Events

Ways to Wellness
2026-03-04 17:30 - 19:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | Namaste Lounge, 615 College Nine Road, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
Join the Asian American/Pacific Islander Resource Center on Wednesday 3/4 from 5:30-7:00pm at Namaste Lounge to learn about Tai Chi and Yoga, as we highlight Asian wellness tools that can be used to help relieve stress and discuss how cultural wellness practices can help us connect to our communities. Feel free to bring your own yoga mat, towel, or blanket!
RSVP at bit.ly/aapirc-wellness
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.

The UC Santa Cruz Kraw Lecture Series presents: Unmasking cancer's complete genetic code
2026-03-04 17:30 - 19:30 | Silicon Valley Campus, 3175 Bowers Avenue, Santa Clara, CA, 95054, United States
In this Kraw lecture, Angela Brooks will discuss her work on cancer research.
Current cancer research focuses almost entirely on finding errors—mutations—in DNA. This has given us incredible tools like precision oncology, matching patients with targeted drugs. But cancer cells almost always develop drug resistance, causing treatments to fail and limiting patient survival. An often-overlooked aspect of cancer genes is the messenger RNA, which is copied from DNA, then translated into protein to do the work of the cell. Over 95% of human genes have isoforms, which are different versions of the RNA message created through a process called RNA splicing. These different messages lead to slightly different proteins, and we believe our lack of knowledge of different isoforms is a missing cause of treatment failure.

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

REGISTER

Unexpected Returns: The Historic Entanglements of Fire, Settlement, and Stewardship in the Santa Cruz Mountains
2026-03-04 18:00 - 19:30 | Institute of the Arts and Sciences, 100 Panetta Ave, Santa Cruz, United States
March 4th, 2026 from 6:00 p.m. – 7:30 p.m. Miriam Greenberg and Andrew Matthews will present the findings of UCSC researchers who have spent three years studying the ecological, social, and political economic processes that have set the stage for contemporary wildfires, in what has become known as the “Wildland Urban Interface” (WUI). Come and learn about the deeper histories of indigenous burning, settler ranching, fire suppression, extractive industries and urbanization that have produced fire prone landscapes in the Santa Cruz Mountains.
This event is presented as part of An Aesthetics of Resilience, a collaborative research initiative of the Institute of the Arts and Sciences and the Friedlaender Lab at UC Santa Cruz. The project brings scientists, artists, humanists, and activists together to examine multiple experiences of vulnerability in the face of climate change and is supported by a University of California Office of the President California Climate Action Seed Grant, with additional support from the Coha Nowark Art + Science Fund.

Undiscovered Shakespeare: The Two Noble Kinsmen - Episode I
2026-03-04 19:00 - 21:00
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.

BME 280B Seminar: Artificial intelligence systems to advance engineered T cell immunotherapy designs
2026-03-05 11:40 - 13:15 | Biomedical Sciences, Biomedical Sciences Building Red Hill Road, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
Presenter: Zinaida Good, Assistant Professor of Medicine in the Division of Immunology and Rheumatology and the Division of Computational Medicine, Stanford University
Description: T cell immunotherapies have reshaped the treatment landscape for hematologic malignancies and are rapidly extending to solid tumors, autoimmune diseases, and transplant tolerance. Yet durable benefit remains inconsistent, and toxicities remain clinically significant. The current discovery proceeds one edit at a time, and existing preclinical models do not represent patient biology, which often results in failure upon clinical translation. Overcoming these challenges to improve patient outcomes and reduce toxicities requires a systems-level understanding of the multiscale factors governing T cell function and toxicity in patients. Artificial intelligence (AI) approaches offer an exciting opportunity to tackle this problem by learning unified representations from diverse data types spanning molecular, cellular, and clinical modalities. I will provide an overview on our team’s approaches building AI systems that harness primary patient datasets to directly inform advanced T cell designs optimized for clinical outcomes, with validation in preclinical models.
Bio: Zinaida Good, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor of Medicine in the Division of Immunology and Rheumatology and the Division of Computational Medicine at Stanford University. She also serves as the Director of the Stanford Center for Cancer Cell Therapy Data Hub. The goal of her research program is to understand and enhance engineered T cell immunotherapies for cancer and immune-mediated diseases through innovative computational approaches and systems immunology. Her lab leverages innovation in machine learning and clinical multiomic datasets to build artificial intelligence systems for advanced T cell therapy design. Dr. Good earned her Ph.D. in Computational & Systems Immunology from Stanford University. Her work includes 4 first-author papers (Nature Medicine 2018 & 2022, Nature Biotechnology 2019, Trends in Immunology 2019), 18+ co-authored papers (including Nature 2019, 2022, 2024, Science 2021, Nature Methods 2016, 2022, and NEJM 2024), and an initial senior author papers (ICML 2025, NeurIPS 2025, Frontiers in Immunology 2025). Her research is supported by the NIH/NCI Pathway to Independence Award, NIH/OD Multimodal AI Initiative Award, NIH/NCI Program Project Grant, and the Weill Cancer Hub West. Dr. Good has been named an Arthur & Sandra Irving Cancer Immunology Fellow in 2022, Parker Bridge Fellow in 2023, and an AACR-Woman in Cancer Research Scholar in 2024.
Hosted by: Professor Vanessa Jonsson, BMEbe Department

Teach For America Information Session
2026-03-05 12:00 - 13:00
Interested in launching a career rooted in service, learning, and community impact? Join Teach For America staff members for an upcoming informational session where you’ll learn more about the paid opportunities we offer, the issue we are trying to tackle together, and how you can get involved.
Teach For America offers paid full-time and part-time roles that range from virtual tutoring, internships, summer fellowships, and full-time teaching positions in historically under-resourced schools. Participants gain valuable leadership, communication, and professional skills while supporting student success and educational equity.
During this session, you’ll learn:
– Available opportunities and role types;
– Eligibility and application timelines;
– What support Teach For America provides to participants;
– How to get involved, regardless of major;

We can provide captions for the presentation. 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.

Contact information
James Crawford, Recruiter

Location
Jack Baskin School of Engineering (E1), 156, Santa Cruz, California, United States

Xu, Y. (CSE) - Right Place, Right Time: Accelerating Edge Computation on Modern Heterogeneous SoCs
2026-03-05 13:00 - 15:00 | Engineering 2, Engineering 2 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
Modern edge computing increasingly relies on heterogeneous System-on-Chip (SoC) architectures. These chips tightly integrate general-purpose CPUs with various specialized accelerators, including GPUs, FPGAs, and AI accelerators, all under a shared memory architecture. Although these shared-memory SoCs enable more efficient communication and data sharing between different processing units, they are notoriously difficult to program and tune due to architectural diversity across vendors and asymmetric compute capabilities within each SoC.
This dissertation introduces Redwood and BetterTogether, two frameworks that rethink CPU-accelerator collaboration on heterogeneous SoCs. Redwood targets a class of algorithms termed traverse–compute, that combine irregular tree traversals with dense leaf-level computation, e.g., Nearest-Neighbor Search and Barnes–Hut algorithm.
It addresses the efficient mapping of these algorithms onto heterogeneous systems by exploiting the architectural strengths of CPUs, GPUs, and FPGAs. BetterTogether extends this methodology to a different class of edge workloads, specifically multi-stage pipelines and neural networks commonly used in computer vision tasks. Furthermore, it introduces interference-aware analysis and scheduling techniques tailored for mobile SoCs. Finally, to broaden the scope of heterogeneous acceleration, we evaluated emerging domain-specific accelerators. We provide a preliminary analysis of Tensor Processing Units and Tensor Cores within the context of modern programming abstractions.
Event Host: Yanwen Xu, Ph.D. Candidate, Computer Science and Engineering
Advisor: Tyler Sorensen
Zoom- https://ucsc.zoom.us/j/5354629158?pwd=[REDACTED]
Passcode- 114514

Planting Oceania and Healing Communities
2026-03-05 13:30 - 15:00 | Namaste Lounge, 615 College Nine Road, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
Planting Oceania is a Oceanian/Indigenous Pacific Islander community organization that plants traditional foods in two gardens located at Filoli Historic House and Gardens in Woodside and at the UC Giltract Farms in Albany. Members of Planting Oceania will share stories about growing plants and stewarding the Land as an important cultural practice for building Oceania/Pacific Islander communities in California. Panelists will discuss being good guests and building good relations with Native California tribal leaders and communities — the Indigenous stewards of the Land — protocols they center in their land-based work.
Speakers: Windsor Taro (Belauan), John Holt (Kanaka Maoli/Native Hawaiian), Loa Niumeitolu (Tongan), Fuifuilupe Niumeitolu (Tongan), Andria Takesy (Belauan and Chuukese), Leila Tamale (Tongan), & Sitiveni Heimuli (Tongan)
Sponsored by: Rachel Carson College, Center for Racial Justice, Critical Race Ethnic Studies, Asian American/ Pacific Islander Resource Center, American Indian Resource Center, People of Color Sustainable Collective, & Mauna Kea Protectors
For more info fniumeit@ucsc.edu
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.

Traveling Film Southasia - Film Screening Festival Launch
2026-03-05 17:00 - 19:00 | Communications Building, 7487 Red Hill Road, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
Located in Communications 150, Studio C
Join the Center for South Asian Studies (CSAS) for a celebratory film screening event to launch Travelling Film Southasia, a mobile film festival highlighting 19 exceptional nonfiction productions of the last two years, originally screened at Film Southasia 2024 in Kathmandu. This year’s festival encapsulates a range of experiences on the Subcontinent with films from Nepal, Bangladesh, India, Pakistan and Myanmar, including CSAS Faculty Director Dolly Kikon’s recent film, Abundance.
Film Southasia (FSA) is a biennial festival that began in 1997 with the goal of popularizing documentary films so that they entertain, inform, and change lives. In addition to the festival that takes place in Kathmandu every two years, FSA organizes screenings, discussions, and workshops to promote Southasian non-fiction within the Subcontinent and around the world. Film Southasia believes that film is a powerful medium that not only helps better represent the region internationally, but also contributes immensely to introspection and to initiatives that bring change at the local level.
For more information: Traveling FSA 2025.
After the March 5 film festival launch event, the festival films will be available for streaming until March 20. Link and instructions for viewing to follow.
This event is open to all students, faculty, staff, and members of the public consistent with University policy and state and federal law.
Presented by the Center for South Asian Studies and co-sponsored by the Department of Film and Digital Media and The Humanities Institute.

Weather and the Whale Book Launch and Closing Party
2026-03-06 17:00 - 19:00 | Institute of the Arts and Sciences, 100 Panetta Ave, Santa Cruz, United States
March 6, 2026 5:00 p.m. – 7:00 p.m. The IAS will host a Celebration of the release of the Weather and the Whale catalog with an after-hours viewing of the exhibition and a conversation with three of the exhibition collaborators and catalog contributors: Guillermo Delgado-P, Kailani Polzak and Zac Zimmer.
Distributed by University of Minnesota Press, Weather and the Whale is an exciting interdisciplinary catalog combining artworks, critical and creative texts, and new scientific research about whales and other marine mammals to both sound a warning of the irreversible consequences of the collapsing climate and offer alternative possibilities for living during these challenging times.

Science in the Neighborhood: Transforming Pacific salmon recovery, from genes to ecosystems
2026-03-06 18:00 - 19:30 | Coastal Biology Building, 130 McAllister Way, Santa Cruz, CA, 95060
Science In the Neighborhood
A public lecture series hosted quarterly by the UC Santa Cruz Science Division
Transforming Pacific salmon recovery, from genes to ecosystems
Presentation by Eric Palkovacs, Professor, UC Santa Cruz
Q&A with Bryan Gaensler, Dean of Science, UC Santa Cruz
Register here.
An endangered Central California Coast coho salmon from the Scott Creek recovery program that UCSC operates in collaboration with NOAA. Photo credit: Joel Sartore / National Geographic Photo Ark.
For millennia, Pacific salmon have been integral to the health of coastal ecosystems and human communities from California to Alaska. Salmon are ecological and cultural keystone species, connecting marine and freshwater food webs and supporting thriving fisheries. Yet, wild salmon have declined precipitously due to a combination of factors including dams, harvest, hatcheries, water use—and now, climate change.
Professor Palkovacs, who leads UC Santa Cruz’s Institute of Marine Sciences and Fisheries Collaborative Program, will describe transformative approaches to recover wild salmon populations by connecting novel insights from the level of genes to ecosystems. Learn how this integrative research program can provide insights to transform the future for wild Pacific salmon and the ecosystems and fisheries they support.
The event is in-person only. Register here.
March 6, 2026 | 6:00–7:30 p.m.
Coastal Biology Building. Rm. 110
UC Santa Cruz Coastal Campus
130 McAllister Way
Santa Cruz, CA 95060
The screenshot below shows where to find the entrance of the Coastal Biology Building.

Lila Downs in Quarry Amphitheatre (March 6th)
2026-03-06 19:00 - 22:00 | Upper Quarry Amphitheater, 15 McLaughlin Drive, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
Tickets are on sale at quarryamphitheater.com, starting at $67.50 for general admission, and $118.26 VIP seating.

Born in 1968, Lila Downs is one of Latin America’s most influential voices, an artist with a singular sound and magnetic stage presence. Rooted in Oaxaca and shaped between Mexico and the United States, she weaves Mexican tradition with jazz, cumbia, folk, and contemporary rhythms. Her music is both celebration and conscience; she’ll turn the redwood backdrop into a gathering—intimate, fearless, and deeply human—where culture is honored, stories are reclaimed, and audiences are invited to feel, dance, and remember.

CANCELLED—UCSC Wind Ensemble—Spirits and Legends
2026-03-06 19:30 - 21:30 | Music Center Recital Hall, 400 McHenry Road, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
Event update: this event is cancelled as of 6:30PM on Friday, March 6. Ticket holders will receive refunds automatically via Eventbrite. Please contact artsevents@ucsc.edu with questions or concerns.
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UCSC Wind Ensemble presents Spirits and Legends; a concert featuring music for Wind Ensemble on themes of past or present legends or spirit journeys. Featuring music from “Spirited Away” by Joe Hisaishi, “The Dream of Angus” by Rolf Rudin, “Sound and Smoke” by Viet Cuong, and music by Carlos Chavez, Julie Giroux, and Richard Wagner.
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ADMISSION
– General admission.
– Free for UCSC students (ticket required).
– Tickets available online through Eventbrite only HERE.
– 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.

First Saturday Tour at the Arboretum
2026-03-07 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.

UCSC Grad Slam Final - March 7th
2026-03-07 18:30 - 21:00 | Kuumbwa Jazz Center, 320-2 Cedar St, Santa Cruz, 95060, United States
What is Grad Slam?

Three Minutes. One Slide. Thousands of Dollars in Prizes!
Grad Slam is a communication contest hosted by the UC Santa Cruz Graduate Division that highlights graduate student research. Participants have a maximum of three minutes to explain their graduate research or artistic endeavor to a general audience.
First Place, Grad Slam Champion: $3000
Second Place: $1500
People’s Choice*: $750
*decided by text message voting, one vote per audience member, both those in person and watching the live stream
Come join the fun and vote for your favorite presentation.
Saturday, March 7th at the Kuumbwa Jazz Center. Doors open at 6:30, talks begin at 7PM
All ten UC Grad Slam champions, 1 from each campus, compete in the UC Office of the President’s Grad Slam. The UC system-wide Grad Slam will take place on Wednesday, April 22, at the UC Center Sacramento.

After Hours: MIKE Live at the Quarry (Student-Only Concert)
2026-03-07 19:00 - 22:00 | Upper Quarry Amphitheater, 15 McLaughlin Drive, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
MIKE headlines an exclusive hip hop concert for UC Santa Cruz students on Saturday, March 7 at the Quarry Amphitheater. Presented by the Division of Student Affairs and Success (DSAS) Leadership and Involvement Team, this event is part of the new After Hours series, created to expand opportunities for student connection, creativity, and engagement beyond traditional campus hours.
Special guest Lil Kayla opens the show.
Doors: 7 p.m. | Show: 8 p.m.
Tickets: $10 (UCSC students only, while supplies last)
Location: Quarry Amphitheater
Follow @ucsc.dsas on Instagram for updates.
Questions: involved@ucsc.edu

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.

Family-friendly and Bilingual Bird Walk at the UCSC Arboretum
2026-03-08 10:00 - 12:00 | Arboretum, 122 Arboretum Road, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
Beginner Bird Walk / Paseando con los Pájaritos
Join the Bird School Project as they help kick-off the celebrations for Hummingbird Month in the beautiful gardens of the UCSC Arboretum & Botanic Garden. This bird walk is beginner and family-friendly. Bring binoculars if you have them, if not, binoculars or a monocular will be provided for you during the walk. The group will meet up at the entrance of the Australianum Garden right next to the large cypress tree in the middle of the parking lot. A Bird School Instructor will be leading the walk and will alternate speaking English and Spanish as needed. We encourage you to arrive at least 15 minutes early if you need to borrow binoculars.
Únase a la Escuela de Aves para celebrar el Mes del Colibrí. Este paseo de aves es para principiantes y apto para familias. Traiga binoculares si los tiene, si no, se le proporcionarán binoculares o un monocular durante la caminata. El grupo se reunirá en la entrada del Jardín Australia, justo al lado del gran ciprés en el medio del estacionamiento. Un instructor de la Escuela de Aves liderará la caminata y alternará hablando en inglés y español según sea necesario. Le recomendamos que llegue al menos 15 minutos antes si necesita pedir prestados binoculares.
Event is free with paid admission. Adults $10, Seniors $8, Youth 4-17 $5
Beginner and family-friendly bird walk at the UCSC Arboretum by the Santa Cruz Bird School Project in English and Spanish.

Jewels in the garden: A Darwinian natural history of humming birds with UCSC Professor Emeritus Bruce Lyon
2026-03-08 13:00 - 14:30 | Arboretum, 122 Arboretum Road, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
This presentation promises to be a super fun exploration of hummingbird natural history, evolution, and social behavior, full of fascinating scientific information and colorful images of local and exotic hummingbirds from here and abroad. Though now officially a Professor Emeritus of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at UC Santa Cruz, we are lucky that Dr. Bruce Lyon has little inclination to stop studying bird ecology and evolution in ‘retirement’! During his rich career teaching and conducting research, Bruce’s work continues to include the Lyon Lab’s 18+ year-long project studying golden-crowned sparrows at the Arboretum.
Bruce will give his entertaining presentation and slideshow in the Arboretum’s Hort 2 Meeting Hall and then take interested folks outside to one of the Arboretum’s “hummingbird hotspots” for an informal (humming)-birdwatching session and Q&A.

The Trial of Spock—An Opera Workshop
2026-03-08 16:00 - 18:00 | Music Center Recital Hall, 400 McHenry Road, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
The creators of The Trial of Spock—An Opera In Three Acts present concert performances of five scenes from an opera-in-progress at the UC Santa Cruz Music Center Recital Hall.
Captain Christopher Pike is gravely injured. Lieutenant Spock is behaving strangely. Charged with protecting Pike in his state of extreme need,Vulcan Commodore T’or suspects that Lieutenant Spock—once Captain Pike’s science officer—is up to no good. Spock’s Captain, James T. Kirk, doesn’t see the trouble until far too late, and soon Spock holds all of them prisoner aboard a ship destined for the “forbidden planet” Talos IV. He refuses to say a word about their fate—not until his superiors agree to give him his trial. Under oath, and with strange evidence, Spock tells the story of Captain Pike’s first visit to Talos IV, where illusion and artificial experiences plunge Pike and fellow captive Vina into uncharted dimensions of their memories, and their concepts of self.
Join sopranos Nicole Koh, Sheila Willey, and Emily Sinclair; tenors Alex Boyer and Nicolas Vasquez-Gerst, baritones Joseph Calzada and Michael Kuo, and the Del Sol Quartet, as they distort the myth of Orpheus, in order to re-think our presumed relationships to freedom and reality, and its augmentations.
Music by Ben Leeds Carson; libretto by Perre DiCarlo & Ben Leeds Carson and Lincoln & Lee Taiz; with contributions from John de Lancie, based on teleplays by Gene Roddenberry.
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ADMISSION
– FREE and open to the public
– Tickets required and available online through Eventbrite
– 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)
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FULL SCHEDULE OF EVENTS
Fri, March 8, 4:00 p.m., UC Santa Cruz Music Center Recital Hall
The Trial of Spock—An Opera Workshop
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Fri, March 13, 7:00 p.m., Kuumbwa Jazz Center
How to Live Long and Prosper—Lessons from a Star Trek Opera
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This program is open to all members of the public consistent with state and federal law.

"The Cigarette Surfboard" screening with filmmaker Ben Judkins (Kresge '17)
2026-03-08 17:00 - 21:00
Join Banana Slug alumni filmmaker Ben Judkins (Kresge ’17, film and digital media) and “ciggy board” creator Taylor Lane for a screening of their award-winning documentary, The Cigarette Surfboard (presented by the California Coastal Commission‘s Whale Tail Grant).
5:00-6:00 PM | alumni meet & greet with light refreshments
6:00-7:35 PM | film screening
7:35-8:30 PM | filmmaker discussion
8:30-9:00 PM | mingle
REGISTER
ABOUT THE FILM
After a young designer realizes that a surfboard – which he crafted from thousands of littered cigarette butts picked up off California beaches – could captivate the eyes of millions across the globe, he decides to use it as the impetus to do something more. The Cigarette Surfboards become a platform to spark ocean stewardship and the symbol of a campaign to hold Big Tobacco accountable for their toxic, plastic waste. Surfing is the medium, but the message is universal.
Small decisions and actions, like littering a cigarette butt, cumulatively can have a large impact, for better or for worse. This immersive documentary provides viewers an up close experience of the ocean through surfers’ eyes, to amplify a message of urgency and possibility regarding the ocean’s wellbeing. As our ocean faces mounting threats, and surfing continues to grow, we as surfers have a responsibility to protect it.
ABOUT THE FILMMAKER
Raised in Northern California, at age eight, Ben Judkins found an old camcorder and discovered the medium to explore and create. After years of videotaping friends skateboarding and surfing, Ben landed at the University of California, Santa Cruz, majoring in Film & Digital Media. His senior film “Marshall” earned the Dean’s Award, and also won “Best Locally-Produced Work” at the 2017 Santa Cruz Film Festival. Ben is an avid surfer who believes in the power of visual storytelling to move people to action. The Cigarette Surfboard documentary is an opportunity to inspire a generation of surfers to be stewards of the sea.

Hendawy, M. (CM) - Autonoming Child Online Safety in the Age of AI: From Control to Digital Co-Agency Across Cultures
2026-03-09 07:00 - 08:00
Children’s lives are now inextricably linked with AI-driven digital systems that shape learning, social interaction, and development. This has elevated child online safety to a central concern for families, policymakers, and educators. This makes Child online safety a wicked socio-technical problem, emerging from the complex interplay of social norms, platform incentives, cultural expectations, and rapidly evolving technologies. Dominant control-based paradigms—monitoring, blocking, and surveillance—undermine children’s developmental capacity, erode family trust, and foreclose the iterative cycles of self regulated learning necessary for digital resilience. This proposal advances digital co-agency as a new paradigm for child online safety. It reframes safety from an outcome of unilateral control to a shared, relational practice distributed across children, caregivers, technologies, and governance structures. To be effective, digital co-agency must be grounded in a clear normative standard. I define this standard as ethical safety: protection is legitimate only when it is rights-respecting and developmentally supportive. Within this boundary, the dissertation proposes autonoming as a design stance for AI-mediated safety systems. Autonoming systems act as developmental mentors that support children’s judgment over time through explanation, negotiation, and graduated support that can fade as competence grows. Autonoming is grounded in Self-Regulated Learning (SRL) as the developmental mechanism for durable safety capacity. SRL models learning as cyclical forethought (planning), performance (in-the-moment regulation), and reflection (evaluating outcomes). The dissertation adopts a socio-technical interpretivist stance and a Design Science Research orientation to produce actionable artifacts that are theoretically grounded and evaluable.. Its core methodological contribution is localization-first comparative design across Cairo and Berlin. This comparative structure helps distinguish between: localized variables (culturally specific norms regarding authority, privacy, risk, norms, expectations, and legitimacy conditions that must be adapted to) from ethical invariants (accountability, contestability, proportionality that should hold across contexts).
Event Host: Mennatullah Hendawy, Ph.D. Student, Computational Media
Advisor: Magy Seif El-Nasr
Zoom- https://ucsc.zoom.us/j/93831600031?pwd=[REDACTED]
Passcode-459844

Statistics Seminar: Evaluating Predictive Algorithms Under Missing Data
2026-03-09 08:00 - 17:00, 2026-03-09 16:00 - 17:00
Presenter: Amanda Coston, Assistant Professor, University of California Berkeley
Description: Performance evaluation plays a central role in decisions about whether and how predictive algorithms should be deployed in high-stakes settings. Yet, in many real-world domains, evaluation is fundamentally difficult: the data available for assessment are often biased, incomplete, or noisy, and the act of deploying a model can itself alter which outcomes are observed. As a result, standard evaluation practices may substantially misrepresent both overall model performance and disparities across groups. In this talk, we examine several common threats to valid evaluation—including measurement error, selection bias, and distribution shift—and present principled evaluation methods that enable valid performance assessment under these challenges when appropriate conditions are met.
Bio: From UC Berkeley website: Amanda Coston is an assistant professor of statistics at UC Berkeley. Her research addresses real-world data problems that challenge the validity, reliability, and equity of algorithmic decision support systems and data-driven policy-making. Her work draws on techniques from causal inference, machine learning, and nonparametric statistics. She earned her PhD in machine learning and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University and subsequently completed a postdoc at Microsoft Research on the Machine Learning and Statistics Team. She also holds a Bachelor of Science in Engineering from Princeton in computer science and a certificate in the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs.
Hosted by: Statistics Department

Robbins, A. (ECE) - How to train your organoid: goal-directed learning in biological neural networks
2026-03-09 10:00 - 11:00
Artificial neural networks can now learn to play games, control robots, generate language, and solve complicated reasoning tasks, yet we still lack a clear understanding of how to directly guide learning in biological neural networks. We show that brain organoids can learn to solve a fundamental control task, balancing an inverted pendulum, through closed-loop electrophysiology. Cortical organoids interfaced with high-density microelectrode arrays received sensory input about the pole’s angle and produced motor output through their neural activity. Training signals selected by a reinforcement learning algorithm significantly outperformed random stimulation and no-stimulation controls. Blocking glutamatergic transmission abolished the learning and washout restored it, confirming the adaptation depends on synaptic plasticity. To support this work and future experiments, we developed BrainDance, an open-source framework for running reproducible biological learning experiments, and contributed to RT-Sort, a real-time spike sorting algorithm. This dissertation presents the tools, experiments, and findings from pursuing goal-directed learning in biological neural networks. BrainDance makes these experiments easy-to-create, reproducible and shareable, letting any lab with compatible hardware start training their own organoids.
Event Host: Ash Robbins, Ph.D. Candidate, Electrical and Computer Engineering
Advisor: Mircea Teodorescu
Zoom- https://ucsc.zoom.us/j/95839863615?pwd=[REDACTED]
Passcode- 069118

ECE 290 Seminar: Dynamical Signatures: Harnessing the Hidden Language of In-Space Electric Propulsion
2026-03-09 10:40 - 11:45 | Engineering 2, Engineering 2 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
Presenter: Dr. Christine Greve, Research Engineer, Edwards AFB
Description: Low-thrust space electric propulsion systems offer long propulsion system lifetimes for satellite maintenance maneuvers. These thrusters operate by generating and accelerating plasmas, making the thrusters throttleable, propellant-efficient, and scalable from low-to-high power operations. This talk will focus on efforts to leverage the underlying time-dependent dynamics of plasma to investigate and influence thruster research and development. Prior years of study have developed techniques to uniquely represent the dynamics of such systems that have since been used to open a new way to test and operate plasma systems. Additional work has investigated the correlations between time-dependent measurements of these dynamics to develop digital twins, automate test processes with machine learning, inform design of experiments, and develop on-orbit system diagnostics. The talk will conclude with a look to the future as these tools are further applied both within the lab and potentially transitioned to on-orbit applications.
Bio: Dr. Christine Greve is a research engineer for the Air Force Research Laboratory at Edwards AFB. She received her Ph.D. in Aerospace Engineering from Texas A&M University under an NDSEG fellowship for her work in data-driven modeling of plasma-based systems. She now serves as the Electric Propulsion group lead with interests in high-power electric propulsion, machine learning, data-driven modeling, and novel plasma diagnostic techniques.
Hosted by: Professor Soumya Bose, ECE Department
Zoom: https://ucsc.zoom.us/j/97975378707?pwd=[REDACTED]

Digital Accessibility: Document Accessibility with Grackle
2026-03-09 12:00 - 13:00 | https://ucsc.zoom.us/meeting/register/bpqXOZJRSDaaRmT6KRK8xg
Learn how to use a new Google document accessibility checker tool: Grackle.
Grackle is a Google Workspace add-on that can be used to check the accessibility of Google Docs, Google Slides, and Google Sheets.
Topics will include: how to access Grackle, how to run a report, and how to read your accessibility report to take action.

Tax Workshops for International Students & Scholars
2026-03-09 12:30 - 14:00 | Graduate Student Commons, 420 Hagar Drive, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
International Student Services and Programming (ISSP) will be hosting two tax-related sessions for international students and scholars in the coming months, including a hands-on workshop for anyone who wants support while working through the filing process. We understand that filing taxes can be daunting, so our office is here to provide resources to make this process easier.
GLACIER tax prep staff from and graduate peer mentors will be available to help you one-on-one as you complete your tax filing steps.

Hands-on Tax Workshop #1
Date: Monday, March 9
Time: 12:30 – 14:00
Location: Graduate Student Commons (entrance next to Cafe Iveta)

Workshop #2 will take place on Monday, April 6, at the same time and location

Have any tax questions or topics you’d like us to address at the beginning of each workshop? Submit your questions here, and we’ll highlight them with the group. Even if you can’t make it to either session, feel free to still ask us your general questions, and we’ll update everyone with common themes we’re noticing.
Please note that ISSP staff are not tax experts and are legally prohibited from giving you tax advice. It is your responsibility to determine how to file your taxes and/or find a tax preparation service.

Radical Craft’s Works-in-Progress Exhibition
2026-03-09 13:30 - 15:00 | Social Sciences 1, Social Sciences 1, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064

Harrison, D. (CS) - Multi-Level Control in Neural Dialogue Generation: Style, Semantics, and Selection through Over-Generation and Ranking
2026-03-09 14:00 - 16:00
End-to-end neural generation models have largely displaced the modular architectures that once gave dialogue system designers explicit control over what is said and how it is said. While these models produce fluent text, they collapse content planning, sentence planning, and surface realization into a single undifferentiated decoding step, sacrificing the controllable structure that earlier systems provided. This dissertation investigates how that structure can be recovered through the over-generate-and-rank (OGR) paradigm: generating multiple candidate outputs and selecting among them using learned or prompt-based ranking functions that jointly optimize semantic fidelity, stylistic appropriateness, and conversational coherence. We instantiate OGR at three levels of natural language generation for dialogue: utterance-level stylistic control, cross-domain semantic evaluation, and dialogue-level response selection.
First, we show that explicit conditioning mechanisms, specifically decoder-level side constraints for personality variation and discourse contrast, re-introduce stylistic control into neural sequence-to-sequence models without compromising semantic accuracy. Second, we demonstrate that prompt-based learning with structured linguistic profiles achieves near-perfect personality accuracy and effectively zero slot error rate when combined with ranking, establishing that LLM prompting with explicit pragmatic specifications can match or exceed fine-tuning for personality-conditioned generation. Third, we develop a cross-domain semantic error rate evaluation framework that frames slot error computation as an extraction task, using a LoRA-adapted language model to extract meaning representations from generated text and a trained ranker to select among candidate extractions, achieving reliable evaluation across 23 topic domains without domain-specific rules. Fourth, we build and evaluate a speaker-aware transformer response ranker for Athena, our Alexa Prize socialbot, demonstrating that learned ranking over heterogeneous generator pools produces significantly longer conversations and higher user ratings than heuristic rule-based selection in a live A/B study with over 6,000 conversations.
A unifying finding emerges across all four contributions: the pragmatic features that control personality style in generation—acknowledgements, engagement questions, hedges, exclamations—are the same features that distinguish high-quality from mediocre responses in open-domain dialogue. This parallel reveals that stylistic control and response ranking are complementary mechanisms for achieving the same goal: making dialogue systems sound more natural and engaging. Together, these results support the dissertation’s central hypothesis that over-generate-and-rank provides a general, extensible mechanism for controllable neural language generation, restoring explicit decision points where competing communicative objectives can be weighed. The ranking function serves a role analogous to the sentence planner in classical NLG architectures, but operates on the outputs of modern neural and LLM-based generators.

Event Host: Davan Harrison, Ph.D. Candidate, Computer Science
Advisor: Marilyn Walker

AM Seminar: Solution Discovery in Fluids with High Precision Using Neural Networks
2026-03-09 16:00 - 17:00
Presenter: Ching-Yao Lai, Assistant Professor, Stanford University
Description: I will discuss examples utilizing neural networks (NNs) to find solutions to partial differential equations (PDEs) that facilitate new discoveries. Despite being deemed universal function approximators, neural networks, in practice, struggle to fit functions with sufficient accuracy for rigorous analysis. Here, we developed multi-stage neural networks (Wang and Lai, J. Comput. Phys. 2024) that can reduce the prediction error to nearly the machine precision of double-precision floating points within a finite number of iterations. We use accurate NNs to tackle the challenge of searching for singularities in fluid equations (Wang-Lai-Gómez-Serrano-Buckmaster, Phys. Rev. Lett. 2023). Unstable singularities, especially in dimensions greater than one, are exceptionally elusive. With NNs we demonstrate the first discovery of smooth unstable self-similar singularities to unforced incompressible fluid equations (Wang et al., arXiv:2509.14185). The example illustrates how deep learning can be used to discover new and highly accurate numerical solutions to PDEs.
Bio: Ching-Yao Lai (Yao) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geophysics and an Affiliated Faculty of the Institute for Computational and Mathematical Engineering (ICME) at Stanford. Before joining Stanford, she was an Assistant Professor at Princeton University. She received an undergraduate degree (2013) in Physics from National Taiwan University and a PhD (2018) in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering from Princeton University. She completed her postdoctoral research at Columbia University where she received the Lamont Postdoctoral Fellowship. Her current research focuses on enhancing the representation of machine-learning models to tackle multiscale problems. She was the recipient of the 2023 Google Research Scholar Award, the 2024 Sloan Research Fellowship, and the 2025 NSF CAREER Award.
Hosted by: Applied Mathematics
