Donor News
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Chemists use peptides from Alzheimer’s and Type II diabetes to describe five new rippled beta-sheets
Scientists from the University of California, Santa Cruz, synthesized peptides from proteins associated with Alzheimer’s and Type II Diabetes and described five new rippled beta-sheet structures.
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Two UC Santa Cruz scientists named 2024 Sloan Research Fellows
Assistant Professors Roxanne Beltran and Jacqueline Kimmey have been awarded Sloan Research Fellowships, one of the most prestigious honors bestowed on early-career scientists, each receiving $75,000 to delve into new areas of research in their respective fields of marine ecology and microbiology.
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Legal Studies major Lauren Elscott found her passion with music and events on campus
Lauren Elscott is senior in the legal studies program whose true passion lies in music and events. At UC Santa Cruz she discovered the electronic music minor and how to be involved on campus.
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Alumna and award-winning author empowers the next generation
Renowned author and UCSC alumna Reyna Grande, recipient of multiple literary awards, traces her extraordinary journey to becoming a bestseller. Grande, now giving back to her alma mater through the Reyna Grande Scholarship, hopes to inspire Latinx students to pursue creative projects and amplify their cultural heritage.
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Slugs in love: Celebrating love stories from UCSC alumni
Fourteen alumni share how they found love as students at UC Santa Cruz.
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Student Gabriella Goss wins $500 Alumni Leadership Award from Ecology Project International
Her project draws inspiration from her Ecology Project International (EPI) course experience in the Galapagos Islands, where she witnessed the thriving wildlife in an ecosystem largely spared from human interference. This prompted her to explore the negative impact of human activities on animal habitats, specifically focusing on the millions of animals killed annually by vehicles.
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Protein designer awarded $2.5M to develop bioluminescent protein for deep tissue imaging
Assistant Professor of Biomolecular Engineering Andy Yeh was awarded a nearly $2.5 million grant from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative to develop completely artificial enzymes that can produce bioluminescence in the body for deep tissue imaging.
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UC Santa Cruz Physicist Joel Primack wins 2024 AAAS Abelson Prize
The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) has awarded the prestigious 2024 Philip Hauge Abelson Prize to Joel R. Primack, distinguished professor of physics emeritus at the University of California, Santa Cruz and a key architect of the Cold Dark Matter theory.
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Innovation at the intersection: An alum’s trailblazing ventures in tech, film, and social change
Dr. Kortney Ryan Ziegler is an award-winning tech entrepreneur, a filmmaker and producer, a social justice advocate, and a scholar.
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Widespread machine learning methods behind ‘link prediction’ are performing very poorly, study shows
New research from UC Santa Cruz Professor of Computer Science and Engineering C. “Sesh” Seshadhri published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences establishes that the metric used to measure link prediction performance is missing crucial information, and link prediction tasks are performing significantly worse than popular literature indicates.

