Engineering
-

Extended reality experience invites people to act as the hands of AI in the real world
A speculative fiction project, which won the XR Experience Jury Award at SXSW 2026, prompts reflection on the increasing presence of AI
-

Extinction is not inevitable: Genomics symposium explores using DNA to save life on Earth
Conservation genomics is a bold new tool for protecting life on earth, but it will take all of us to slow the extinction crisis.
-

Engineer to develop secure data center hardware for the public cloud with NSF CAREER award
Yuanchao Xu will lead this research with the support of one of the most prestigious grants in support of early-career faculty
-

AnVIL makes groundbreaking genomic datasets available on AWS for free
With the support of the AWS Registry of Open Data, AnVIL has made major genomic datasets available on AWS, free of the data transfer fees that previously cost over $15,000 dollars for some datasets.
-

UC Santa Cruz debuts on CodeSignal’s University Report
A new ranking demonstrates Banana Slugs’ software engineering career readiness
-

UC Santa Cruz among top 10 public U.S. universities with high-impact research, analysis shows
The campus ranks among the top 10 public universities in the United States home to high-impact researchers, according to a recent analysis by Clarivate.
-

Engineering student wins NVIDIA Agents for Impact Hackathon
Preet Karia built an AI-powered tool to turn physics notes into 3D visualizations.
-

Grant funds research to identify drug targets for autism and schizophrenia using human stem cell models
The research aims to uncover the molecular and cellular mechanisms underlying autism and schizophrenia and to identify drug targets for both conditions.
-

Three UC Santa Cruz professor-student teams win Keck Foundation funding
The program provides funds to support the career trajectories of early- to mid-career faculty and their graduate students.
-

UC Santa Cruz trio takes third at 2026 Mistral AI hackathon with cybersecurity platform
A team of UC Santa Cruz students and an alumnus earned third place at the 2026 Mistral AI Worldwide Hackathon in San Francisco for developing an artificial intelligence-powered cybersecurity solution to help companies prevent phishing attacks.
-

With fastest solver and fourth place for D1 schools, UC Santa Cruz finishes strong at 2025 Codebreaker Challenge
The challenge tasks students to develop their reverse engineering and cryptography skills using a realistic cybersecurity scenario
