Events

How to Apply to the Premed Postbacc Program
2026-08-20 18:00 - 19:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | 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 August 7. 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.

Huang, X. (CSE) - Scalable and Verifiable Reasoning for Medical Foundation Models
2026-08-21 15:00 - 16:00
This PhD research focuses on developing reliable medical foundation models capable of reasoning across textual, visual, and interactive clinical information. The work investigates three complementary directions: improving medical reasoning through test-time scaling, training multimodal medical models with verifiable rewards, and synthesizing high-quality visual question-answering data from biomedical literature using generator-verifier frameworks. Building on these efforts, the proposed research will extend medical language and multimodal models toward agentic systems that can gather evidence, use external tools, integrate multimodal information, and verify decisions over sequential interactions. Overall, this research aims to improve the reliability, efficiency, and transparency of medical AI reasoning while supporting reproducible and human-supervised applications in healthcare.
Event Host: Xiaoke Huang, Ph.D. Student, Computer Science & Engineering
Advisor: Yuyin Zhou
Zoom: https://ucsc.zoom.us/j/8855787311
Passcode: [REDACTED]

BIC 2026 | UC Systemwide Bioengineering Symposium
2026-08-22 08:00 - 21:00 | Kresge College, R-3 Suites, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
The 26th Annual UC Systemwide Bioengineering Symposium (BIC 2026) is taking place at UC Santa Cruz on August 22-23, 2026. The event will bring together faculty, researchers, students, industry representatives, non-profit organizations, and other stakeholders to explore bioengineering & AI in the heart of the redwood forest. BIC 2026 will foster new collaborations and showcase the latest advancements in bioengineering research and innovation, including at the intersection with AI.
Register here.

Dates & Time

Day 1 (Saturday, August 22): August 22 @ 8:00 am – 9:00 pm
Day 2 (Sunday, August 23): August 23 @ 8:30 am – 5:00 pm

Registration Fees & Cost

Undergraduate Student: $215 (Early Bird) / $265 (Standard)
Graduate Student or Postdoc: $270 (Early Bird) / $320 (Standard)
Faculty or Staff: $320 (Early Bird) / $370 (Standard)
Industry or Guest: $420 (Early Bird) / $470 (Standard)

Note: Late bird/Standard rates apply starting June 16, 2026, and a 4.00% processing fee is added at checkout.

Pawar, M. (CSE) - Understanding Representations, Reasoning, and Decision-Making in Autonomous Driving Models
2026-08-24 14:00 - 16:00
Modern autonomous-driving models increasingly rely on learned representations and generated reasoning to interpret complex scenes and produce predictions or actions. However, it remains unclear what information these models encode, how that information is exposed through common interpretation methods, and whether their stated reasoning meaningfully influences their behavior. This research investigates these questions across motion-forecasting and vision-language-action models.
Event Host: Manasi Pawar, Ph.D. Student, Computer Science & Engineering
Advisor: Leilani Gilpin
Zoom: https://ucsc.zoom.us/j/92653015420?pwd=[REDACTED]
Passcode: [REDACTED]

Empowering humans through AI
2026-08-24 18:00 - 19:00 | Silicon Valley Campus, 3175 Bowers Avenue, Santa Clara, CA, 95054, United States
Join us for an inside look at how our AI Application Development courses provide hands‑on experience, industry‑driven projects, and the technical foundation you need to advance your career as an ML Engineer, MLOps Engineer, or Applied AI Researcher.
Your speaker
Kavitha Velusamy, Ph.D., brings more than 20 years of experience developing cutting-edge technologies at Amazon, NVIDIA, Cisco, Leia Inc., and Robust.AI. Kavitha currently serves as Senior Vice President of Engineering at Robust.AI and teaches Humanoid Robotics (Sept. 19) and Artificial Intelligence for Robotics (Sept. 26).
Keep learning
See our course page for a closer look at all upcoming offerings.
CLAIM YOUR SEAT TODAY.

Gomez, J. (CSE) - Toward Sustainable and Secure Open Source Software: Discovery, Measurement, and Defense
2026-08-25 11:00 - 13:00 | Engineering 2, Engineering 2 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
In March 2024, a backdoor was discovered in xz Utils, a widely used open source data compression library present in nearly every major Linux distribution. The attack was discovered days before merging into major distributions, and if this had happened, it would have allowed attackers to execute arbitrary code on millions of systems worldwide via SSH.
The success of this backdoor was enabled by two failures. The first was technical: weaknesses in the software supply chain allowed a malicious actor to inject code into a widely trusted release. The second was human: the project’s only maintainer, overwhelmed and burned out after years of maintaining critical infrastructure alone, was the target of a multi-year social engineering campaign, in which a malicious actor built trust under a false identity and gradually obtained commit access to the project. This incident shows that software security failures and sustainability failures are not independent: an overburdened, unsupported maintainer is itself an attack surface.
Academic and scientific open source software (OSS) faces both of these crises simultaneously. Projects that critical infrastructure depends on are maintained by researchers, students, and faculty who contribute in their spare time, without dedicated security training or institutional support. Existing security frameworks including NIST’s SSDF, OWASP’s SCVS, and SLSA were not designed with these communities in mind, and policy efforts such as the EU Cyber Resilience Act have shown that mandates developed without community input risk harming the ecosystems they are meant to protect.
This dissertation addresses the sustainability and security of academic open source software through two parallel empirical research tracks. The sustainability track combines GitHub’s REST API with LLM-based filtering to discover and characterize over 216,000 institutionally affiliated repositories across 32 academic and research institutions, finding that while 84% include a README, only 23.4% carry a detectable license and fewer than 2% include a Contributing Guide. Building on this dataset, we develop a maturity-staged sustainability framework that classifies projects into four lifecycle stages and generates targeted recommendations for Open Source Program Offices (OSPOs).
The security track examines whether post-9/11 trade security programs offer a workable model for OSS supply-chain policy, finding that effective frameworks require voluntary incentives and direct community engagement rather than top-down mandates. We further evaluate five large language models on the OWASP Benchmark for vulnerability triage, finding that o1-mini reduces false positives by 20% over the Semgrep baseline, demonstrating the potential for automation to reduce the security burden on individual maintainers.
Together, these contributions treat sustainability and security as interconnected problems. A project that cannot sustain itself cannot secure its code, and this dissertation takes steps toward closing both gaps.

Event Host: Juanita Gomez, Ph.D. Candidate, Computer Science & Engineering
Advisor: Alvaro Cardenas
Zoom: https://ucsc.zoom.us/j/91057980344?pwd=[REDACTED]
Passcode: [REDACTED]

Designing for Today's Digital World
2026-08-25 18:00 - 19:00 | Silicon Valley Campus, 3175 Bowers Avenue, Santa Clara, CA, 95054, United States
Design digital experiences people love to use.
In today’s rapidly evolving tech landscape, organizations need professionals who can combine empathy, usability, and aesthetics to create interfaces that engage and delight users. Learn how UX and web design specialists use research‑driven methods, prototyping tools, and inclusive design principles to build seamless digital experiences across platforms.
Speaker
Join Nicole Sharratt, chair of the UCSC Silicon Valley Extension User Experience & Web Design program, for an inside look at how our courses equip you with the skills to lead user‑centered design projects—whether you’re shaping websites, apps or digital products.
Keep learning
See our course page for a closer look at all upcoming offerings.
CLAIM YOUR SEAT TODAY.

From Idea to Income: How to Validate Your Next Business Idea Before Investing More Time and Money
2026-08-26 12:00 - 13:00 | CA
From Idea to Income: How to Validate Your Next Business Idea Before Investing More Time and Money With Sami Toussi
Wednesday, Aug. 26, 2026 | Noon PT
Virtual via Zoom
Hosted by the UCLA Alumni Association, open to all UC alumni
Most entrepreneurs don’t fail because they lack passion. They fail because they build something customers don’t actually want.
In this interactive workshop, UCLA alumna and Business Strategist Sami Toussi will introduce the Lean Canvas framework and walk through the key questions every founder should answer to build a stronger business. You’ll learn how to identify your ideal customer, uncover unmet needs, evaluate growth opportunities, and strengthen your business model.
Through guided exercises and real-world examples, you’ll begin applying these concepts to your own business during the session.
LEARN MORE & REGISTER

Bioinformatics: Lead the next wave of innovation
2026-08-26 12:00 - 13:00 | Silicon Valley Campus, 3175 Bowers Avenue, Santa Clara, CA, 95054, United States
Where biology meets Big Data
Join us for an inside look at how our Bioinformatics courses can help you strengthen your skills in data analysis, genomics, and software tools—preparing you to contribute to advances in biotech, pharmaceuticals, and healthcare. We’ll provide an overview of the curriculum, discuss current industry trends and workforce demand, highlight career opportunities, and answer your questions about getting started.
Your speaker
Darryl A. León, Ph.D., director, Software Portfolio Strategy at Agilent Technologies, has over 10 years of experience leading product management teams, launching customer-focused products, and partnering with R&D groups to deliver high-quality software, hardware, and cloud-based solutions that support academic, biopharma, and clinical research markets. He has served as chair of the UCSC Silicon Valley Extension Bioinformatics Advisory Committee since 2025.
Keep learning
This session is hosted by the Bioinformatics program. Visit our program page for additional details and a closer look at all upcoming courses.
CLAIM YOUR SEAT TODAY.

Bioinformatics: Lead the next wave of innovation
2026-08-26 12:00 - 13:00 | Silicon Valley Campus, 3175 Bowers Avenue, Santa Clara, CA, 95054, United States
Where biology meets Big Data
Join us for an inside look at how our Bioinformatics courses can help you strengthen your skills in data analysis, genomics, and software tools—preparing you to contribute to advances in biotech, pharmaceuticals, and healthcare. We’ll provide an overview of the curriculum, discuss current industry trends and workforce demand, highlight career opportunities, and answer your questions about getting started.
Your speaker
Darryl A. León, Ph.D., has over 10 years of experience leading product management teams, launching customer-focused products, and partnering with R&D groups to deliver high-quality software, hardware, and cloud-based solutions that support academic, biopharma, and clinical research markets. He has served as chair of the UCSC Silicon Valley Extension Bioinformatics Advisory Committee since 2025.
Keep learning
This session is hosted by the Bioinformatics program. Visit our program page for additional details and a closer look at all upcoming courses.

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.

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.

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]

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.

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]

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

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.

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]

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

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.

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.

Ensuring Your Professional Longevity
2026-09-09 12:00 - 13:00 | CA
There are many things that can derail our ability to advance in our careers while maintaining long-term sustainability and health. Join us as we discuss the 4 key factors that will help us thrive and enjoy our professional lives for years to come. Whether you’re an early-career professional or already deep into your career journey, you’ll leave with practical strategies and inspiring ideas to chart your own individual path towards a healthy workplace lifestyle in the seasons ahead.
REGISTRATION

Research Lunch & Learn: Effective award management
2026-09-09 12:00 - 13:00 | https://events.ucsc.edu/event/research-lunch-learn-effective-award-management/
Join the Research Financial Services and Extramural Funds Accounting leadership for a conversation about good internal controls and effective financial oversight of sponsored projects accounts. During this session, we will discuss the tools and resources that are available to ensure that we are good stewards of the funds entrusted to us. We will review when prior approval may be required, what rebudgeting means for our financial oversight, and how these intersect with our financial system of record.
Join us on September 9, 2026, 12-1 p.m.
Join: Zoom link for this session.

When Traditional Career Advice Doesn't Fit Your Brain: ADHD at Work
2026-09-17 12:00 - 13:00 | CA
When Traditional Career Advice Doesn’t Fit Your Brain: ADHD at Work With Kelly George
Thursday, Sept. 17, 2026 ǀ Noon PT
Virtual via Zoom
Hosted by the UCLA Alumni Association, open to all UC alumni
Many professionals with ADHD feel like they’re not living up to their potential at work—but aren’t always sure why. Challenges with focus, follow-through, communication, and managing competing demands can impact performance, even when ability is not the issue. This session offers a practical approach to understanding and navigating ADHD in the workplace. Participants will learn how these patterns show up day-to-day, how they affect productivity and collaboration, and what to do about them. The workshop focuses on strategies for managing focus and follow-through, as well as identifying or adapting work environments that better support how you function.
LEARN MORE & REGISTER

ISO San Francisco Day Trip
2026-09-19 08:30 - 17:00 | Quarry Plaza, Student Union, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
Welcome, New International Slugs!
Come join International Student Services and Programming and fellow new international students on a fun day trip to the city of San Francisco. We will be traveling together to visit some famous sites and catch a glimpse of one of the world’s greatest cities.

Click here to RSVP for our day trip. Confirmation emails will be sent to students prior to the event. Students must reply to the confirmation email to secure their spot on the bus.

—
Date: Saturday, September 19
Time: 8:45 – 17:00
Meeting Point: Quarry Plaza – UCSC Campus
Destination: San Francisco, CA
Cost: $40 per person (billed to your student accounts)

Students must confirm or cancel their reservation via email by Friday, September 18 at 17:00.
Failure to cancel or being late and missing the bus will result in a $40 fee billed to the student’s account.

—

Itinerary:

Board shuttle from Quarry Plaza at 8:45
Travel to San Francisco
Golden Gate Bridge Welcome Center
Pier 39/Fisherman’s Wharf (lunch and shopping)
Begin return trip to Santa Cruz at approximately 15:00
Drop off at Downtown Santa Cruz or UCSC Quarry Plaza at appx. 17:00

The Mindful U: Finding Calm, Clarity + Connection in a Chaotic World
2026-09-30 12:00 - 13:00 | CA
The Mindful U: Finding Calm, Clarity + Connection in a Chaotic World With Jessica Sanam Hekmat
Thursday, Sept. 30, 2025 | Noon PT
Virtual via Zoom
Hosted by the UCLA Alumni Association, open to all UC alumni
This interactive session, led by career coach Jessica Sanam Hekmat, invites participants to pause and reset to cultivate presence and self-awareness as they navigate professional and personal demands. We’ll explore practical mindfulness tools and reflective prompts designed to foster resilience, regulate stress and re-energize focus. The conversation will balance strategy and self-inquiry, and we’ll ground ourselves together in real time through guided breathwork, reflection, and visualization. Participants will leave with practical ways to reconnect to their values and sense of purpose, even when the external environment feels unpredictable.
LEARN MORE & REGISTER

Harvest Festival
2026-10-17 11:00 - 15:00 | UCSC Farm, 152 Farm Rd, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
Connect with community on the campus farm at the annual Harvest Festival! Harvest Fest will have activities for all ages including face painting, flower pressing, pumpkin painting, cider pressing, tractor rides, live music, and more! Plus, enjoy food and treats from local food trucks, participate in an apple pie bake-off (more info coming soon), connect with local organizations, and enjoy the campus farm. Full list of activities coming soon.

Cost: $5 for general public; free entry for current students of UCSC, Hartnell and Cabrillo College, Friends of the UCSC Farm & Garden members, and children under 12. Cash preferred at the entrance gate.

Transportation and parking: We encourage carpooling, walking, biking, or taking the bus if you are able to! Parking info coming soon. Logistics: Please do not harvest any of the crops on the farm during your visit. The crops grown on the farm feed students in need and support our research and programming. We encourage you to bring a reusable water bottle to save plastic and stay hydrated! Pets are not allowed on the UC Santa Cruz campus (with the exception of service animals). The Harvest Festival is presented by the UC Santa Cruz Center for Agroecology, the Food Systems Working Group, Measure 43 and Life Lab.

The UCSC Farm has moderately steep slopes and uneven terrain. If you require accommodations to fully participate, contact agroecology@ucsc.edu.

Photo-Jim Clark

Taking Charge of Change: Five Fundamental Truths for Mastering the Chaos of Life
2026-10-21 12:00 - 13:00 | CA
Taking Charge of Change: Five Fundamental Truths for Mastering the Chaos of Life With Jim Hjort
Wednesday, Oct. 21, 2026 | Noon PT
Virtual via Zoom
Hosted by the UCLA Alumni Association, open to all UC alumni
Change is the only constant in life, and every day we are called to reckon with this. Today, it may be most apparent to you in national or global tumult, a career pivot you’re contemplating, or relationship dynamics you’re struggling to tweak or adapt to.
However it shows up, you can count on the rug continuing to shift beneath your feet. And your brain really doesn’t like that, at least by default. In its frenzy to find stability today, it will leap to ways of thinking and behaving that will leave you feeling even more stuck, stifled, and afraid tomorrow. Yet, if you are inclined toward personal growth, you can use the tidal forces of change to propel you to ever-greater wisdom, inner stability, and even growth.
LEARN MORE & REGISTER

Seymour Center Homeschool Day: Spectacular Science
2026-10-30 10:00 - 12:30 | Seymour Marine Discovery Center, 100 McAllister Way, Santa Cruz, CA, 95060
Calling all homeschool families! Join the Seymour Center on Friday, October 30, at 10 a.m. for a morning of hands-on science investigations, aquarium feeds, a scavenger hunt, and lots more.
• Enjoy hands-on science investigations, crafts, and a scavenger hunt.
• Make an enormous whale skeleton appear in front of your eyes, then walk inside it with our special virtual reality experience.
• Touch live bat stars and crabs, and learn about bone-eating zombie worms and hagfish.
• Marvel at Ms. Blue, a massive blue whale skeleton, and discover how science and engineering innovations helped us restore this beloved Santa Cruz icon.
Admission fees apply. Special activities are included at no additional cost.
RSVP here by October 15 to receive details and activities.

23rd Annual Graduate Research Symposium
2026-11-06 13:00 - 17:00 | Physical Sciences Building, Physical Sciences Building, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
This event celebrates and highlights the work of UCSC graduate students in all academic divisions. Any enrolled graduate student is welcome to present either a poster, talk, or mixed media presentation. The event is free and open to the public.
