Author: Dan White
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Inaugural Banana Slug Share sessions will add life and learning to Alumni Week
The spirit of “paying it forward” infuses UC Santa Cruz’s inaugural Banana Slug Share Sessions, in which alumni will provide hard-won advice about everything from kombucha-making to the interpretation of dreams. These sessions are among the highlights of UC Santa Cruz’s virtual Alumni Week 2021.
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Celestial heights and oceanic depths
Two of UC Santa Cruz’s most prominent trailblazers in science, astronomer Sandra Faber and alumna and former astronaut Kathryn Sullivan, spoke of risks, discoveries, and sexism in candid “fireside chat” during a Science and Engineering Library floor-naming event.
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TestMe: Slugs rise to the challenge of helping to keep the campus community healthy
More than five dozen hardworking Banana Slugs are a key element of UC Santa Cruz’s TestMe asymptomatic testing program, which has administered more than 56,000 COVID-19 tests of students, staff, and faculty since the project’s inception in September 2020.
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Campus launches first Black studies minor
UC Santa Cruz’s Black Studies minor offers students grounding in the intellectual histories, political movements, cultural expressions, and critical theories of the Black diaspora.
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Notes of resistance
History Professor Eric Porter delves deeply into jazz improvisation as a means for “resistance, survival, and promoting one’s own resiliency.”
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COVID and the road ahead
UC Santa Cruz infectious disease expert A. Marm Kilpatrick looked toward the future during his immersive Kraw Lecture about COVID vaccines, variants and the road ahead.
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Pandemics expert urges vigilance as COVID-19 variants spread
Alumna and Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Laurie Garrett sounds urgency about the need for an all-out race to stay ahead of highly contagious COVID variants in the U.S.
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Reform, abolition, and vision
Organizer and prison industrial complex abolitionist Mariame Kaba to address Martin Luther King Jr. Convocation, which will be held virtually for the first time
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Lessons from Dante in a time of COVID
UC Santa Cruz literature professor Filippo Gianferrari finds meaning and poignancy—made even more acute by the ‘purgatory’ of social distancing—in the Divine Comedy on the epic poem’s 700th anniversary
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Giving Tuesday: A day of generosity
Giving Tuesday exemplified the generosity that Banana Slugs displayed in 2020. The one-day event raised money for the UC Santa Cruz Fund, allowing campus leadership to address UC Santa Cruz students’ most pressing needs.
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UC Santa Cruz Nobel laureate delves into the world of telomeres in Kraw Lecture
In her Kraw Lecture this week, Nobel laureate and UC Santa Cruz distinguished professor of MCD biology Carol Greider explored the world of telomere research, with links to cell death, cancer research, and degenerative diseases.
