Spring Exhibitions at the Institute of the Arts and Sciences
2026-07-23 12:00 - 17:00, 2026-07-24 12:00 - 17:00, 2026-07-25 12:00 - 17:00, 2026-07-26 12:00 - 17:00, 2026-07-29 12:00 - 17:00, 2026-07-30 12:00 - 17:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | Institute of the Arts and Sciences, 100 Panetta Ave, Santa Cruz, United States
Visit the IAS, UCSC’s premier art galleries, for our spring exhibitions. On view April 10–August 16, 2026 are three diverse and interdisciplinary shows: Libia Posada: Everything is Going Right, the first US solo exhibition by the Colombia-based artist and medical doctor; Gina Athena Ulysse: A Redwoods Rasanblaj, a site-specific and immersive exploration of the Haitian kreyol conception of rasanblaj; and Ronaldo V. Wilson: There Are No Words, But Melodies, a mixed-media exhibition emerging at the intersections of Black poetics, performance, and visual art.
The IAS Galleries are open Wednesday-Sunday, 12 pm – 5 pm. Admission is free to the public.
Libia Posada: Everything is Going Right
Libia Posada’s first solo exhibition in the United States features installations, sculptures, and drawings meticulously constructed from surgical instruments, gauze bandages, crutches, used books, and domestic picture frames. The new and existing works in the exhibition powerfully stitch together the personal, social, and political disorders and afflictions that currently trouble the world, from the wars that resonate across the globe to the violences of aging in US prisons.
Gina Athena Ulysse: A Redwoods Rasanblaj: Origins & Disentanglements
The internationally-lauded work of humanities professor Gina Athena Ulysse is on view as a premier Faculty Spotlight Exhibition. The site-specific installation, produced in community from things collected, found, purchased and donated, centers on the Haitian concept of rasanblaj, a form of assembly and collage that transcends the formal use of materials to draw together people, spirits, and ideas.
Ronaldo V. Wilson: There Are No Words, But Melodies
Collage is both a material practice and a structural interrogation in the Faculty Spotlight Exhibition artworks by literature professor Ronaldo V. Wilson. In video, painting, and installation, layers and folds conceal and reveal, delving into the experience, both bodily and emotive, of living in times of violence.

Visualizing Abolition Screening Series: Beyond Access
2026-07-23 12:00 - 17:00, 2026-07-25 12:00 - 17:00, 2026-07-26 12:00 - 17:00, 2026-07-29 12:00 - 17:00, 2026-07-30 12:00 - 17:00 | Institute of the Arts and Sciences, 100 Panetta Ave, Santa Cruz, United States
On view in the IAS Screening Room is a selection of short films curated by Visualizing Abolition Visiting Faculty Fellow Dr. Pooja Rangan.
Prisons deny and censor the access of those trapped inside them—to information, to intimacy, to community, to meaningful work, to nourishment of all kinds, and perhaps most cruelly, to care. This program assembles a series of films, including works by filmmakers incarcerated in California as well as others without that lived experience. Together, these works confront the debilitating impacts of these restrictions and reveal how the disabling logic of the prison is extended to other institutional spaces (the hospital, the university), turning access into a scarce commodity by enclosing what should be held in common. Questioning the carceral and state-sponsored productions of disability and accessibility, the short films together reveal the courage of people working despite limitations to produce collective access for one another, described simply and beautifully by disability justice activist Leah-Lakshmi Piepzna Samarasinha as “revolutionary love without charity.”
Thanh Tran
Dying in Prison, 2022
HD Video (color, sound), 3 minutes
Courtesy of the artist
Carolyn Lazard
Pre-Existing Condition, 2019
HD video (color, sound), 6 minutes
Courtesy of the artist and Trautwein Herleth3
Anthony Alejandrez
Another Rainy Day, 2023
Phone video (color, sound), 3 minutes
Courtesy of the artist
Jordan Lord
After…After… (Access), 2018
HD Video (color, sound), 16 minutes
Courtesy of the artist
Rahsaan “New York” Thomas
Friendly Signs, 2023
Video (color, sound) 21 minutes
Courtesy of Tommy Wickerd, Empowerment Ave & System Impact Media

Rules Are Not Neutral: Play As Sense-Making, Acts Of Resistance, And Imagining Otherwise
2026-07-23 12:00 - 17:00, 2026-07-30 12:00 - 17:00 | Eloise Pickard Smith Gallery, 11 Cowell Service Rd, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
This exhibition brings together a range of analog games – including board, card, role-playing, and other participatory works – that engage social and political realities in different ways. The works span widely circulated commercial games to independently produced projects, one-of-a-kind artworks by artists, faculty, alumni, and students, and materials drawn from UC Santa Cruz Special Collections and Archives.
In part, the exhibition challenges the persistent assumption that games and play are detached from social and political life. On the contrary, game designers and artists across diverse perspectives and positions have long used play to engage questions of social systems, lived experience, and how power operates. This exhibition does not attempt to represent that full spectrum. Instead, it brings together a particular set of works that foreground how games can make systems visible, intervene in them, and imagine alternatives.
All games embody values, whether intentional or not.
– Mary Flanagan, game designer and scholar
Across all of these works, games are not only forms of entertainment, though they may be that as well. They are encountered in multiple ways: as objects, as systems, as artworks, and as experiences that unfold unpredictably through interaction. In each case, rules and constraints shape what participants can do. In these different forms, the works stage systems – such as housing and land ownership, capitalism, race and identity, civil rights and protest, fascism, and colonialism – in ways that are simplified and easy to see, opening space to recognize similar structures beyond the game. In this sense, the works suggest that rules are not neutral – they organize experience, distribute power, and produce meaning.
Games are the art of agency.
– C. Thi Nguyen, philosopher
The exhibition is intentionally dense. This abundance reflects the breadth of ways games operate across contexts, from activism and education to art and everyday life. While it celebrates creativity and difference, it also asks how these works engage critically with the structures that shape our lives.
Some works use rules to model systems, helping players understand how those systems operate. Others use play to rehearse action, asking players to practice navigating or challenging those systems. Still others turn toward speculation, inviting players to imagine alternative futures, worlds, and the systems that might shape them.
The imagination is an instrument of change.
– Ursula K. Le Guin, author
The focus on analog games reflects how they foreground materiality and shared physical presence. Played face-to-face, handled, read aloud, and experienced together, these works show how rules operate not in abstraction, but through lived, embodied experience.
Ultimately, the exhibition asks us to consider not only how games represent the world, but how they shape our engagement with it – and how through play, the social and political systems they model might be understood, challenged, and reimagined.
Games are not apolitical.
– Kishonna L. Gray, media scholar

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

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

How to Apply to the Premed Postbacc Program
2026-07-23 18:00 - 19:00 | Silicon Valley Campus, 3175 Bowers Avenue, Santa Clara, CA, 95054, United States
Join UC Santa Cruz Healthcare Pathways for a live online information session to learn about our Premed Postbacc Cohort, Premed and Pre-Health DIY Pathways, and other program offerings.
We’ll provide an overview of our programs and cover how to apply for our next admissions cycle, which opens in August. We’ll also discuss the application process, admissions timeline, coursework, advising, MCAT preparation, and more.
You’ll have plenty of time to ask questions and connect directly with program staff.
Claim your seat today.

Gholami, K. (ECE) - Efficient Language Model Construction and Inference via Sparsity
2026-07-24 14:00 - 16:00 | Engineering 2, Engineering 2 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
While large language models can match or exceed human performance, they do so with memory and energy costs orders of magnitude greater than biological cognition. We investigate sparsity as a brain-inspired computational principle to address both. We first establish a framework for evaluating small language model construction methods, using the next-token logit distribution as a behavioral fingerprint. Then, we introduce a semi-structured correlation-aware weight sparsity (CWS) method that uses the full activation covariance to identify and prune correlated weights whose combined removal cost is lower than any individual score predicts. CWS, improves perplexity over existing criteria up to 70% sparsity. To extend this gain to extreme sparsity, we propose a hierarchical ADMM framework that optimizes pruning directly against cross-entropy and distillation loss, first layer-wise for efficiency and then globally for cross-layer coordination. This research establishes brain-inspired principles as a foundation for efficient language models that remain accurate even under extreme compression.
Event Host: Kimia Gholami, Ph.D. Student, Electrical & Computer Engineering
Advisor: Jason Eshraghian
Zoom: https://ucsc.zoom.us/j/9827512398?pwd=[REDACTED]
Passcode: [REDACTED]

Fontana, J. (STAT) - When We're Always Wrong: Scalable Variable Selection in M-Open Settings
2026-07-24 14:00 - 17:00 | Engineering 2, Engineering 2 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
A ubiquitous task in statistical practice is that of variable selection, identifying which of a large set of features are the relevant ones. As data sets with a large number of observations have become increasingly common, new theoretical and computational challenges for model selection have emerged. We consider the variable selection problem for linear models in the M-open setting, where the data generating process is outside the model space. We focus on the novel problem of “model superinduction”, which refers to the tendency of model selection procedures to select larger models at an exponential rate as the sample size grows, resulting in overparametrized models which collapse model interpretability and induce severe computational difficulties. For a set of popular frequentist information criteria and the Bayesian case of mixtures of g-priors, we prove that when comparing nested models, the larger model will always be asymptotically selected. We seek to minimize this effect for large n while preserving variable selection consistency.We propose utilizing a mixture of g-priors, where the hyper-prior on g has hyper-parameters chosen to result in a slowly diminishing rate of prior influence on the posterior, which favors simpler models while preserving consistency. We also propose a model space prior which induces stronger model complexity penalization for large sample sizes. The posterior model probabilities under our prior choices further provide an alternative information criterion that is resistant to the effects of model superinduction.
Next, we extend our results to other classes of popular variable selection priors, the family of spike and slab priors, the non-local priors, and selection procedures that correspond to posterior modes such as the LASSO. We show that these procedures are all afflicted with model superinduction, except for the continuous spike and slab priors when a Student-t distribution is used for both the spike and the slab.
Finally, we address existing bottlenecks in the computation efficacy of spike and slab based variable selection. We demonstrate that Gibbs samplers scale poorly to large sample sizes, and the proposed alternatives in the literature result in posterior surrogates that are afflicted with superinduction. Instead, we propose a search strategy based off easy to compute approximations of the posterior model probabilities. We show this procedure, Fast Approximate Stochastic Search (FASS), coupled with post-hoc inference on parameters via either a Block-Variational Bayes approach or an Expectation Propagation approach, results in competitive performance. We demonstrate the aforementioned phenomena, and the efficacy of our proposed solutions, via synthetic data examples and case studies using albedo data from GOES satellites and LCA application data.
Event Host: Jacob Fontana, Ph.D. Candidate, Statistical Science
Advisor: Bruno Sansó
Zoom: https://ucsc.zoom.us/j/99965109575?pwd=[REDACTED]
Passcode: [REDACTED]

UCSC Farm U-Pick
2026-07-25 09:00 - 12:00 | UCSC Farm, 152 Farm Rd, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
Come enjoy picking your own organic strawberries and/or flowers at the campus farm!
When: U-picks will take place on Saturdays from 9am to 12pm, July 11–August 22, or while supplies last. PLEASE NOTE that u-pick will not occur on Saturday, August 29.
Where: Free parking will be available in the Hay Barn lot or lot 115/116 during u-pick hours. Please do not park in the dirt lot at the farm’s back gate. Please walk to the check-in table near the strawberries/flowers at the farm to pre-pay and collect your u-pick container(s). We will have directional signage displayed. There is one ADA parking spot on the farm. The UCSC Farm has uneven, hilly terrain. If you require accommodations to fully participate, please email agroecology@ucsc.edu.
Cost: UCSC students with valid ID get 25% off produce.

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

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

The Dickens Universe featuring 'Bleak House'
2026-07-26 01:00 - 2026-07-27 00:59, 2026-07-27 01:00 - 2026-07-28 00:59, 2026-07-28 01:00 - 2026-07-29 00:59, 2026-07-29 01:00 - 2026-07-30 00:59, 2026-07-30 01:00 - 2026-07-31 00:59, 2026-07-31 01:00 - 2026-08-01 00:59 | Humanities and Social Sciences Facility, 2 Hagar Drive, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
The Dickens Universe is a unique cultural event that brings together scholars, teachers, students, and members of the general public for a week of stimulating discussion and festive social activity on the beautiful Santa Cruz campus of the University of California—all focused on one or two Victorian novels, usually (but not always) one by Charles Dickens. In 2026, the Dickens Universe will feature Bleak House by Charles Dickens.
Dickens’s ninth novel, published between 1852-1853, shines a light on social injustice and the devastating effects of a corrupt legal system, following the entangled lives of those caught in the never-ending Jarndyce and Jarndyce case. Told in alternating narrative voices, this rich literary experiment plays with a variety of genres from detective fiction and social realism to melodrama and satire. As characters move from city to suburb, from mansions to slums, we discover unexpected connections among classes, plots, and characters.
Now in its 46th year of operation, the Dickens Universe combines features of a scholarly conference, a festival, a book club, and a summer camp. Participants include people of all ages and walks of life—distinguished scholars, graduate students, undergraduates, retirees, young professionals, high school teachers, and anyone who loves reading and enjoys long Victorian novels.
Here are some things that make the Universe such a special experience.

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

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

View the complete schedule
Registration options
Plenary Lecturers and Guest Scholars

Cabrillo Festival 2026 - Opening Night
2026-07-26 01:00 - 2026-07-27 00:59 | CA
“We the Dreamers is both an invitation and a responsibility”; says Music Director Cristian Măcelaru. “At this historic moment, we are asking how music can help us imagine a more expansive ‘we’—one that listens deeply, embraces complexity, and dares to hope. These works remind us that dreaming is essential to shaping a more just and connected future.”
The Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music presents its 64th season, We the Dreamers, running July 26 through August 9, 2026. Framed by the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, this transformative season asks one of the most resonant civic questions of our time: Who is the “we” of America—and who are “we” still becoming? The answers unfold across four world premiere Festival Commissions, eight West Coast premieres, and two U.S. premieres, brought to life by a dynamic global roster of over 20 composers and an extraordinary array of guest artists.
Highlights include the second-ever performance and West Coast premiere of Philip Glass’s Symphony No. 15 Lincoln, which draws on Lincoln’s urgent reverence for the Constitution and his prescient warnings against internal division, alongside an appearance by Former U.S. Poet Laureate Rita Dove and new works by Clarice Assad, Vivian Fung, Sarah Hennies, and Pedro Emanuel Pereira—together offering a compelling portrait of our contemporary moment through the lens of history, civic reckoning, and global perspective.
For more information: Cabrillo Festival 2026

Start of Summer Session 2
2026-07-27 00:00 - 23:59 | CA
Summer Session 2 courses start today! Make sure you’re set with Canvas access, dates and deadlines, and any first-day instructions from your instructors. Find answers to common questions on our website or email summer@ucsc.edu. You can still add classes until the deadline!

Elimination of "Duration of Status" Virtual Town Halls
2026-07-27 14:30 - 16:00, 2026-07-30 10:30 - 12:00, 2026-07-30 13:30 - 15:00
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. Four sessions will be held during the following date/times in Pacific Time:

Undergraduate Students (F/J) Town Hall: Friday, July 31 @ 9:00-10:30

Graduate Students (F/J) Town Hall: Thursday, July 30 @ 13:30-15:00
New Graduate Students (F/J) Starting Fall 2026 Town Hall: Thursday, July 30 @ 10:30-12:00
J Scholars Town Hall: Monday, July 27 @ 14:30-16:00

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.

ECE Seminar - "Nanoprobes for Single-Cell Surgery"
2026-07-28 11:30 - 13:00 | Jack Baskin Engineering, Baskin Engineering 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
Presented by: Paolo Actis, Associate Professor of Bionanotechnology at the University of Leeds
Description: “Physiological and pathological processes within the human body are controlled by complex cell-cell interactions within the context of a dynamic microenvironment. The ability to dynamically measure phenotypes (i.e. gene expression, protein activities, ion fluctuations, signalling) at the single cell level is key to understanding cellular behaviour in a complex environment. I will be presenting the development of nanoscale tools able to dissect the dynamic contributions of single cells to disease processes.
I will present the application of nanopipettes for the structural characterization of biomolecules under physiological relevant conditions. I will then discuss the integration of nanopipettes with scanning probe microscopies to enable the quantitative delivery of DNA, globular proteins, and protein fibrils into cells with single molecule resolution and that delivery results in a phenotypic change in the cell that depends on the identity of the molecules introduced. Using experiments and computational modelling, we also show that macromolecular crowding in the cell increases the signal-to-noise ratio for the detection of translocation events, thus the cell itself enhances the detection of the molecules delivered.”
References
1 Chau et al, Angewandte Chemie, 2026
2 Chau et al, ACS Nano, 2025
3 Chau et al, Nature Communications, 2024
4 Marcuccio et al, Science Advances, 2024
Bio: Paolo is an Associate Professor in Bionanotechnology at the University of Leeds and his research involves the development of nanoprobes for single-cell analysis and manipulation with single molecule resolution. After graduating in 2008 with a PhD from the Grenoble Institute of Technology (FR), Paolo spent 4 years in California working on his tan at NASA Ames (US) and UC Santa Cruz (US) before crossing the pond again to lose his tan at Imperial College London (UK). He then spent two years at Bio Nano Consulting as a Consultant & Project Manager before joining the University of Leeds in 2014 first as Lecturer and since 2020 as Associate Professor.
Hosted by: Professor Marco Rolandi, Jack Baskin Endowed Chair in Engineering & Chair of Electrical and Computer Engineering
When: Tuesday, July 28, 2026 @ 11:30AM PST
Location: Jack Baskin Engineering, Room 330

Movie Night Under the Stars: Screening “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse”
2026-07-28 19:30 - 21:30 | Stevenson College, Stevenson Service Road, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
The DSAS Center for Leadership and Involvement and Summer Edge invite you to join us for our Movie Night Under the Stars event screening “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse”:
Date: Tuesday, July 28th
Screening Time: Event entry begins at 7:30 p.m. | Movie starts at 8:00 p.m.
Location: Stevenson College Knoll
*Bring your own blanket! Limited chairs are available on a first-come, first-served basis.*
Free movie snacks will be available! For any questions or accommodations, please email 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.
