Events

ReView
2026-09-09 01:00 - 2026-10-17 00:59, 2026-09-08 01:00 - 2026-10-16 00:59, 2026-09-07 01:00 - 2026-10-15 00:59, 2026-09-06 01:00 - 2026-10-14 00:59, 2026-09-05 01:00 - 2026-10-13 00:59, 2026-09-04 01:00 - 2026-10-12 00:59, 2026-09-03 01:00 - 2026-10-11 00:59, 2026-09-02 01:00 - 2026-10-10 00:59 (America/Los_Angeles) and 6 more dates | Mary Porter Sesnon Art Gallery, Baskin Service Road, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
Mary Porter Sesnon Art Gallery
August 13-September 19, 2026
Opening celebration and Artist Talk
Saturday, August 15, 2-4:30 p.m
Light refreshments will be served.
Summer Gallery Hours: Thursday-Saturday, 1-5pm
ReView: UC Santa Cruz Arts Alumni Exhibition features Arts Division alumni from the Monterey and San Francisco Bay Areas. Curated by Valéria Miranda, the Sesnon’s Director, ReView includes a wide variety of media and techniques highlighting the diversity of contemporary practice of alumni who graduated from 1972 to 2025. The exhibition title alludes to the portfolio critique process and suggests ideas of reflection and reevaluation—whether revisiting past work, rethinking materials, or tracing how a practice evolves over time.
This exhibition celebrates the creative path of artists who began their journeys at UC Santa Cruz. United by shared roots yet defined by distinct paths, the participating alumni reflect the lasting influence of the Arts Division programs. Their works speak to the spirit of inquiry, experimentation, and perseverance that has long shaped the university’s artistic community.
ReView presents an opportunity for the campus and larger community to see the professional practice of these artists who continue to build on the creative foundation that they received at UCSC and to inspire our current students, offering visualization of their own future artistic journeys after graduation.
ReView offers a unique opportunity for returning alumni to celebrate their creative expressions while reconnecting with classmates and the university community.
Admission is free and open to the public.
More Information

Volunteer at the UCSC Arboretum
2026-09-08 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!

First Saturday Tour at the Arboretum
2026-09-05 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.

Elimination of Duration of Status: Final Town Hall
2026-09-03 10:30 - 12:00 | https://ucsc.zoom.us/j/7341288474?pwd=[REDACTED]
Changes to the “duration of status” for F and J visa holders are now in effect. Immigration rules are complex, and Global Engagement wants to make sure you have accurate information.
We invite you to join us for a comprehensive update and a Q&A session for F and J visa-holding students and scholars.
Click here to register for the Zoom link
Can’t make it? This update and future guidance will be posted on the Global Engagement Immigration Updates and Guidance Webpage. We recommend bookmarking this page.
Questions? Please visit our advising webpage to schedule an appointment with an international advisor or email us at istudent@ucsc.edu or ischolar@ucsc.edu.

Transform your workplace with practical AI skills.
2026-09-02 18:00 - 19:00 | Silicon Valley Campus, 3175 Bowers Avenue, Santa Clara, CA, 95054, United States
Explore how to lead with AI—whether you want to build it or apply it.
In this information session, discover two dynamic pathways: AI Business Practices, for professionals seeking practical AI tools to boost productivity without coding, and AI Engineer, for those ready to design and deploy production-ready AI systems. Learn how generative AI, automation, and intelligent agents are transforming today’s workplace—and how you can be part of that change.
Speaker
Join Hien Luu, Program Chair and Head of Machine Learning Infrastructure at Zoox, for an inside look at how our courses help you build prompt‑engineering know‑how, ethical AI awareness, and productivity‑boosting workflows—so you can lead AI‑driven change in your organization.
Keep learning
See our course page for a closer look at all upcoming offerings.
CLAIM YOUR SEAT TODAY.

Engineering Teaching Community (Faculty)
2026-09-02 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.

Dry Farm Tomato Field Day
2026-09-02 10:00 - 14:00 | Hay Barn, 94 Ranch View Road, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
Climate change models predict increasingly hot and dry conditions, raising concerns about impacts on agricultural production and food security. Answering this challenge is organic dry farming, a sustainable practice that allows growers to produce crops under arid conditions with little irrigation.
Researchers from UC Santa Cruz and the University of Oregon are studying the environmental conditions and plant traits that support successful dry-farmed tomato production on 10 different varieties. Join us for a Field Day focused on research that aims to help small-scale organic farmers adapt to our changing climate.
RSVP

Shen, J. (STAT) - Bayesian Modeling and Uncertainty Quantification for Verbal Autopsy Data
2026-09-01 09:00 - 11:00
Verbal autopsy (VA) is a well developed tool to collect information describing deaths outside of hospitals by conducting surveys to the relatives and caregivers of the deceased person. It is routinely-implemented in low and middle income countries, where it often lacks sufficient resources to conduct the autopsy. The main task is to estimate both individual level cause-of-death probabilities and population level cause-specific mortality fractions. In this document, we present three projects dealing with challenges current VA modeling faces. In the first project, we build a shared latent class model for verbal autopsy, which allows causes to share common symptom patterns. A truncated Bayesian nonparametric prior allows the number of latent classes to adapt to data, while retaining a computationally tractable representation. We provide a general framework for few-shot learning of the VA data, where limited labels can be combined in analysis with a potentially much larger collection of unlabeled symptom profile. Two complementary factorizations are considered to account for different types of distribution shift between source and target. In the second project, we develop a conformal prediction procedure for verbal autposy. For each death, we generate a conformal prediction set from existing VA model outputs, which guarantees a marginal coverage of true cause from a fequentist perspective. We also investigate conformal Bayesian procedures that more directly incorporate posterior uncertainty from Bayesian VA models. In the third project, we consider situations where source and target do not share a common cause list. We propose methods using repulsive priors to identify deaths in the target domain whose symptom profiles are not adequately represented by the known causes in the source domain.
Event Host: Jibo Shen, Ph.D. Student, Statistical Science
Advisor: Zehang Richard Li
Zoom: https://ucsc.zoom.us/j/94158273558?pwd=[REDACTED]
Passcode: [REDACTED]

What's new in clinical research careers?
2026-08-31 12:00 - 13:00 | Silicon Valley Campus, 3175 Bowers Avenue, Santa Clara, CA, 95054, United States
Building safety into innovation
In this information session, you’ll gain insight into current industry trends, emerging skills, and career opportunities. We’ll dive into how our Clinical Trials Design and Management program is designed to help professionals build expertise, stay competitive, and achieve their educational and career goals.
Whether you’re looking to advance in your current role, transition into a new field, or expand your knowledge, this session is a great place to start.
Your speaker
Karim Sajwani, M.P.H., CCRA, executive director and head of clinical operations at Henlius USA, Inc., has more than 25 years of experience in clinical drug development in the areas of cardiovascular, dermatology, infectious disease, oncology, ophthalmology, neuropathy, and respiratory illness. Karim has been serving as chair of the Clinical Trials Design and Management program since 2025.
Keep learning
See our course page for a closer look at all upcoming offerings.
CLAIM YOUR SEAT TODAY.

Farm to Fork 2026
2026-08-29 16:00 - 21:00 | UCSC Farm, 152 Farm Rd, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
Join the Center for Agroecology for an evening at the Farm
Enjoy a reception and benefit dinner on the UCSC Farm followed by dancing in the Hay Barn! This event will feature music, appetizers, tours, and local wine followed by a seasonally-focused, locally-sourced meal featuring produce from the UCSC Farm and local partners. As the sun sets, head down to the Hay Barn for music, dancing, and dessert.
The evening’s program:
4:00pm: Reception and farm tours followed by dinner
7:00pm: Dancing in the Hay Barn
Individual Registration: $225.00
Table of Six: $1,300.00
Individual Registration Dance Portion Only: $30.00

Life as an International Grad Student Workshop
2026-08-29 08:00 - 09:30 | https://ucsc.zoom.us/j/93007224753?pwd=[REDACTED]
Welcome new international graduate students!
To prepare for your arrival, we invite you to join our International Grad Peer Mentors for an online session that will go over life as an international graduate student. Come learn about living in Santa Cruz (transit, health, finances, housing etc.), basic needs (e.g., bank accounts, mobile phones, social security number), campus resources, and more!
Send us any topics/questions you’d like our Grad Peer Mentors to cover.
Zoom Link
Meeting ID: 930 0722 4753
Passcode: [REDACTED]

Nag, S. (BMEB) - Personalized Diploid Genome Graphs for Accurate Somatic Variant Discovery
2026-08-28 10:00 - 12:00 | Engineering 2, Engineering 2 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
Many somatic variant-calling pipelines begin by aligning tumor and matched-normal sequencing reads to a single linear reference genome, such as GRCh38. Because every individual differs substantially from this reference, this approach can introduce reference bias, causing reads to map incorrectly or not at all and potentially leading to missed somatic variants or germline variants being misclassified as somatic. I propose replacing the generic reference with a personalized diploid genome graph constructed from a donor-specific assembly (DSA), which represents both inherited haplotypes of the individual. I will develop this framework by (1) generating haplotype-resolved, telomere-to-telomere DSAs for cancer reference cell lines, (2) developing haplotype-aware graph alignment and adapting DeepSomatic to call variants against personalized diploid genomes, and (3) applying this approach across tissues from SMaHT donors to improve somatic mosaicism detection and characterize shared and tissue-specific mutations.
Event Host: Sagorika Nag, Ph.D. Student, Biomolecular Engineering & Bioinformatics
Advisor: Benedict Paten
Zoom: https://ucsc.zoom.us/j/99844148597?pwd=[REDACTED]
Passcode: [REDACTED]

Saleem, O. (ECE) - Coupled Evacuation Readiness and Post-Disaster Restoration for Vehicle-to-Grid Enabled Resilient Power–Transportation Networks
2026-08-28 09:00 - 12:00 | Engineering 2, Engineering 2 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
The accelerating adoption of zero-emission vehicles (ZEVs) in California is reshaping both the transportation and electrical grids at the moment as climate-driven disasters are intensifying in frequency and severity. This dual transition exposes a critical structural gap: existing resilience research treats pre-disaster evacuation readiness and post-disaster grid restoration as separate problems, even though both are governed by the same underlying resource, i.e., electric vehicle batteries. On the other hand, same underlying constraint, a damaged, congested transportation network. This dissertation develops an integrated framework that spans the full disaster lifecycle, coupling evacuation-phase EV readiness assessment with restoration-phase vehicle-to-grid (V2G) coordination.
The work begins by establishing a quantitative ZEV Evacuation Readiness Score (ZEV Score) that assess community preparedness across exposure of the region to various natural disasters based on historical data, vulnerabilities of the available infrastructure and the adaptive capacity of the infrastructure under stress. This work was afterwards extended to 44-indicator resilience framework across 6 domains i.e. community engagement, charging infrastructure, mobile and backup power, transportation routing, exposure, equity, and community engagement. Building on this foundation, the dissertation introduces a novel restoration architecture that couples vehicle-routing-problem-based crew dispatch with game-theoretic V2G aggregation through a physics-consistent islanding-duration variable — the first framework to close the loop between road/grid repair scheduling and battery energy management. Validated on the IEEE RTS-79 network with Tesla Model 3 battery dynamics, this coupling eliminates the “battery dead-zone” failure mode entirely, reducing cumulative unsupported outage time from 54.3 to 0 hours under worst-case coordination scenarios, while cutting total load shed by up to 18% beyond standalone repair coordination.
Together, these contributions reframe EV fleets not merely as evacuation liabilities to be planned around, but as a coordinated, timeline-aware energy resource spanning both the flight from disaster and the recovery that follows. The dissertation’s proposed aims extend this integration towards stochastic damage scenarios, heterogeneous mobile energy resources, and a unified pre- to post-disaster co-optimization pipeline. Which offer both a technical bridge between restoration engineering and evacuation planning, and a policy-relevant tool for California communities navigating a fully electrified, climate-exposed future.
Event Host: Osman Saleem, Ph.D. Student, Electrical & Computer Engineering
Advisor: Keith Corzine & Leila Parsa
Zoom: https://ucsc.zoom.us/j/96031345847?pwd=[REDACTED]
Passcode: [REDACTED]

Educational Therapy Program Info Session
2026-08-27 18:30 - 19:30 | Silicon Valley Campus, 3175 Bowers Avenue, Santa Clara, CA, 95054, United States
Transform learning
Join Diana Black Kennedy, chair of UCSC Silicon Valley’s Educational Therapy program, to learn how this distinctive program prepares educators and professionals to create meaningful, lasting impact. As one of the few programs approved by the Association of Educational Therapists (AET), it equips you with the skills to assess learning differences and implement research-based, effective interventions with confidence.
Empower students and build your practice
Gain skills to support students with learning differences like dyslexia, ADHD, and autism using therapeutic and educational strategies. Whether you’re working in schools or starting a private practice, this program helps you create individualized plans that foster meaningful progress.
This info session is sponsored by the Educational Therapy Program.
Claim your seat today.

Kramer, A. (BMEB) - Scalable phylo-pangenomics
2026-08-27 15:00 - 17:00 | Biomedical Sciences Building, 575 McLaughlin Drive
The COVID-19 pandemic generated genomic data at unprecedented scale, with tens of millions of SARS-CoV-2 genomes deposited in public repositories and thousands of new sequences added each day. This dissertation develops methods for analyzing genomic datasets at this scale, unified by the idea that encoding genomes according to their evolutionary relationships can make otherwise intractable computations practical. First, I evaluate online phylogenetic inference, in which new genomes are continuously added to an existing tree, and compare parsimony-based methods with maximum-likelihood approaches under pandemic time constraints. For densely sampled SARS-CoV-2 genomes, online inference with UShER and matOptimize produces trees comparable to established maximum-likelihood methods while requiring orders of magnitude less time and memory. I then develop tools that make phylogenies containing millions of genomes useful for downstream analysis and visualization. ShUShER enables privacy-preserving phylogenetic placement within a web browser, allowing laboratories to analyze sensitive sequences without transmitting them to an external server. Treenome Browser co-visualizes the genomic variation of millions of samples alongside their phylogenetic relationships by operating directly on a compressed mutation-annotated tree. Finally, I describe Panmap, which uses Pangenome Mutation-Annotated Networks (PanMANs) to place, align, and genotype sequencing reads and to estimate haplotype abundances against reference collections containing up to millions of genomes. Panmap produces indexes hundreds of times smaller than graph-based alternatives, improves genome reconstruction over single-reference workflows at low coverage, and supports applications ranging from pathogen genome assembly to ancient environmental DNA analysis. Together, these results show that evolutionary history can serve not only as an object of inference but as a scalable computational infrastructure for phylogenomic and pangenomic analyses as genomic datasets continue to grow.
Event Host: Alexander Kramer, Ph.D. Candidate, Biomolecular Engineering & Bioinformatics
Advisor: Russell Corbett-Detig
Zoom: https://ucsc.zoom.us/j/91364025182?pwd=[REDACTED]
Passcode: [REDACTED]

Advance your Career in Medical Device Design & Quality
2026-08-27 12:00 - 13:00 | Silicon Valley Campus, 3175 Bowers Avenue, Santa Clara, CA, 95054, United States
From discovery to market
Join Kiran Gulati, chair of the UCSC Silicon Valley Extension Medical Device Quality and Design program, for an inside look at how our courses provide hands-on training, practical case studies, and industry-relevant skills that prepare you for roles in quality engineering, regulatory compliance, and design assurance.

Sponsor
This info session is sponsored by the UCSC Silicon Valley Extension Medical Device Quality and Design program.

CLAIM YOUR SEAT TODAY.

Where Hardware Meets Intelligence
2026-08-26 18:00 - 19:00 | Silicon Valley Campus, 3175 Bowers Avenue, Santa Clara, CA, 95054, United States
Embedded Systems: Build the Intelligence Behind the Hardware
Join Juergen Kienhoefer to explore the foundations of embedded systems and how firmware powers the devices we use every day—plus get an introduction to how AI is transforming the field.
Learn how our UCSC Silicon Valley Extension Embedded Systems courses prepare you to develop low-level software, interface with hardware components, and build reliable real-time applications for microcontrollers and embedded platforms, while gaining insight into emerging trends like AI at the edge. Discover how the hands-on courses can help advance your career in embedded systems engineering.
Your speaker
Juergen Kienhoefer, instructor of the AI-Driven Embedded Systems course, also teaches Linux Systems Programming, which kicks off Sept. 25.
Keep learning
Explore our program page and course catalog to see the full course lineup.

CLAIM YOUR SEAT TODAY.
