Media Coverage

Michael Chemers, the chair of the department of Performance, Play, and Design and the founder of the Center for Monster Studies, talks about his role in monsters studies. In this Q&A for The Jewish News of Northern California Chemers explores monsters through the lens of Judaism, in particular discussing the golem which comes from Jewish folklore.

Political leaders who use racist and anti-immigrant rhetoric are directly harming safety and wellbeing in our communities, write UC Santa Cruz faculty members Regina Day Langhout and Saskias Casanova. Recent research conducted in Santa Cruz County supports this assertion. In Fall 2023, youth researchers in United Way of Santa Cruz County’s Alzamos la Voz program worked with…

Silicon Valley–style venture capital places enormous emphasis on scale and a startup’s ability to grow rapidly, says Madeleine Fairbairn, a sociologist at UC Santa Cruz, who studies agriculture and food systems. “Everybody’s used to this claim that we have a growing population, and they’re going to starve if we don’t feed them,” she says. For…

In 2022, geneticist Beth Shapiro from the UC Santa Cruz, who is a scientific advisor to Colossal Biosciences, decoded the dodo’s genome. Scientists at Colossal are now determining the sequences which they will edit into cells collected from the dodo’s closest living relative, the Nicobar pigeon. Then, just as for the passenger pigeon, the edited…

“Those early kind of signals can be helpful for understanding the progression of the fungus, of where it’s getting to,” said Winifred Frick, chief scientist at Bat Conservation International and an adjunct professor in ecology and evolutionary biology at UC Santa Cruz.

“Weddell seals live in one of the most hostile environments on the planet and need to keep their internal clock running during periods when the sun never sets or when the sun never rises,” noted Daniel Costa, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

University of California, Santa Cruz Associate Professor of History Benjamin Breen was featured in a Washington Post story about using AI chatbot technology to help voters research long and complex ballots.

University of California, Santa Cruz Associate Professor of History Benjamin Breen, author of Tripping On Utopia: Margaret Mead, The Cold Ward, and The Troubled Birth Of Pscyhedelic Science, was featured in an Atlantic Monthly feature story about the American hard right's recent embrace of psychedelics.   

Professors Michael Chemers and Renée Fox are featured in an article about the Center for Monster Studies, an interdisciplinary space where scholars from across the academic spectrum can come together to explore the role of monsters in culture, literature, politics, and even science and technology. The GoodTimes also featured the center.

Scientists from UC Santa Cruz and their collaborators have achieved something monumental — they’ve managed to directly measure the behavioral responses of these dolphins and unraveled some surprising findings. Also covered by Study Finds, Interesting Engineering, and others.