Students

  • Pursuing cultural anthropology

    Pursuing cultural anthropology

    Gabriel Ephraim Kaplan Wall was awarded the Jeremy Demian Marx Scholarship in 2022. Learn more about how scholarships support students at UC Santa Cruz.

  • Sanya Cowal: Resilience and agency

    Sanya Cowal: Resilience and agency

    Sanya Cowal was awarded the Jessica Roy Memorial Scholarship in 2022. Learn more about how scholarships support students at UC Santa Cruz.

  • McKenna Smith: Pursuing biological sciences

    McKenna Smith: Pursuing biological sciences

    McKenna Smith was awarded the Keeley Coastal Scholars Award in 2022. Learn more about how scholarships support students at UC Santa Cruz.

  • COSMOS program serves as a portal for aspiring astrophysicist’s journey to UC Santa Cruz

    COSMOS program serves as a portal for aspiring astrophysicist’s journey to UC Santa Cruz

    Her high school experience on campus motivated and inspired Julia Stewart (Crown ’24, astronomy) to matriculate to UCSC. Now she is paving the way for the next generation of math and science protégés seeking their own North Star

  • Transforming Futures: Amanda Safi

    Transforming Futures: Amanda Safi

    Transforming Futures— a pilot program launched by UC Santa Cruz’s Institute for Social Transformation—awarded seven first generation, underrepresented, and/or low-income UCSC students scholarships to pursue unpaid internships over the summer. Amanda Safi interned with the Office of Congressman Jimmy Panetta.

  • Frontier Fellows: Peter Nguyen

    Frontier Fellows: Peter Nguyen

    The Earth Futures Institute’s Frontier Fellows program offers undergraduate research opportunities and funding at UC Santa Cruz. UCSC student Peter Nguyen studies a federally listed endangered flowering plant—Lupinus nipomensis.

  • Seeking Okinawan rights

    Seeking Okinawan rights

    UC Santa Cruz doctoral candidate Lex McClellan-Ufugusuku appeared before the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, exploring whether the people of Okinawa could be recognized as Indigenous—meaning they might have the right to block or stop new military bases under guidelines about Indigenous people set up by the U.N.

  • Tiffany-Ellen Vo

    Tiffany-Ellen Vo

    Tiffany-Ellen Vo encountered some initial difficulties in college, but with support from the Multicultural Engineering Program she regained her footing. She went on to take advantage of every opportunity she was offered at UC Santa Cruz—and she has already secured a job as a software engineer at Cisco.

  • Amanda Quirk

    Amanda Quirk

    Amanda Quirk’s research on galaxy mergers showed evidence that the Andromeda galaxy had some kind of major galactic collision in the past 4 billion years, and survived—which has implications for our own galaxy, the Milky Way.

  • Benny Mosqueira

    Benny Mosqueira

    Benny Mosqueira felt driven to make something of himself, and he arrived on campus intending to become a medical doctor. Instead, the first-generation college student was captivated by the research opportunities he found at UC Santa Cruz and decided to pursue biomedical research as a career.

  • Brittany Caldwell

    Brittany Caldwell

    Brittany Caldwell, a scholar focused on the impact of early-grade math instruction, has pulled off an impressive feat: earning her Ph.D. in math education and teaching hundreds of students in seminars, all while raising three children.

  • Candy Martinez

    Candy Martinez

    The daughter of Oaxacan migrants, Candy Martinez has found a meaningful way to reconnect with her roots, investigating the ways in which Indigenous communities process and heal grief and trauma.

Last modified: Mar 18, 2025