Campus News

Alumni, current and prospective students, and their families and friends will come to the campus on Saturday, April 19, for the Banana Slug Spring Fair. Last year, more than 3,000 people attended the fair. This year’s campus open house features special faculty lectures; alumni reunions; tours of the colleges, campus, and special facilities; and presentations…

SANTA CRUZ, CA–The National Science Foundation announced on March 28 that it will negotiate a five-year agreement with the University of California, San Diego, to revolutionize high-performance computing resources for the nation’s scientists and engineers. UC Santa Cruz is one of 37 institutions that will contribute to the program, called the National Partnership for Advanced…

Nature Magazine Publishes Commentary By Linguist That Shows Ebonics Is A Linguistically Sound Dialect Editors: Below is a commentary piece written by Geoffrey K. Pullum, professor of linguistics at the University of California, Santa Cruz, on both the decision by the Oakland school board to recognize Ebonics as a language of its students and the…

SANTA CRUZ, CA–Are female faculty underpaid? The question quickly triggers a host of follow-up queries, such as how do you weigh productivity? How do you compare the productivity of faculty artists and scientists? Should faculty research be reviewed independent of teaching performance? Ronald Oaxaca, a professor of economics at the University of Arizona, has been…

The Space Telescope Science Institute has selected 15 young scientists for the 1997 Hubble Postdoctoral Fellowship Program. Inaugurated in 1990, the program funds research opportunities for outstanding applicants chosen from among the approximately 200 Ph.D. astronomers and astrophysicists who graduate annually. Appointed for three-year terms, Hubble Fellows conduct research of their choice related to the…

Two Academic Senate committees have endorsed the proposed major in electrical engineering, the final step in the campus approval process, said Executive Vice Chancellor R. Michael Tanner. "Implementation of the electrical engineering undergraduate major represents a critical step forward in the development of engineering programs at UC Santa Cruz," Tanner said. The Academic Senate Committee…

United Press International spoke with physicist Michael Nauenberg about the London conference he helped to organize on Isaac Newton. The science and history conference, held on March 21, attracted the world’s leading Newtonian scholars. The San Francisco Chronicle published a paean to Pioneer 10, the most distant spacecraft from Earth. A diagram showed the famous…

One morning last week, high school sophomore Genevieve Garcia went on a building inspection, saw dolphins and sea urchins at Long Marine Lab, and learned how certain chemicals can affect the environment. It was a busy few hours for Garcia, who trailed Dan Blunk of Environmental Health & Safety through his morning on the job,…

Students with book collections that have a special significance to them are invited to enter the 31st annual Book Collection Contest. The contest, sponsored by the Friends of the UCSC Library, is open to all undergraduate and graduate students at UCSC. Cash prizes of $300, $200, and $100 will be awarded to the winners, and…

SAN FRANCISCO, CA–The University of California Board of Regents voted today (March 21) to approve the initial stages of the master plan for the UC Monterey Bay Education, Science, and Technology (MBEST) Center, a regional economic development initiative based at the former Fort Ord military reservation near Monterey. The action clears the way for UC…

SANTA CRUZ, CA–In 1892, wealthy railway magnate Charles T. Yerkes of Chicago set out to "lick the Lick"–the University of California’s Lick Observatory–by financing "the largest and best telescope in the world." Five years later, his ambitions took concrete form in Williams Bay, Wisconsin, when astronomers dedicated Yerkes Observatory, home to a mammoth 40-inch refracting…

SANTA CRUZ, CA–"Astrobiology," an intriguing new interdisciplinary research field spanning the origins and evolution of life on Earth and elsewhere, will be the focus of a "gathering of minds" at UC Santa Cruz on Saturday, March 22. The daylong workshop will begin at 8:30 a.m. in room B206, Earth and Marine Sciences Building. The meeting…