Events

Mashhadi, N. (CSE) - Compositional, Clinically Conditioned, and Confound-Aware Deep Learning for Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging
2026-03-10 16:30 - 17:30 (America/Los_Angeles)
Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is a progressive neurodegenerative disorder and a leading cause of dementia. Neuroimaging and clinical biomarkers can reveal early disease changes, but building reliable machine learning models is difficult because data come from different scanners and sites, some modalities are missing, labeled cohorts are limited, and factors such as age and scanner/site effects can bias results.
This dissertation develops machine learning methods for robust, interpretable, and controllable analysis of AD-related neuroimaging data. First, I introduce a modular, graph-based framework for multimodal AD detection that treats datasets and models as nodes and directed edges that can be combined to build more complex predictors. Second, I propose a clinically conditioned 3D VAE-GAN to synthesize brain MRI, enhanced with diffusion-driven sampling in clinical feature space to improve realism and control, supporting data augmentation. Third, I present a disentangled 3D masked autoencoder (MAE) that learns separated representations for age, pathology, and scanner effects, making it possible to isolate and adjust age, pathology, or scanner effects, while remaining reliable across sites.
Together, these contributions advance practical methods for modular prediction, controllable image generation, and confound-aware representation learning in neuroimaging, with an emphasis on generalization and interpretability for clinically relevant applications.
Event Host: Najmeh Mashhadi, Ph.D. Candidate, Computer Science and Engineering
Advisor: Razvan Marinescu
Zoom- https://ucsc.zoom.us/j/98195204428?pwd=[REDACTED]
Passcode- 688069

A Musical Journey with UCSC Music Ensembles —Percussion, Celtic, Classical Guitar, Horns, Central Asian, Experimental
2026-03-10 19:00 - 21:00 | Music Center Recital Hall, 400 McHenry Road, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
Audiences are invited to the free winter quarter chamber concert at the Music Center Recital Hall at UC Santa Cruz to hear selections from multiple ensembles, including the following:
UCSC Percussion Ensemble
William Winant, director
UCSC Celtic Chamber Music Ensemble
Bill Coulter, director
UCSC Classical Guitar Ensemble
Christopher Mallet, director
William Coulter, steel string guitar
Caila Bigelman, violin soloist
UCSC Horn Ensemble
Susan Vollmer, director
UCSC Central Asian Ensemble
Tanya Merchant, director
UCSC Experimental Music Ensemble
Amy Beal, director
Ricky Lomelí, special guest/drum set
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ADMISSION
– Free and open to the public.
– Open seating (no ticket required).
– Doors are scheduled to open 30 minutes prior to event start time.
—
PARKING
– Parking by permit, ParkMobile, or $11 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.
– UCSC affiliates must purchase their permits before arriving at the event in order to receive their discounted UCSC rate. Attendants will only sell the non-affiliate-priced permits.
– More information provided by UCSC Transportation & Parking Services (TAPS)
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image: UCSC Central Asian Ensemble in Washington, D.C., where they performed and liaised with the Embassy of Uzbekistan.
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This program is open to all members of the public consistent with state and federal law.

Nowruz
2026-03-10 19:30 - 21:30 | Merrill Cultural Center, 200 McLaughlin Dr, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
Join AA/PIRC and the Iranian Student Union on Tuesday, March 10th from 7:30-9:30pm at the Merrill Cultural Center to celebrate Nowruz — the Iranian/Afghan New Year! Come learn about the significance of Nowruz, enjoy delicious food and activities, be together in community, and more.
Register at: bit.ly/nowruz26
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.

CSE Colloquium: Co-Active AI-Assisted Programming
2026-03-11 11:00 - 12:15 | Engineering 2, Engineering 2 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
Presenter: Nadia Polikarpova, UCSD
Abstract:
AI-assisted programming has rapidly moved from novelty to default. Today, most developers use AI coding tools, and increasingly rely on agentic systems capable of making multi-step design and implementation decisions with minimal human guidance. While these systems boost productivity, they also introduce new risks: developers may disengage from the reasoning behind generated code, leading to shallow understanding, loss of ownership, and what is increasingly described as cognitive debt.
In this talk, I argue that AI-driven software development must be co-active: humans and AI should remain continuously engaged in a shared process of understanding and decision-making. I will present two complementary research directions toward this goal. The first focuses on observability—helping developers understand, validate, and trace the behavior of AI-generated code. The second focuses on controllability—making AI decisions explicit, persistent, and steerable. Together, these ideas restore programmer agency while maintaining the productivity gains of AI-assisted development.
Bio:
Nadia Polikarpova is an associate professor at UC San Diego, and a member of the Programming Systems group. She received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from ETH Zurich in 2014, and then spent some time as a postdoctoral researcher at MIT. Nadia’s research interests are at the intersection of programming languages, AI, human-computer interaction, and social computing.
Hosted by: Professor Nikos Tziavelis
Location: Engineering 2, Room E2-180 (*Refreshments such as coffee, tea, pastries, and fresh fruit will be available.)
Zoom: https://ucsc.zoom.us/j/93445911992?pwd=[REDACTED]

Yang, S. (CSE) - Beyond Image Editing: Building Generalized Image Customization Systems
2026-03-11 11:00 - 13:00
Current generative vision models struggle with image customization that requires multi-step reasoning or real-world knowledge. This proposal introduces generalized image customization, enabling systems to execute complex, inferential modifications rather than just simple edits. The research focuses on the foundational framework required for this generalization, specifically high-quality training data, scalable evaluation benchmarks, self-improving training paradigms that reduce reliance on paired annotations, and unified multi-modal architectures. Building on two completed studies in data quality and evaluation, this proposal outlines two future research directions to develop capable, annotation-efficient, and reasoning-native image customization systems.
Event Host: Siwei Yang, Ph.D. Student, Computer Science and Engineering
Advisor: Cihang Xie
Zoom- https://ucsc.zoom.us/j/3852138080?pwd=[REDACTED]

Research Lunch & Learn: PI Eligibility and the Exception to Policy (ETP) Process
2026-03-11 12:00 - 13:00 | https://events.ucsc.edu/event/research-lunch-learn-pi-eligibility-and-the-exception-to-policy-etp-process/
Join us on March 11, 2026, 12-1 p.m. for a session led by Deirdre Beach, Executive Director of the Office of Sponsored Projects, and others as they discuss and review UCSC’s policy on Principal Investigator (PI) eligibility. This session will highlight which appointments are eligible to request an exception, when PIship is necessary to support the work, and the process for submitting an exception request for consideration.
Join: Zoom link for this session.

Global Cafe (Winter 2026)
2026-03-11 14:00 - 16:00 | Classroom Unit, Classroom Unit, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, Select a Country:
International Student Services & Programming invites you to our monthly Global Cafe, a space for all international-minded community members to connect. Swing by for some refreshments and an opportunity to meet other international students and scholars, as well as Global Engagement staff. Feel free to drop in at any time and stay for as long as you’d like.
Our winter Global Cafe dates:

Wednesday, January 14
Wednesday, February 11
Wednesday, March 11

What's new in AI?
2026-03-11 18:00 - 19:00 | Silicon Valley Campus, 3175 Bowers Avenue, Santa Clara, CA, 95054, United States
Chat with the AI chair
Lead innovation as a machine learning engineer
Want to learn what’s new in AI? Join Praveen Krishna, chair of the Artificial Intelligence Application Development certificate program, in an informal discussion about the AI topic of the month and an open Q&A. You’ll get an insider’s look at what you need to know for where you want to go. Bring your questions. Share your experience. Plan your learning.
Every 2nd Wednesday | Online
Visit our program page for a closer look at our AI App Development courses and offerings.
Register now.

Undiscovered Shakespeare: The Two Noble Kinsmen - Episode II
2026-03-11 19:00 - 23:59 | CA
Shakespeare returns to the characters and themes of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in what may have been the last play he had a hand in writing: The Two Noble Kinsmen. This time, however, the story of Theseus and Hippolyta, the disorienting experience of adolescent sexual desire, and the conflict of duties to sovereigns, parents, friends, and spouses are no laughing matter. It’s over-shadowed by the play’s source text — Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale, in which chance foils Theseus’s best efforts to create order out of chaos and meaning out of loss — and by Shakespeare’s own experience writing tragedy and tragicomedy.

Thomas Luxon is Professor of English, Emeritus at Dartmouth College, where he was also the inaugural Cheheyl Professor and Director of the Dartmouth Center for the Advancement of Learning. His teaching and scholarship focus on literature of the English Renaissance and Reformation, with a particular interest in John Milton, John Bunyan, John Dryden, and 17th-century English religion and politics. In his revelatory book, Single Imperfection: Milton, Marriage, and Friendship (Duquesne UP, 2005), Professor Luxon explores the impact of ancient theories of friendship on Milton’s conception of Reformation marriage, and during the pandemic, he contributed a lecture about the rivalry of friendship and marriage in Two Noble Kinsmen to Ian Doescher’s Shakespeare 2020 Project.
Undiscovered Shakespeare is a public arts and humanities series co-produced by Santa Cruz Shakespeare, UCSC Shakespeare Workshop, and The Humanities Institute. It brings professional actors and scholars together with the public for a staged reading and discussion of works by Shakespeare that are rarely produced.

HCI Build Demo Day
2026-03-12 11:00 - 15:30 | Event Hall, 3175 Bowers Ave, Santa Clara, 95054, United States
Welcome to HCI Build Demo Day!
Get ready to dive into an exciting in-person event where HCI builders come together to showcase their projects. In Intro to Build at UCSC Silicon Valley Campus, we build with two realms of technologies – digital and physical. HCI 202A will showcase their creative apps they made with React Native and HCI 202B will have an exhibition of the interactive physical prototypes they made with Arduino.
Light refreshments are provided at the event, and it is free for all to attend!

Agenda
11:00 AM – 1:15 PM

Mobile Programming Demo

1:30 PM – 3:00 PM
Physical Computing Demo

BME 280B Seminar: Modulating Insulin Receptor Through New Ligands
2026-03-12 11:40 - 13:15 | Physical Sciences Building, Physical Sciences Building, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
Presenter: Danny Chou, Associate Professor of Pediatrics, Stanford University
Description: Since its discovery in 1921, insulin has been at the forefront of scientific breakthroughs. From its amino acid sequencing to the revelation of its three‐dimensional structure, the progress in insulin research has spurred significant therapeutic breakthroughs. In recent years, protein engineering has introduced innovative chemical and enzymatic methods for insulin modification, fostering the development of therapeutics with tailored pharmacological profiles. In this seminar, I will highlight the use of new ligands to modulate insulin receptors and discuss how they continue to shape the future trajectory of insulin research.
Bio: Danny Chou is an Associate Professor of Pediatrics and by courtesy, of Chemical & Systems Biology at Stanford University. He is an affinity group leader at Stanford Diabetes Research Center. His research interests lie in the intersection of peptide therapeutics and metabolic diseases. He started his independent career as an assistant professor of biochemistry at University of Utah in 2014. He moved his lab to Stanford University in 2020 and continued their pursuit of using peptide and protein chemistry to develop therapeutics to address unmet needs.
Hosted by: Professor Andy Yeh, BME Department

[HSI Equity Talk] Beyond Invisibility: Reimagining Servingness to Support Undocumented Transfer Students
2026-03-12 15:30 - 17:00 | https://events.ucsc.edu/event/hsi-equity-talk-beyond-invisibility-reimagining-servingness-to-support-undocumented-transfer-students/
Presenters: Valeria Alonso Blanco, Dr. Saskias Casanova, and Jesus Morales
This interactive talk draws on a qualitative study conducted with undocumented Latinx transfer students at a California four-year HSI. Using focus groups and reflexive thematic analysis, we examined how these students perceive and experience institutional support, belonging, and barriers related to their intersectional identities. This session is designed around three goals: (1) assessing what staff and administrators currently know about undocumented students on campus, particularly undocumented transfer students; (2) building shared knowledge through our research findings and student voices; and (3) connecting participants to existing campus resources and identifying concrete opportunities for cross-departmental collaboration. We will share key resources and actionable strategies for holistically serving undocumented transfer students.
Please register online. The Zoom information and a calendar invitation will be sent to those who RSVP.
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.

Your path to medical school starts here.
2026-03-12 18:00 - 19:00 | Silicon Valley Campus, 3175 Bowers Avenue, Santa Clara, CA, 95054, United States
Are you considering medical school and seeking a clear, supportive path forward?
Join the University of California, Santa Cruz, for a free online informational session to learn more about our Summer 2026 Premed Postbacc Cohort Programs. This session is designed for students and graduates who are serious about pursuing a career in health care and want expert guidance through the medical school preparation and application process.
During this session, you’ll learn how the UCSC Premed Postbacc Program provides a structured, cohort-based experience—offered in Silicon Valley and Marina on the Central Coast—to help students strengthen their academic foundation, prepare for medical school, and apply with confidence.
Claim your seat.

UCSC Jazz Combos
2026-03-12 19:30 - 21:30 | Music Center Recital Hall, 400 McHenry Road, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
Join the UC Santa Cruz Jazz Combos for a winter concert. Directed by Charles Hamilton.
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ADMISSION
– General admission
– Free for UCSC students (ticket required).
– Tickets available here online through Eventbrite only.
– Follow the Music Dept on Eventbrite for notices and updates.
– Doors are scheduled to open 30 minutes prior to event start time.
– Ticket holders not seated at least 5 minutes before the advertised start time may forfeit their ticket/seat and no refund will be issued.
—
PARKING
– Parking by permit or ParkMobile
– 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.

Fan, Y. (CSE) - Building Human-Centered Multimodal AI Agents
2026-03-13 09:30 - 11:00
As multimodal artificial intelligence systems become increasingly embedded in everyday technology, there is a growing need to design human-centered AI agents that support and amplify human capabilities rather than replace them. This dissertation investigates how to build human-centered multimodal AI agents, framing human-centeredness as an agent-level objective that requires both accessible, assistive interaction and reliable, trustworthy behavior across physical and digital environments. This dissertation explores two complementary dimensions of human-centered agent design. The first focuses on enhancing accessibility through conversational and interactive agents that assist users in everyday tasks. We study both embodied and digital settings in which agents reduce physical and cognitive burdens via natural language interaction, including hands-free drone control, navigation assistance in unfamiliar environments, and interactive access to complex graphical user interfaces. The second dimension focuses on strengthening agent capability to improve reliability and trust. We investigate how agents can acquire environment-specific knowledge through autonomous exploration and how they can reason about visual information in a grounded and transparent manner, drawing inspiration from human learning and reasoning behaviors.
Event Host: Yue Fan, Ph.D. Candidate, Computer Science and Engineering
Advisor: Xin Eric Wang
Zoom- https://ucsc.zoom.us/j/99619642071?pwd=[REDACTED]
Passcode- 467959

Moghadam, M. (CE) - Constraint-Aware Scene Understanding and Trajectory Generation Using Deep Reinforcement Learning for Autonomous Vehicles
2026-03-13 10:00 - 12:00 | Engineering 2, Engineering 2 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
Advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS) are commonly organized as modular pipelines that transform raw sensor measurements into low-level actuation commands through perception, planning, and control. While learning-based methods have achieved state-of-the-art performance in perception and environment modeling, the planning layer remains a key bottleneck for reliable autonomy. Highway driving in particular requires long-horizon reasoning and socially aware interaction with multiple actors, while also producing smooth and dynamically feasible motion that can be tracked by classical controllers.
This thesis focuses on scene understanding and planning for highway driving. We study the problem through two complementary simulation environments: the high-fidelity CARLA simulator for motion planning and continuous trajectory generation under realistic vehicle dynamics and road geometry, and the lightweight HighwayEnv simulator for interaction-rich behavior planning at high episode throughput.
We present three planning contributions that increase autonomy. First, we introduce a modular hierarchical planning framework in Frenet space that combines long-term decision-making with short-term trajectory optimization. The approach includes a corridor-based dynamic obstacle avoidance strategy that generates spatiotemporal polynomial trajectories and supports diverse driving styles through interpretable parameter tuning. Second, we propose an end-to-end continuous deep reinforcement learning approach that unifies decision-making and motion planning into a single policy that outputs continuous polynomial trajectories in the Frenet frame. A spatiotemporal observation tensor and a temporal convolutional backbone enable the learned planner to exploit interaction history and outperform optimization-based and discrete RL baselines in CARLA. Third, we develop an interaction-aware behavior planning neural network architecture that couples trajectory prediction with high-level decision-making via a social pooling scene encoder built on actor histories and an ego-centered BEV representation. This unified design improves RL social awareness, safety, and overall driving performance in multi-agent highway scenarios in HighwayEnv.
Across extensive simulation studies, the results show that constraint-aware representations and learning-based policies can improve planning quality beyond hand-crafted objectives, especially when the policy is equipped with spatiotemporal social context while retaining classical feedback control for stable trajectory tracking. Finally, we provide supporting simulation and evaluation infrastructure, including observation tensor and neural network designs, BEV utilities, and scalable training and testing pipelines, to enable reproducible research on learning-based planning in interactive traffic.
Event Host: Majid Moghadam, Ph.D. Candidate, Computer Engineering
Advisor: Gabriel Elkaim
Zoom- https://ucsc.zoom.us/j/95848602314?pwd=[REDACTED]
Passcode- 325939

Get Certified in CPR, First Aid, and AED!
2026-03-13 11:00 - 13:00 | Scotts Valley Center
Location: Scotts Valley Center
Register for the training.
This Adult and Pediatric First Aid/CPR/AED blended learning course equips you to recognize and care for various first aid breathing and cardiac emergencies involving adults, children, and infants. It is designed for individuals who need a certification that satisfies OSHA workplace or other regulatory requirements.
This class is taught in a blended learning format and the online portion must be completed before attending the Instructor-led skills session. A valid 2-year digital certificate for Adult and Pediatric First Aid/CPR/AED is issued upon completion.
This training will be held on-site at the Scotts Valley Center. To register, please fill out the registration link.
For more information, please visit the Occupational Health Training website.
For questions or to schedule a training for your team, please contact Occupational Health Specialist, Elizabeth Tomlinson, at ektomlin@ucsc.edu.

Winter 2026 Open Studios
2026-03-13 12:00 - 16:00 | Elena Baskin Visual Arts Center, Baskin Service Road, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
Art Department students exhibit their art work throughout studios and classrooms at the Elena Baskin Visual Arts Center at UC Santa Cruz. The Open Studios event features student art work in a variety of media, including:
– Drawing
– Painting
– Print media
– Sculpture
– Photography
– Environmental art
– Electronic art/new media
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ADMISSION
FREE and open to the public.
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PARKING
– Parking by permit, ParkMobile, or $11 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.
– UCSC affiliates must purchase their permits before arriving at the event in order to receive their discounted UCSC rate. Attendants will only sell the non-affiliate-priced permits.
– More information provided by UCSC Transportation & Parking Services (TAPS)
—
This program is open to all members of the public consistent with state and federal law.

Wang, H. (CSE) - Accelerating RTL Simulation with Specialized Graph Partitioners
2026-03-13 14:00 - 15:00 | Jack Baskin Engineering, Baskin Engineering 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
Register transfer level (RTL) simulation is an invaluable tool for developing, debugging, verifying, and validating hardware designs. However, the performance of RTL simulation has long been a limiting factor in industry. Despite the inherent parallelism of hardware, current RTL simulators have not achieved practical performance gains due to fundamental challenges in communication, synchronization, memory bandwidth, and architectural mapping.
This dissertation addresses the RTL simulation performance problem from three complementary perspectives: optimizing simulation latency through parallelism, improving aggregate throughput via deduplication, and enabling efficient GPU acceleration with RTL-native semantics.
First, we present RepCut, a parallel RTL simulation methodology that uses replication-aided partitioning to cut circuits into balanced partitions with minimal overlaps. By replicating the overlaps, RepCut eliminates problematic data dependences between partitions and significantly reduces synchronization overhead. RepCut achieves superlinear speedups of up to 27.10x using 24 threads with only a 3.81% replication cost.
Second, we introduce Simulation Deduplication, a technique that exploits the extensive reuse of building blocks in modern hardware designs. By generating shared code for duplicated instances and carefully co-scheduling their execution, we reduce the instruction cache footprint and memory bandwidth pressure. This approach achieves up to 1.95x speedup for single simulations and 2.09x improvement in overall batch simulation throughput.
Third, we present Toucan, a GPU-accelerated RTL simulation framework that preserves RTL semantics rather than flattening designs to gate-level netlists. By leveraging native GPU arithmetic operations and introducing warp-level micro-partitioning with shuffle-based communication, Toucan achieves efficient mapping of irregular circuit topologies to GPU SIMT architectures while maintaining fast compilation times. Toucan achieves up to 4.73x speedup over the state-of-the-art GPU RTL simulator on large multi-core designs.
Together, these three approaches provide a comprehensive solution to RTL simulation performance optimization, demonstrating significant improvements over state-of-the-art commercial and open-source simulators across multiple hardware platforms and design scales.
Event Host: Haoyuan Wang, Ph.D. Candidate, Computer Science and Engineering
Advisor: Jose Renau
Zoom- https://ucsc.zoom.us/j/94044618343?pwd=[REDACTED]
Passcode- 574772

UCSC Concert Choir
2026-03-13 19:30 - 21:30 | Music Center Recital Hall, 400 McHenry Road, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
UCSC Concert Choir performs in a winter quarter concert, “Contrast,” with music by Chris Pratorius, Einojuhanni Rautavarra, and Juhi Bansal. Featured is “Contraponientes,” by Pratorius, a 30-minute piece for choir, three flutes, harp, and cello. a song cycle for choir on texts by Federico Garcia Llorca. “The Rautavaara” also features Llorca texts, while the Bansal reflects some of the pastoral imagery of the Llorca texts. Ensemble directed by Nathaniel Berman with guest conductor Lukáš Janata.
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ADMISSION
– General admission.
– Free for UCSC students (ticket required).
– Tickets available here online through Eventbrite only.
– Follow the Music Dept on Eventbrite for notices and updates.
– Doors are scheduled to open 30 minutes prior to event start time.
– Ticket holders not seated at least 5 minutes before the advertised start time may forfeit their ticket/seat and no refund will be issued.
—
PARKING
– Parking by permit, ParkMobile, or $11 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.
– UCSC affiliates must purchase their permits before arriving at the event in order to receive their discounted UCSC rate. Attendants will only sell the non-affiliate-priced permits.
– More information provided by UCSC Transportation & Parking Services (TAPS)
—
This program is open to all members of the public consistent with state and federal law.

Non-Toxic Gopher Control workshop
2026-03-14 09:00 - 12:00 | Hay Barn, 94 Ranch View Road, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Gophers! Every backyard gardener’s nemesis. Join Anastatia Foster for this informative class on effective gopher control methods that are safe for humans and the environment.
Gophers and other vertebrate pests take a huge toll in agriculture as well as your own backyard; as much as 10 to 50% of crops can be lost to animal pests. This workshop will cover innovative methods and tools to reduce crop damage by managing pest populations in several ways. The most effective lethal traps and techniques will be presented along with exclusion barriers, integrating pest predators, and crop rotation.

Planting for Hummingbirds
2026-03-14 12:00 - 14:00 | CA
Would you like to attract hummingbirds to your garden? Join us on the patio at Norrie’s Gift & Garden Shop where UC Master Gardeners will host a pop-up information booth to offer advice and answer questions about the best Arboretum plants to attract hummingbirds.
Flowers really are the best hummingbird feeders and these tiny birds are attracted to many of the Arboretum’s high-nectar-producing blossoms. We will provide handouts about which Arboretum plants are best to make your garden abuzz year-round. We’ll also have fun facts about these aerial acrobats and will raffle off a beautiful plant from our nursery – a nectar producer that is a favorite of hummingbirds.
Come celebrate the wonders of our local hummingbirds and stock up on plants for your home garden.

Wildlife Photography from Hummingbirds to Elephants - a photo presentation by Kevin Lohman
2026-03-14 13:00 - 14:30 | CA
Join Kevin for “Wildlife Photography from Hummingbirds to Elephants” at the UC Santa Cruz Arboretum & Botanic Garden in the Horticulture 2 Meeting Hall. He will offer tips for photographing hummingbirds, share beautiful images taken at the arboretum, and present highlights from his wildlife photography across Monterey Bay and from his travels around the globe.
Kevin Lohman is an award-winning wildlife photographer based in Santa Cruz, California. One of his hummingbird photographs taken at the UC Santa Cruz Arboretum & Botanic Garden is among several of his images featured locally on a Santa Cruz METRO wildlife bus as part of the “One Ride at a Time” conservation campaign. His work has been published by National Geographic (online) and Outdoor Photographer, and recognized in major competitions including the Audubon Photography Awards and Nature’s Best International Photography Awards. Lohman actively supports conservation organizations through the donation and use of his photography.
The event is free with paid admission. UCSC students and faculty receive free admission to the Arboretum. Public admission costs are: Adults $10, Seniors $8, and Youth (4-17) $5.

UCSC Chamber Singers
2026-03-14 19:30 - 21:30 | Music Center Recital Hall, 400 McHenry Road, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
The UCSC Chamber Singers present a winter concert under the direction of Michael McGushin.
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ADMISSION
– General admission $5–12
– Free for UCSC students (ticket required).
– Tickets available here online through Eventbrite only.
– Follow the Music Dept on Eventbrite for notices and updates.
– Doors are scheduled to open 30 minutes prior to event start time.
– Ticket holders not seated at least 5 minutes before the advertised start time may forfeit their ticket/seat and no refund will be issued.
—
PARKING
– Parking by permit, ParkMobile, or $11 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.
– UCSC affiliates must purchase their permits before arriving at the event in order to receive their discounted UCSC rate. Attendants will only sell the non-affiliate-priced permits.
– More information provided by UCSC Transportation & Parking Services (TAPS)
—
This program is open to all members of the public consistent with state and federal law.

Summer Live in the Schedule of Classes
2026-03-15 00:00 - 23:59 | CA
The Summer Session Schedule of Classes goes live today. Explore course descriptions, prerequisites, and meeting times to start planning early for summer enrollment. Email summer@ucsc.edu with questions or call 831-459-5373.

OLLI at UCSC Sunday Speaker Meeting
2026-03-15 10:00 - 12:00 | Colleges Nine and John R. Lewis College Multi-purpose Room, 615 College Nine Road, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
OLLI at UCSC Hosts Bruce Lyon, Professor, Ecology & Evolutionary Biology
The Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI) at UC Santa Cruz invites the public to an in-person presentation from 10:00 to noon on Sunday, March 15th, in the Colleges Nine/Lewis Multipurpose Room at UCSC.
Join us for a social hour and a presentation titled, Sparrows in the Mist: Complex Winter Social Behavior in a Little Brown Bird.
Ornithologists often study breeding birds, and as a result, the winter ecology and social behavior of migratory birds is relatively understudied. A 22-year study of a population of golden-crowned sparrows that winter in the Arboretum of the University of California, Santa Cruz was conducted. Each sparrow was given a unique combination of color bands, which allowed us to identify individual birds in the wild and monitor their behavior and survival. Given that they survive migration and breeding, individual sparrows return winter after winter to the arboretum and flock together with the same individuals as in previous years. We used innovative social network methods to understand the patterns of social organization and discovered remarkable social complexity in these birds that is similar in some ways to the societies of mammals, including primates.
Professor Lyon seeks to understand the ecological and evolutionary basis of reproductive strategies and social behavior in animals, particularly reproductive parasitism, parental care, and mating systems. One focus is to understand patterns of cooperation and reproductive parasitism in birds and insects. His passion for photography has also been very useful in his research.
OLLI at UCSC is a community of adults from diverse educational, occupational, and geographic backgrounds who are devoted to the pursuit of learning. This event is free and open to the public. Bring a friend. Coffee and nibbles will be served.
For directions and free parking information, visit: https://olli.ucsc.edu/monthly-gatherings/location-directions-and-parking/
Free and open to the public

Presented by the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI) at UC Santa Cruz.

Cookies & LoFi Cram (finals study hall)
2026-03-15 13:00 - 23:00 | Porter/Kresge Dining Hall, 411 Porter-Kresge Rd, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
If studying in your room or apartment is not getting you where you need to be, change up the scenery and head to Porter Dining Hall for an hour or three. Bring your book, bring your final draft, or your flash cards.
We’ll bring the cookies & coffee (and tea & hot chocolate).
If you think you would like to attend, please RSVP on the registration page. It’s not required but it does help us plan.
Sponsored and hosted by: staff at the Porter Activities Office
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.

UCSC Jazz Big Band—with guest artist Marcus Shelby, bass
2026-03-15 15:00 - 17:00 | Music Center Recital Hall, 400 McHenry Road, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
Join the UC Santa Cruz Jazz Big Band for a winter concert, featuring compositions by Charles Mingus, with guest artist Marcus Shelby, bass, including an original arrangement performed for the first time by the UCSC Jazz Big Band. Directed by Charles Hamilton.
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ADMISSION
– General admission.
– Free for UCSC students (ticket required).
– Tickets available here online through Eventbrite only.
– Follow the Music Dept on Eventbrite for notices and updates.
– Doors are scheduled to open 30 minutes prior to event start time.
– Ticket holders not seated at least 5 minutes before the advertised start time may forfeit their ticket/seat and no refund will be issued.
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PARKING
– Parking by permit, ParkMobile, or $11 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.
– UCSC affiliates must purchase their permits before arriving at the event in order to receive their discounted UCSC rate. Attendants will only sell the non-affiliate-priced permits.
– 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.

Teng, Z. (CM) - Visualizing Player Processes: Towards Design Guidelines for Interactive Process Visualization Tools in Game Analytics
2026-03-16 08:00 - 10:00
Game analysts face a significant challenge in understanding problem-solving and decision-making processes from the vast and complex sequential data generated by modern video games. Existing visualization tools often fail to adequately support the exploration, suffering from issues of visual clutter, inflexible cohort construction, and a lack of interactive depth. To address this gap, this dissertation adopts a Research through Design (RtD) methodology to investigate how an interactive process visualization system can be designed and developed to better support the needs of game analysts.
The research was conducted in three phases. First, an initial set of five design guidelines was identified through a breakdown analysis of existing tools and semi-structured interviews with professional game analysts. Second, these guidelines were iteratively refined through long-term, collaborative case studies with analysts working on diverse commercial games. This process not only validated the initial guidelines and surfaced one additional guideline concerning interactive inspection, but also resulted in INSPECT, an interactive process visualization prototyping system that embodies the refined guidelines. Third, the guidelines were empirically validated through two complementary user studies of the INSPECT system. A controlled experiment demonstrated that features designed according to the guidelines enabled participants to identify player strategies more efficiently than with a baseline system, while a qualitative study with professional Dota 2 coaches and players demonstrated the system’s practical value for strategic analysis and strong usability.
The primary contributions of this dissertation to the fields of game analytics and information visualization is a set of validated design guidelines for process visualization tools. This contribution provides a durable and transferable framework for the design and development of more effective, analyst-centered tools for understanding player problem-solving and decision-making processes.
Event Host: Zhaoqing Teng, Ph.D. Candidate, Computational Media
Advsior: Magy Seif El-Nasr
Zoom- https://ucsc.zoom.us/j/97624383966?pwd=[REDACTED]
Passcode-595285

Karen Russell - The Antidote
2026-03-16 19:00 - 20:00 | Bookshop Santa Cruz
Bookshop Santa Cruz welcomes bestselling author Karen Russell (Swamplandia!) for a discussion about her latest novel The Antidote, which will be available in paperback on the night of the event. “The Antidote blends speculative and fantasy elements with rich language and vivid characters in an effort not to escape reality but to comment even more thoughtfully on it. . . . Russell’s lyrical writing dazzles on every page.” —The New York Times

Your RSVP helps us plan for your arrival and keep in touch with any changes. Thank you for registering!
The Antidote opens on Black Sunday, as a historic dust storm ravages the fictional town of Uz, Nebraska. But Uz is already collapsing—not just under the weight of the Great Depression and the dust bowl drought but beneath its own violent histories. The Antidote follows a “Prairie Witch,” whose body serves as a bank vault for peoples’ memories and secrets; a Polish wheat farmer who learns how quickly a hoarded blessing can become a curse; his orphan niece, a basketball star and witch’s apprentice in furious flight from her grief; a voluble scarecrow; and a New Deal photographer whose time-traveling camera threatens to reveal both the town’s secrets and its fate.
Karen Russell is the author of six books of fiction, including the New York Times bestsellers Swamplandia! and Vampires in the Lemon Grove. She has received MacArthur and Guggenheim Fellowships and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Born and raised in Miami, Florida, she now lives in the Bay Area with her husband, son, and daughter. The Antidote, a national bestseller and a finalist for the National Book Award, is her second novel.
This event is cosponsored by The Humanities Institute.
