data bottlenecks. I will introduce Habitat 3.0, a 3D simulator designed for training and evaluating robotic agents in dynamic environments that include human interactions. Focusing on collaborative human-robot tasks, I will present PARTNR, a simulation benchmark designed to rigorously evaluate planning and reasoning in interactive settings. I will share key insights from this benchmark, revealing both the impressive capabilities of current LLMs and the significant challenges they encounter when faced with the complexities of real-world environments.
Bio: Roozbeh Mottaghi is a Senior Research Scientist Manager at FAIR and an Affiliate Associate Professor in Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington. Prior to joining FAIR, he was the Research Manager of the Perceptual Reasoning and Interaction Research (PRIOR) group at the Allen Institute for AI (AI2). He obtained his PhD in Computer Science in 2013 from the University of California, Los Angeles. After PhD, he joined the Computer Science Department at Stanford University as a post-doctoral researcher. His research mainly focuses on embodied AI, reasoning via perception, and learning via interaction, and his work on large-scale Embodied AI received the Outstanding Paper Award at NeurIPS 2022.

Faculty Host: Professor Mohsen Lesani

Location: Engineering 2, E2-180

*Refreshments such as coffee and pastries will be provided.

Zoom: https://ucsc.zoom.us/j/93445911992?pwd=[REDACTED]

Joint Senate/Admin Forum — Development of Achievement Relative to Opportunity (ARO) Guidelines for UC Santa Cruz Personnel Review
2025-11-05 15:00 - 17:00 | https://docs.google.com/document/d/1IUD4vjdJHS6XDiBo5hTVE9iS3oCmJubXTY2xkYhffwg/edit?tab=t.0
The Committee on Academic Personnel (CAP), VPAA Ravelo, and iCP/EVC Koch will host a working Forum on the Development of Achievement Relative to Opportunity (ARO) Guidelines for UC Santa Cruz Personnel Review on November 5, 2025 from 3:00pm to 5:00pm via Zoom. Please see this document for history, context, and draft proposals for ARO guidelines.
With stakeholder feedback from this forum, CAP, the VPAA, and the iCP/EVC aim to develop comprehensive guidelines for ARO in the personnel review process that consider disruptive, external impacts on academic advancement. This online Senate forum will gather broad input from Senate faculty on a preliminary proposal for ARO guidelines with the goal of implementing the guidelines in review cycles beginning fall quarter 2026. Please join us for this working forum to share your valuable input and feedback, and assist us in creating a set of guidelines that best serves our campus and faculty. We hope you will bring examples of impacts and thoughts on how we can best assess impacted work.

American Agitators Screening at Cabrillo
2025-11-05 16:30 - 19:00 | Cabrillo College, 6500 Soquel Dr., Aptos, CA, 95003, United States
American Agitators comes to Santa Cruz! We cordially invite you to the screening of American Agitators with a discussion and a Free Dinner! Spaces are limited, so RSVP today!
Sponsored by Santa Cruz Local, Cabrillo College, COPA, UCSC Dolores Huerta Research Center for the Americas, UCSC Center for Labor and Community, and UCSC Institute for Social Transformation.
AMERICAN AGITATORS captures the remarkable story of organizing for social change in the U.S. through the work Fred Ross Sr. and many others such as iconic organizers Dolores Huerta and Fred Ross Jr. as well as current ones, all of whom have devoted their lives to the pursuit of justice and equality.
For over 50 years Ross led a groundbreaking organizing approach that improved the lives of thousands and reverberates in organizing strategies today. From organizing Dust Bowl refugees to helping Japanese-Americans find jobs and housing after release from the internment camps to challenging KKK activity by organizing civil unity leagues in California that led to the integration of local school boards across California’s Citrus Belt, Ross’ work with the Mendez case laid the foundation for the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown vs Board of Education and his mentorship of legendary organizers Cesar Chavez and Huerta led to the success of the United Farmworkers.
Generations of organizers and activists, many of whom are featured in AMERICAN AGITATORS, stand on the shoulders of Ross and his innovative organizing tactics. Evidence of Ross’ impact is illustrated in the case examples the film explores: in Atlanta, where Fight For 15 organizers demand an increased minimum wage and the unionization of workers across the Southern states; in Las Vegas where hotel workers organize for fair wages and to get out the vote; in Oakland, where teachers, families and community members forged a fair contract with the Oakland school district.
The documentary demonstrates the efficacy of member-led movements built through patience and by listening.
Award-winning filmmaker Raymond Telles has made American Agitators to illustrate how collective action can create long term, positive change especially at a critical moment in American history.
“Bringing Fred’s life to the screen is the medicine our society needs right now. He empowered people to be engaged in the democratic process.”
-Dolores Huerta, February 2022
View: American Agitators Premier Trailer
Check us out: American Agitators

The UC Santa Cruz Kraw Lecture Series presents: Stars to Soil: A Journey from the Big Bang to Planet Earth
2025-11-05 17:30 - 19:30 | Silicon Valley Campus, 3175 Bowers Avenue, Santa Clara, CA, 95054, United States
In this Kraw lecture, Professor Alexie Leauthaud will present the latest results on the nature of our universe, including groundbreaking and prize-winning new results on the nature of dark energy. Leauthaud will discuss our current understanding of the basic ingredients of our Universe and will explain why recent results from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument Collaboration (DESI) collaboration made international headline news earlier this year. She will speculate on what this might mean for the future of our Universe. Zooming into planet Earth, Professor Leauthaud will then explain why astronomers are increasingly becoming involved in the fight against climate change. She will discuss her own journey in recognizing the predicament of life on this blue planet will conclude with a big picture view of the challenges that lie ahead.

In-Person Reception: 5:30 p.m.
Lecture: 6–7 p.m.

Register Now

A Joyful Noise—video, music, panel discussion, and fellowship
2025-11-05 19:30 - 21:30 | Music Center Recital Hall, 400 McHenry Road, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
Audiences are invited to listen, share, and express ideas and feelings about individual and collective struggles in this interdisciplinary event featuring music, arts, science, and creative videography:

Video screening (Art)
Musical interlude
Video screening (STEM)
Panel discussion with Q&A
Light refreshments with continued conversation/fellowship in the lobby

This event features live performances—Karlton Hester (tenor sax and composer of electronic score), akua naru (word), Tammy Hall (piano), Pierpaolo Polzonetti (clarinet; guest professor from UC Davis), and Jing Zhou (Guzheng)—and videography by Patricia Saucedo, Katarina Fink, and Nanaiya Hester. Video participants include Karlton Hester (electronic music score and tenor saxophone), Fahima Ife and Renaldo Wilson (UCSC Critical Race & Ethnic Studies), akua naru (UCSC Music Department), Mandjou Kone (UCSC Department of Performance, Play & Design), Angel Riotutor (director of the American Indian Resource Center and People of Color Sustainability Collective), and Chari Glogovac-Smith (UCSC Film and Digital Media Department).
This event is presented as a collaboration between Arts Division and STEM Associate Deans of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI), including: Marcella Gomez, associate professor/associate dean for DEI with the Jack Baskin School of Engineering; Pedro Morales-Almazan, associate teaching professor/associate dean for DEI with the Division of Physical and Biological Sciences (PBSci); Karlton Hester, professor/associate dean for DEI with the Arts Division; and Anju Reejhsinghani, vice chancellor and chief diversity officer at UC Santa Cruz.
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ADMISSION
– FREE and open to the public
– Doors are scheduled to open 30 minutes prior to event start time
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VISITOR PARKING
– Parking by permit, ParkMobile, or $5 cash/credit via the on-site parking attendant
– Arts Lot #126 is the closest parking lot to the event
– Visitors with DMV placards or plates may park for free in DMV spaces, Medical spaces, or ParkMobile spaces without additional payment, or in timed zones for longer than the posted time.
– More information provided by UCSC Transportation & Parking Services (TAPS)
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This program is open to all members of the public consistent with state and federal law.

BME 280B Seminar: Anne Nakamoto, Alan Zhang, Shelbi Russell
2025-11-06 11:40 - 13:15 | Physical Sciences Building, Physical Sciences Building, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
Presenter 1: Anne Nakamoto, BME PhD Candidate, Corbett-Detig Lab, UC Santa Cruz
Talk: Investigating deleterious mutation burden across populations and landscapes in the California Conservation Genomics Project
Description: Biodiversity is being lost at an accelerated rate due in part to anthropogenic forces, posing a threat to the sustainability of Earth’s ecosystems as well as to human health. A major goal of conservation genomics is to use genomic data to understand population health, which can inform management decisions for the preservation of biodiversity. The California Conservation Genomics Project (CCGP) is an extensive dataset containing species of conservation interest sampled across California, allowing a landscape genomics approach to conservation. Among the many metrics that can be used to assess population health is genetic load, which refers to the reduction in fitness imposed by deleterious mutations. In this work, we construct a bioinformatic analysis framework to identify deleterious genomic variants in CCGP species based on evolutionary constraint. This allows us to investigate patterns in genetic burden across populations and the landscape of California.
Presenter 2: Alan Zhang, BME PhD Candidate, Corbett-Detig Lab, UC Santa Cruz
Talk: Scalable Strain-Level Metagenomic Deconvolution and Assembly Using Pangenome Mutation-Annotated Networks
Description: Strain-level deconvolution of metagenomic samples is essential for pathogen surveillance, mixed infection diagnosis, and evolutionary genomics, yet remains computationally challenging as genomic databases expand. Existing methods scale poorly with database size or rely exclusively on single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) information. SNP-based approaches rely on mutation-annotated trees and thus require well-established reference genomes, limiting their applicability to divergent species that lack alignable root references. We present panMAMA (panMAN Metagenomic Assignment and Metagenomic Assembly), a method that leverages the pangenome Mutation-Annotated Network (panMAN) data structure to enable accurate strain-level quantification across both closely related and divergent genomes. By employing k-min-mer-based pseudo-chaining with a seed-annotated tree index, panMAMA achieves substantial computational speedup compared to existing k-mer-based tools while maintaining high accuracy. We demonstrate that panMAMA accurately deconvolves both closely related SARS-CoV-2 genomes and divergent HIV and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) genomes, outperforming existing tools including Freyja on simulated wastewater samples. Through a hybrid heuristic and maximum likelihood approach for read assignment and consensus calling, panMAMA effectively recovers variant genomes from low-heterogeneity samples of divergent species. These results establish panMAMA as a scalable and accurate platform that extends strain-level metagenomic analysis to previously intractable highly divergent species.
Presenter 3: Shelbi Russell, PhD, UC Santa Cruz, Ph.D., Organismic & Evol Bio, Harvard, PostDoc MCDB, UC Santa Cruz
Description: Many animals harbor bacterial symbionts that manipulate host reproduction to enhance bacterial survival and transmission. Obligate intracellular symbionts, such as Wolbachia pipientis, are particularly adept at host manipulation, influencing reproductive biology and even blocking viral replication. These bacterially induced traits have been harnessed in field studies to control mosquito populations and limit the spread of human pathogens like Dengue and Zika viruses. Despite these promising applications, the molecular mechanisms underlying Wolbachia’s interactions with host cells remain poorly understood. Furthermore, even less is known about the implications of these symbionts spreading to non-target hosts in the ecosystem. Previous work from my lab tackled these questions in vivo: we discovered that the wMel strain of Wolbachia can enhance host fertility and we discovered that even extremely low rates of horizontal symbiont transmission among hosts can influence bacterial genome evolution. However, in vivo systems offer limited resolution to identify the precise cellular mechanisms of fertility enhancement and the real-time genomic impacts of horizontal transmission. Here, we use an in vitro Drosophila system to 1) identify the cell type-specific impacts of Wolbachia infection on host-microbe interactions and 2) characterize how strains interact within host tissues during mixed infections. This simplified, easy to sample system enabled us to concentrate the effects of host cell type on Wolbachia gene expression and to control de novo strain infections and mixtures. Through these experiments, we discovered that different host cell types induce differential Wolbachia gene expression that feeds back to alter host gene expression and epigenetic silencing. These findings have motivated on-going single cell RNAseq work to resolve the process at the single cell level, during de novo infections. Results from the experimental mixed infections revealed highly reproducible strain and cell type-specific dynamics. We will leverage these discoveries to understand strain-specific tissue tropisms and how multiple strains can co-exist as superinfections in nature, which will inform future biocontrol strategies.
Bio: Shelbi is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biomolecular Engineering at UCSC. She started her lab in 2022, after completing her PhD at Harvard University in 2016 and performing her postdoctoral work at UCSC. Her passion for studying symbiotic systems began as an undergraduate researcher at the University of Kansas describing new tapeworm species. She transitioned to studying the evolutionary genomics of bacterial-animal mutualisms in her PhD and was awarded the UC Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellowship and the NIH Career Development Award (K99) to test genomic hypotheses in the Wolbachia-Drosophila model system during her postdoc. As faculty, she is working to learn how hosts and microbes function and evolve so we can engineer associations for biological control. She has authored 24 papers and obtained $2.75 million in funding. Her interdisciplinary training makes her uniquely qualified to lead these investigations and has enabled novel breakthroughs in our understanding of symbiont evolution and microbe-induced host phenotypes.
Hosted by: Professor Josh Stuart, BME Department
Room: PSB-240

Campus to Career: Job Talk with Rebecca Hernandez, Community Archivist
2025-11-06 12:00 - 13:00 | https://events.ucsc.edu/event/campus-to-career-job-talk-with-rebecca-hernandez-community-archivist/
Wondering what you can do with your Arts or Humanities degree? Come hear from a real professional on our campus with a background in both. Rebecca Hernandez is the inaugural Community Archivist at the UCSC University Library. In this job talk, she will tell us about her educational journey as a first-generation transfer student and share insights and reflections from her professional path. If you are interested in careers in higher education, museums, or archives, this event is for you!
Register on Handshake here
Learn more about Rebecca:
Rebecca Hernandez earned a PhD in American Studies, specializing in American Indian art and material culture. She also holds an MA in American Indian Studies and an MFA in Exhibition Design and Museum Studies. With a wealth of experience in higher education, Rebecca has worked as both an administrator and a student affairs professional. Currently serving as the inaugural Community Archivist at the UC Santa Cruz University Library, she collaborates with community members to preserve the rich history and cultural heritage of Santa Cruz County.
Hosted by UCSC Humanities Division and UCSC Arts Division

Applied Microeconomics and Trade Seminar Series presents: Matt Pecenco
2025-11-06 13:40 - 15:00 | Engineering 2, Engineering 2 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
Applied Microeconomics and Trade Seminar
Date: Thursday, November 6, 2025
Time: 1:40-3:00 p.m.
Location: E2-499

Speaker: Matt Pecenco
Title: Orlando Bravo Assistant Professor of Economics
Affiliation: Brown University
Host: Ariel Zucker

Seminar title: Conviction, Incarceration, and Policy Effects in the Criminal Justice System

ABSTRACT: The criminal justice system affects millions of Americans through criminal convictions and incarceration. In this paper, we introduce a new method for credibly estimating the effects of both conviction and incarceration using randomly assigned judges as instruments for treatment. Misdemeanor convictions, especially for defendants with a shorter criminal record, cause an increase in the number of new offenses committed over the following five years. Incarceration on more serious felony charges, in contrast, reduces recidivism during the period of incapacitation, but has no effect after release. Our method allows the researcher to isolate specific treatment effects of interest as well as estimate the effect of broader policies; we find that courts could reduce crime by dismissing marginal charges against defendants accused of misdemeanors, with larger reductions among first-time defendants and those facing more serious charges.

Artist Talk for "Sculptures by Doyle Foreman: A Retrospective"
2025-11-06 15:00 - 16:00 | Mary Porter Sesnon Art Gallery, Baskin Service Road, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
Join Doyle Foreman for a talk with the artist as part of the Mary Porter Sesnon Art Gallery’s fall exhibition, Sculptures by Doyle Foreman: A Retrospective, which celebrates the career of metal sculptor and UC Santa Cruz Professor Emeritus Doyle Foreman. Throughout his seven-decade career, Foreman sculpted visceral reflections of his experiences with metal and the American landscape, forging a unique path in American Black sculpture.
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ADMISSION
– FREE and open to the public
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FULL SCHEDULE OF EVENTS
Exhibition: September 25–December 7, 2024
Opening Celebration: Wednesday, October 9, 5:00–7:00 p.m.
Artist Talk: Wednesday, November 6, 3:00-4:00 p.m.
Guided Public Tours: Saturdays at 1:00 p.m. starting November 24
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PARKING
Lot 124 & 125 are the closest parking lots to the gallery
Parking is $5 via ParkMobile or online permit
TAPS provides additional parking information
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This program is open to all members of the public consistent with state and federal law.

Indignant Liberalism: Political Protest and Generational Change in El Salvador
2025-11-06 15:00 - 17:00 | Bay Tree Building, Student Union, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
In 2013 anthropologist Ellen Moodie embedded with indignados—young middle-class protestors demanding that the government live up to its liberal commitments—to better understand the course of political change since the civil war. In this talk she discusses her forthcoming book, which starts with her work with urban activists of what she calls the “post-postwar” generation. She argues that theirs is only the latest demographic disappointed with liberalism in practice. Moodie looks back not only to the 1992 United Nations-brokered peace accords, which ended El Salvador’s twelve-year civil war, but also to a nineteenth-century “racial liberalism” that saw descendants of colonists “civilizing” Indigenous people while dispossessing them of lands and mobilizing them for labor. Today, the failure to make good on the promises of postwar liberalism has inspired robust support for strongman Nayib Bukele. Moodie argues that El Salvador’s case, though inflected by local concerns, is not unique. Rather, it is another stark demonstration of how liberalism’s imaginary social contract gives rise to populist authoritarianism.
Ellen Moodie is Associate Professor of Anthropology and director of the Global Studies program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She has been carrying our research in El Salvador for more than 30 years. Her publications include El Salvador in the Aftermath of Peace: Crime, Uncertainty, and the Transition to Democracy (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010) and the co-edited volume Central America in the New Millennium: Living Transition Reimagining Democracy (Berghahn/CEDLA, 2013).

59th Faculty Research Lecture Featuring Professor Natalie Batalha
2025-11-06 18:30 - 20:00 | Music Center Recital Hall, 400 McHenry Road, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
The UC Santa Cruz Academic Senate is delighted to invite you to the 59th Faculty Research Lecture
Featuring Natalie Batalha Professor, Department of Astronomy & Astrophysics Director of Astrobiology & UC Presidential Chair
Thursday, November 6, 2025
6:30 PM – 7:30 PM

Reception to follow
This event is free and open to the public. Seating will begin at 6:00 p.m
Parking permits will be available for purchase for $5 in the Performing Arts lot 126, ”A” permits are required during the week until 8pm. Park Mobile options are available in this same lot. Please follow the event signage at the base of campus and a parking attendant will assist you.

Register to attend here
The lecture will be held in person and also available to view via livestream.
Thirty Years of Exoplanet Discovery
The first exoplanet orbiting a normal sun-like star was announced in October 1995. Discoveries have been trickling in at an accelerating pace ever since, with the roster of new worlds surpassing 6000 just this year. Due to a confluence of lucky events, I’ve been afforded a front row seat to exoplanet discovery over those last three decades. The science has taken me from humble mountaintops like Lick Observatory to the most powerful space telescopes like Kepler, TESS, and Webb. As the story unfolds, so to does my human perspective. I will share the view from this front row seat — how the story started and where it’s going, what we know and don’t know, and what the next generation can look forward to as we search for evidence of living worlds beyond the Solar System.
Natalie Batalha is a Professor of Astronomy & Astrophysics and Director of Astrobiology at UC Santa Cruz. She uses ground and space-based telescopes to find and characterize planets orbiting other stars in the galaxy, with the ultimate goal of searching for evidence of life beyond the Solar System. Prior to UCSC, Dr. Batalha was a research scientist at NASA Ames where she served as Science Team Lead and Project Scientist for NASA’s Kepler mission. She led the team that discovered the first confirmed rocky exoplanet (Kepler-10b). Over the next decade, she played a central role in expanding the Kepler catalog of discoveries and guiding the team through the statistical analyses that demonstrated the prevalence of potentially habitable planets in our Galaxy. For her work on Kepler, Batalha was awarded a NASA Public Service Medal (2011) and the Smithsonian Ingenuity Award (2017). Most recently, Batalha led the team that achieved the first definitive detection of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of an exoplanet (WASP-39b), a breakthrough that showcased the James Webb Space Telescope’s extraordinary power to probe alien skies and ushered in a new era of atmospheric exploration. At UCSC, she is working to grow an Astrobiology program that will place UCSC at the center of the search for life beyond Earth.

Family Weekend 2025
2025-11-07 13:00 - 21:00, 2025-11-08 08:00 - 20:00, 2025-11-09 09:00 - 11:00
We’re excited to announce Nov. 7-9 as the dates for UCSC’s second annual Family Weekend, bringing families together to experience UC Santa Cruz’s vibrant campus life and community spirit. The weekend will offer engaging activities, informative sessions, and opportunities to connect with faculty, staff, and fellow families.
For more details, visit the Family Weekend webpage.

Wang, S. (CSE) - Learned Hashing and Overlay Networks for AI-native Retrieval and Serving at Scale
2025-11-07 14:00 - 16:00 | https://events.ucsc.edu/event/wang-s-cse-learned-hashing-and-overlay-networks-for-ai-native-retrieval-and-serving-at-scale/
Modern AI systems demand low-latency high-quality retrieval and serving over billion-scale keys and vectors. This proposal studies learned hashing and overlay networks to co-locate semantically related items and steer queries with minimal coordination. We first present LEAD, to our knowledge the first use of order-preserving learned hash functions in distributed key-value overlays, enabling efficient range queries and cutting hops/messages by 80–90% in prototypes while retaining balance and churn resilience. Second, Vortex applies learned hashing to approximate nearest-neighbor retrieval: a self-organizing overlay binding learned keys to distributed HNSW indexes to achieve high recall at low fan-out. Third, PlanetServe introduces onion-style path setup with multi-path dispersal and cache-aware forwarding for open LLM serving, reducing TTFT and latency while preserving privacy. Planned work generalizes learned hashing to embedding partitions, token/KV caches, programmable switches, and storage tiers, and provides formal convergence, load-balancing, and monotonic-progress guarantees under skew and churn. We are also working to design the first knowledge delivery network for LLM serving: an overlay that unifies data placement, retrieval, and policy-aware routing across clusters and providers with tunable cost, privacy, and quality. Evaluation on real workloads at scale will measure recall, tail latency, cost, and robustness, targeting a predictable, elastic, scalable AI-native retrieval and serving stack.
Event Host: Shengze Wang, Ph.D. Student, Computer Science & Engineering
Advisor: Chen Qian

Zoom: https://ucsc.zoom.us/j/5455463199?pwd=[REDACTED]
Passcode: [REDACTED]

"Bring Them Home" Screening
2025-11-07 18:00 | Namaste Lounge, 615 College Nine Road, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
The American Indian Resource Center will be screening "Bring Them Home" at the Namaste Lounge this November 7th.
"Bring Them Home" is more than a film; it is a movement aimed at raising awareness around the Blackfeet's buffalo program, a cornerstone in their fight against the lingering shadows of colonization, oppression, and trauma. Through this campaign, we aspire to amplify the tribe's rewilding efforts, support the sustainability of their buffalo program, and convey the critical message of living in harmony with animals and the land.
The narrative of the Blackfeet and bison is intertwined with themes of survival, resilience, and rebirth. These majestic creatures are integral to every face of the Blackfeet culture, playing a vital role in ceremonies and symbolizing the community's cultural, spiritual, and economic healing. The recent release of the Elk Island Herd into the wild marks a significant step in this journey, despite the numerous challenges encountered along the way.
