Events

Time Management
2026-08-11 14:00 - 14:45 (America/Los_Angeles) | https://ucsc.zoom.us/j/7372922776?pwd=[REDACTED]
In this workshop, you will: Learn the ways you can manage your time and avoid procrastination/burnout.
The Successful Slug Workshop series, hosted by Learning Support Services Peer Coaches, are open to all UCSC undergraduate students and focus on academic skills and tools to support your success as a student. At each workshop, you will be introduced to a topic, engage in active learning, be given resources to begin implementing the same day, and have an opportunity to learn more if you are interested.
You Belong Here: The programs and services described here 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.

Volunteer at the UCSC Arboretum
2026-08-11 10:00 - 11:00 | Arboretum, 122 Arboretum Road, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
Volunteer Information Sessions at the Arboretum
Do you love gardens and gardening? The UCSC Arboretum & Botanic Garden has a wonderful community of staff, students, and volunteers, ready to welcome you. Opportunities include staffing our gift shop & retail nursery and working to care for our gardens and greenhouses.
To learn more, join us at one of our monthly information sessions. They go for about 45 minutes and include an easy walk through the gardens.
To attend, please fill out our simple volunteer interest form at the bottom of our volunteer webpage found here: https://arboretum.ucsc.edu/get-involved/become-a-volunteer/
If you need a different day and/or have mobility issues please let us know in the “Notes” section of the Interest Form.
Thank You!

August Slugs and Steins with Professor Barbara Rogoff
2026-08-10 18:30 - 20:00
Learning to be Community-Minded
How do children learn to be part of a community, attentive to what’s going on around them and pitching in to help out? Barbara Rogoff builds on her 50+ years researching and participating with a Mayan community in Guatemala to make the case that people everywhere can learn from Indigenous cultural values of relationality and responsibility, which are commonly enacted in everyday family and community life. An important practice in many Indigenous-heritage communities of the Americas is including children collaboratively in the endeavors of family and community life even in the youngest years. In the process, young children often collaborate skillfully and help without being asked, developing community-mindedness through their shared contributions.
Barbara Rogoff is UCSC Foundation Distinguished Professor of Psychology at UCSC. She investigates cultural aspects of children’s learning and how communities arrange for learning, finding especially sophisticated collaboration, attention, and community-mindedness among children from some Mexican and Indigenous communities of the Americas. She is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Education, and a Fellow of professional organizations in psychology, anthropology, and education. She has received Distinguished Lifetime Contributions Awards from international research organizations as well as the Chemers Award for Outstanding Research, from UCSC. She has held the University of California Presidential Chair and Fellowships of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Kellogg Foundation, Spencer Foundation, and the Exploratorium, and served as Editor of Human Development. A cat that lives at a University in Pakistan is named in her honor (the cat’s name: “Doctor Barbara Rogoff”). Her award-winning books include Learning Together: Children and Adults in a School Community; The Cultural Nature of Human Development; and Developing Destinies: A Mayan Midwife and Town.
REGISTER

Zhao, Z. (CSE) - TOWARD VERIFIABLE REASONING IN LLMS
2026-08-10 10:30 - 12:30 | Silicon Valley Campus, 3175 Bowers Avenue, Santa Clara, CA, 95054, United States
Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting can improve final-answer performance, but it does not guarantee that intermediate reasoning steps are faithful, valid, or checkable. This proposal studies how formal methods can make natural-language reasoning more reliable by translating CoT rationales into Lean artifacts, checking the resulting theorem statements and proofs, and using compiler feedback to diagnose and repair failures. The completed work evaluates direct zero-shot and few-shot auto-formalization pipelines for quantity- and logic-focused reasoning problems, measuring proof type-check rate, theorem-statement validity, assumption faithfulness, and repair behavior. The ongoing work extends this pipeline with AMR-guided semantic representations and altered-rationale stress tests. The planned work proposes methods of modeling LLM Agent thinking in Lean. Together, these components separate two questions that are often conflated: whether a model translated the reasoning into the right formal goal, and whether that goal can be proved once translated. The research goal is to develop an evaluation framework and a tool-supported workflow to improve the reliability, auditability, and semantic faithfulness of LLM reasoning.
Event Host: Zekun Zhao, Ph.D. Student, Computer Science & Engineering
Advisor: Jeffrey Flanigan
Zoom: https://ucsc.zoom.us/j/96068207641?pwd=[REDACTED]
Passcode: [REDACTED]

Visualizing Abolition Screening Series: Beyond Access
2026-08-09 12:00 - 17:00, 2026-08-08 12:00 - 17:00, 2026-08-06 12:00 - 17:00, 2026-08-05 12:00 - 17:00, 2026-08-02 12:00 - 17:00, 2026-08-01 12:00 - 17:00 | Institute of the Arts and Sciences, 100 Panetta Ave, Santa Cruz, United States
On view in the IAS Screening Room is a selection of short films curated by Visualizing Abolition Visiting Faculty Fellow Dr. Pooja Rangan.
Prisons deny and censor the access of those trapped inside them—to information, to intimacy, to community, to meaningful work, to nourishment of all kinds, and perhaps most cruelly, to care. This program assembles a series of films, including works by filmmakers incarcerated in California as well as others without that lived experience. Together, these works confront the debilitating impacts of these restrictions and reveal how the disabling logic of the prison is extended to other institutional spaces (the hospital, the university), turning access into a scarce commodity by enclosing what should be held in common. Questioning the carceral and state-sponsored productions of disability and accessibility, the short films together reveal the courage of people working despite limitations to produce collective access for one another, described simply and beautifully by disability justice activist Leah-Lakshmi Piepzna Samarasinha as “revolutionary love without charity.”
Thanh Tran
Dying in Prison, 2022
HD Video (color, sound), 3 minutes
Courtesy of the artist
Carolyn Lazard
Pre-Existing Condition, 2019
HD video (color, sound), 6 minutes
Courtesy of the artist and Trautwein Herleth3
Anthony Alejandrez
Another Rainy Day, 2023
Phone video (color, sound), 3 minutes
Courtesy of the artist
Jordan Lord
After…After… (Access), 2018
HD Video (color, sound), 16 minutes
Courtesy of the artist
Rahsaan “New York” Thomas
Friendly Signs, 2023
Video (color, sound) 21 minutes
Courtesy of Tommy Wickerd, Empowerment Ave & System Impact Media

Spring Exhibitions at the Institute of the Arts and Sciences
2026-08-09 12:00 - 17:00, 2026-08-08 12:00 - 17:00, 2026-08-07 12:00 - 17:00, 2026-08-06 12:00 - 17:00, 2026-08-05 12:00 - 17:00, 2026-08-02 12:00 - 17:00, 2026-08-01 12:00 - 17:00 | Institute of the Arts and Sciences, 100 Panetta Ave, Santa Cruz, United States
Visit the IAS, UCSC’s premier art galleries, for our spring exhibitions. On view April 10–August 16, 2026 are three diverse and interdisciplinary shows: Libia Posada: Everything is Going Right, the first US solo exhibition by the Colombia-based artist and medical doctor; Gina Athena Ulysse: A Redwoods Rasanblaj, a site-specific and immersive exploration of the Haitian kreyol conception of rasanblaj; and Ronaldo V. Wilson: There Are No Words, But Melodies, a mixed-media exhibition emerging at the intersections of Black poetics, performance, and visual art.
The IAS Galleries are open Wednesday-Sunday, 12 pm – 5 pm. Admission is free to the public.
Libia Posada: Everything is Going Right
Libia Posada’s first solo exhibition in the United States features installations, sculptures, and drawings meticulously constructed from surgical instruments, gauze bandages, crutches, used books, and domestic picture frames. The new and existing works in the exhibition powerfully stitch together the personal, social, and political disorders and afflictions that currently trouble the world, from the wars that resonate across the globe to the violences of aging in US prisons.
Gina Athena Ulysse: A Redwoods Rasanblaj: Origins & Disentanglements
The internationally-lauded work of humanities professor Gina Athena Ulysse is on view as a premier Faculty Spotlight Exhibition. The site-specific installation, produced in community from things collected, found, purchased and donated, centers on the Haitian concept of rasanblaj, a form of assembly and collage that transcends the formal use of materials to draw together people, spirits, and ideas.
Ronaldo V. Wilson: There Are No Words, But Melodies
Collage is both a material practice and a structural interrogation in the Faculty Spotlight Exhibition artworks by literature professor Ronaldo V. Wilson. In video, painting, and installation, layers and folds conceal and reveal, delving into the experience, both bodily and emotive, of living in times of violence.

Weekend With Shakespeare
2026-08-09 01:00 - 2026-08-10 00:59, 2026-08-08 01:00 - 2026-08-09 00:59
Dig deeply into this season’s Shakespeare productions with a special weekend of lectures, discussions and hands-on activities. In partnership with UCSC’s Shakespeare Workshop and The Humanities Institute, this is a wonderful opportunity to learn more about each play during the day and then enjoy the production that same evening.
This year, Weekend with Shakespeare will be held at the Audrey Stanley Grove in DeLaveaga Park on August 8th (Much Ado About Nothing) and August 9th (Macbeth).
Admission is free to all, but seating is limited. Please register below to reserve your seats.

Schedule for Weekend with Shakespeare
Saturday, 8/8 – Much Ado About Nothing by William Shakespeare

11:00 a.m. – Welcome (Sean Keilen, UCSC)
11:15 a.m. – Actor Panel (Charles Pasternak and members of the company, SCS)
12:15 p.m. – Boxed lunch (courtesy of Shakespeare Workshop)
1:00 p.m. – Visiting Scholar (Eli Simon, UC Irvine)
2:00 – End of program

Sunday, 8/9 – Macbeth by William Shakespeare

1:00 a.m. – Welcome (Sean Keilen, UCSC)
11:15 a.m. – Actor Panel (Charles Pasternak and members of the company, SCS)
12:15 p.m. – Boxed lunch (courtesy of Shakespeare Workshop)
1:00 p.m. – Visiting Scholar (Eli Simon, UC Irvine)
2:00 – End of program

Sean Keilen is Professor of Literature and UC Santa Cruz, the founder of Shakespeare Workshop, and Head of Dramaturgy at Santa Cruz Shakespeare.
Charles Pasternak is Artistic Director at Santa Cruz Shakespeare, before which served as Artistic Director of The Porters of Hellsgate Theatre Co in Los Angeles for over fifteen years. He has had a wide-ranging career as an actor and director at theatres across this country including American Players Theatre, Alabama Shakespeare Festival, The Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey, The Shakespeare Center of Los Angeles, three seasons with The Shakespeare Festival of St. Louis and four with Shakespeare Santa Cruz.
Eli Simon is a Chancellor’s Professor of Drama at UC Irvine, where he has served as chair and head of acting. He is the founding artistic director and managing producer of the New Swan Shakespeare Festival, UCI’s professional summer theater in residence, which presents two of Shakespeare’s plays in rotating repertory each summer. Designed and built on campus, the intimate 135-seat New Swan Theater has become a celebrated Orange County cultural destination, winning acclaim from audiences, critics and the community. In 2017, the Los Angeles Times/Daily Pilot named New Swan the premier theater company in Orange County. Simon also co-directs the New Swan Shakespeare Center, a UCI research initiative supporting scholarly and public engagement with Shakespeare.

Seymour Center's Seaside Storytime
2026-08-08 10:30 - 11:30 | Seymour Marine Discovery Center, 100 McAllister Way, Santa Cruz, CA, 95060
Get ready to set sail on a storybook adventure! 📚 ✨ It’s the ultimate weekend treat to spark big imaginations, foster a love for nature, and nurture the next generation of ocean heroes! 🌊 🐚 📖
Our friends at Bookshop Santa Cruz have hand-selected a collection of books about the environment that are perfect for young readers. We hope to see you there!
Join Seaside Storytime on the second Saturday of every month!

UCSC Farm U-Pick
2026-08-08 09:00 - 12:00, 2026-08-01 09:00 - 12:00 | UCSC Farm, 152 Farm Rd, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
Come enjoy picking your own organic strawberries and/or flowers at the campus farm!
When: U-picks will take place on Saturdays from 9am to 12pm, July 11–August 22, or while supplies last. PLEASE NOTE that u-pick will not occur on Saturday, August 29.
Where: Free parking will be available in the Hay Barn lot or lot 115/116 during u-pick hours. Please do not park in the dirt lot at the farm’s back gate. Please walk to the check-in table near the strawberries/flowers at the farm to pre-pay and collect your u-pick container(s). We will have directional signage displayed. There is one ADA parking spot on the farm. The UCSC Farm has uneven, hilly terrain. If you require accommodations to fully participate, please email agroecology@ucsc.edu.
Cost: UCSC students with valid ID get 25% off produce.

Strawberry pints – $4 each
Strawberry flats (12 pints) – $44
Flowers, small bouquet – $5
Flowers, large bouquet – $15
Flower, bulk buckets – $65

Payment: Credit card payments only (you will need a smartphone to scan a QR code and enter your card info manually).
Dogs are not allowed on the UC Santa Cruz campus (service animals are OK).

Rules Are Not Neutral: Play As Sense-Making, Acts Of Resistance, And Imagining Otherwise
2026-08-06 12:00 - 17:00 | Eloise Pickard Smith Gallery, 11 Cowell Service Rd, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
This exhibition brings together a range of analog games – including board, card, role-playing, and other participatory works – that engage social and political realities in different ways. The works span widely circulated commercial games to independently produced projects, one-of-a-kind artworks by artists, faculty, alumni, and students, and materials drawn from UC Santa Cruz Special Collections and Archives.
In part, the exhibition challenges the persistent assumption that games and play are detached from social and political life. On the contrary, game designers and artists across diverse perspectives and positions have long used play to engage questions of social systems, lived experience, and how power operates. This exhibition does not attempt to represent that full spectrum. Instead, it brings together a particular set of works that foreground how games can make systems visible, intervene in them, and imagine alternatives.
All games embody values, whether intentional or not.
– Mary Flanagan, game designer and scholar
Across all of these works, games are not only forms of entertainment, though they may be that as well. They are encountered in multiple ways: as objects, as systems, as artworks, and as experiences that unfold unpredictably through interaction. In each case, rules and constraints shape what participants can do. In these different forms, the works stage systems – such as housing and land ownership, capitalism, race and identity, civil rights and protest, fascism, and colonialism – in ways that are simplified and easy to see, opening space to recognize similar structures beyond the game. In this sense, the works suggest that rules are not neutral – they organize experience, distribute power, and produce meaning.
Games are the art of agency.
– C. Thi Nguyen, philosopher
The exhibition is intentionally dense. This abundance reflects the breadth of ways games operate across contexts, from activism and education to art and everyday life. While it celebrates creativity and difference, it also asks how these works engage critically with the structures that shape our lives.
Some works use rules to model systems, helping players understand how those systems operate. Others use play to rehearse action, asking players to practice navigating or challenging those systems. Still others turn toward speculation, inviting players to imagine alternative futures, worlds, and the systems that might shape them.
The imagination is an instrument of change.
– Ursula K. Le Guin, author
The focus on analog games reflects how they foreground materiality and shared physical presence. Played face-to-face, handled, read aloud, and experienced together, these works show how rules operate not in abstraction, but through lived, embodied experience.
Ultimately, the exhibition asks us to consider not only how games represent the world, but how they shape our engagement with it – and how through play, the social and political systems they model might be understood, challenged, and reimagined.
Games are not apolitical.
– Kishonna L. Gray, media scholar

Gallery Reception
May 15 from 1 to 4pm at the Eloise Pickard Smith Gallery

Art Friday
Hands-on art activities drawing from the current exhibition.
ALL ARE WELCOME regardless of skill level. Art supplies and free snacks are provided!

Engineering Teaching Community (Faculty)
2026-08-05 12:00 - 13:00 | Jack Baskin Engineering, Baskin Engineering 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
During the chaos of a quarter, is it hard to find time to reflect and improve as an instructor? Would you like to be a part of an inclusive, supportive group of engineering instructors who do this in community? ETC is for sharing teaching experiences, classroom ideas, research on learning, and methods that support instructors and students. All are welcome, and lunch is provided. Please reach out to Jenny Quynn with questions.

Understanding & Using Your Syllabus
2026-08-04 14:00 - 14:45 | https://ucsc.zoom.us/j/7372922776?pwd=[REDACTED]
In this workshop, you will: break down, understand, and use your syllabus as a tool for success.
The Successful Slug Workshop series, hosted by Learning Support Services Peer Coaches, are open to all UCSC undergraduate students and focus on academic skills and tools to support your success as a student. At each workshop, you will be introduced to a topic, engage in active learning, be given resources to begin implementing the same day, and have an opportunity to learn more if you are interested.
You Belong Here: The programs and services described here 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.

Le, A. (STAT) - Bayesian Nonparametric Analysis of Densities for Replicated Point Patterns
2026-08-03 16:00 - 17:00
Many scientific applications produce repeated point pattern realizations across subjects, regions, or time. While such point patterns exhibit individual variation, we assume they arise from related point processes that share a common distributional structure. This dissertation develops a Bayesian nonparametric modeling framework built around an interpretable baseline. We work with Poisson processes, such that the point process stochastic mechanism is characterized by the total intensity and a density with compact support. Flexible, parsimonious weighted combinations of beta densities represent both the baseline and the replicate-specific densities. The weights corresponding to each replicate encode the features that characterize its density and are pooled hierarchically across replicates to estimate the shared baseline. Throughout, we illustrate the framework using bike-share demand at a Chicago Divvy station, where weekly demand shares a common daily pattern while its features evolve across weeks.
We lay the foundation with a conditionally independent model, relating the replicates through a Dirichlet process prior centered on the shared baseline. The model admits a Pólya urn representation that yields fully conjugate posterior updates and partially parallel computation across replicates. Inference proceeds at both the shared and replicate-specific levels, and predictive inference on the density of demand for a new week follows readily through the baseline.
Moving to a dynamic extension, we use the representation of the replicate-specific discrete random distributions to express structured dependence separately through the atoms and the weights. Stochastic processes on these components relate the locations of density features and their relative importance. The weights follow a geometric construction that keeps the model parsimonious. For the atoms, we develop a novel stochastic process with the baseline as its marginal distribution, so its interpretation is unchanged under temporal dependence. Across the Divvy weeks, the contributions of these two forms of dependence are visible in the forecast uncertainty, and both forecast the weekly densities more precisely than the conditionally independent model.
Finally, we model the full intensity of the underlying nonhomogeneous Poisson process by exploiting its factorization into a total intensity and a density. The factorization keeps the likelihood tractable and separates the volume of demand from its shape across the day. The dynamic density model carries directly over, while the total intensity follows a stationary autoregressive process centered hierarchically on a baseline total intensity. This gives a baseline intensity, extending the idea from densities to intensities. In the Divvy application, the model yields smoother intensity estimates and sharper forecasts of the weekly intensities.
The common thread throughout the framework is the preservation of the baseline, which retains the same interpretation as dependence and intensity modeling are introduced. Together, the models give a unified characterization of the shared, replicate-specific, and dynamic structure of replicated point patterns.
Event Host: Andrew Le, Ph.D. Candidate, Statistical Science
Advisor: Athanasios Kottas
Zoom: https://ucsc.zoom.us/j/94954212320?pwd=[REDACTED]
Passcode: [REDACTED]

Wildlife Cameras and Other Methods for Assessing Backyard Biodiversity
2026-08-02 09:00 - 12:00 | Hay Barn, 94 Ranch View Road, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Home gardens, small farms, and wildland-agricultural interfaces can often be areas of increased water, food, and habitat resources for wildlife. Many people are interested in seeing wildlife on their properties, from the common visitors to the elusive wanderers. Come learn about how to monitor for wildlife in your own backyard, as well as the ecology, habitat requirements, and challenges species face across dynamic landscapes. Answer the question: What does biodiversity mean to you?
REGISTER
Free for UCSC students; please email agroecology@ucsc.edu to register as a student.

First Saturday Tour at the Arboretum
2026-08-01 11:00 - 12:00 | Arboretum, 122 Arboretum Road, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
First Saturday Tours are a wonderful way to introduce yourself to the Arboretum or to deepen your knowledge of the Arboretum’s plant collections. Each tour is a little different depending on the time of year, the interests of the tour guide, and the people who join in. For example, you might learn about the birds and mammals that make this land their home or about the amazing physical adaptations that plants have evolved to better deal with our extreme weather and climate conditions. Tours are free with paid admission.

Free Guided Tour of the UCSC Farm
2026-08-01 10:00 - 11:30 | UCSC Farm, 152 Farm Rd, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
Take a free, guided tour of the 30-acre organic UCSC Farm. Visitors can enjoy touring the organically managed greenhouses, hand-worked garden beds, orchards, row crop fields, and children’s garden, while learning about the history of the site and the basic concepts of organic farming and gardening. Perched on a meadow near the campus entrance, the farm also offers spectacular views of the Monterey Bay. Heavy rain cancels.
Tours will take place from 10 a.m. to 11:30 a.m. on the following dates (please RSVP for the tour of your choice):

Saturday, July 11
Saturday, August 1
Saturday, September 12
Saturday, October 3

The Dickens Universe featuring 'Bleak House'
2026-08-01 01:00 - 2026-08-02 00:59 | Humanities and Social Sciences Facility, 2 Hagar Drive, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
The Dickens Universe is a unique cultural event that brings together scholars, teachers, students, and members of the general public for a week of stimulating discussion and festive social activity on the beautiful Santa Cruz campus of the University of California—all focused on one or two Victorian novels, usually (but not always) one by Charles Dickens. In 2026, the Dickens Universe will feature Bleak House by Charles Dickens.
Dickens’s ninth novel, published between 1852-1853, shines a light on social injustice and the devastating effects of a corrupt legal system, following the entangled lives of those caught in the never-ending Jarndyce and Jarndyce case. Told in alternating narrative voices, this rich literary experiment plays with a variety of genres from detective fiction and social realism to melodrama and satire. As characters move from city to suburb, from mansions to slums, we discover unexpected connections among classes, plots, and characters.
Now in its 46th year of operation, the Dickens Universe combines features of a scholarly conference, a festival, a book club, and a summer camp. Participants include people of all ages and walks of life—distinguished scholars, graduate students, undergraduates, retirees, young professionals, high school teachers, and anyone who loves reading and enjoys long Victorian novels.
Here are some things that make the Universe such a special experience.

The college lifestyle: participants live on campus, eat together in the student dining hall, and have time to meet and come to know each other in different ways.
Everyone is reading the same book. We all have this one important thing in common.
The activities include formal lectures, small discussion groups, films, daily Victorian teas, performances, and Victorian dancing.

The Universe offers a week of total immersion in the world of Victorian fiction with friendly, like-minded colleagues in a beautiful setting. Whether we’re returning to a Dickens novel that everyone knows and loves, or branching out into a Victorian novel by another author who might be less familiar, during the Universe we build a community out of our passion for reading, talking with one another, and bringing Victorian culture to life.

View the complete schedule
Registration options
Plenary Lecturers and Guest Scholars
