Baskin Engineering at UC Santa Cruz

🎉 Congratulations to Leila Parsa, professor of electrical and computer engineering who has received the 2026 IEEE Power & Energy Society (PES) Cyril Veinott Electromechanical Energy Conversion Award for her seminal contributions to high-torque-density and fault-tolerant electric machines.

“I am honored to receive the IEEE PES Cyril Veinott Electromechanical Energy Conversion Award,” said Parsa. “Throughout my career, I have been fortunate to work with many talented colleagues and collaborators, whose contributions and support have been an important part of my work. I am especially grateful to my students, past and present. Many of the advances recognized by this award were achieved through our shared efforts.”

The Veinott Award recognizes outstanding contributions to the field of electromechanical energy conversion.

Learn more with the link in the comments. 🔗

📣 Congrats to students Kevin Bachelor (B.S. ’26, computer science) and Anthony Furman (B.S. ’27, robotics engineering) on winning Best Student Presentation in the First Year Programs Division at the 2026 American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) Annual Conference & Exposition!

Their project, titled “Teaching Neural Networks in Ten Weeks: Creating an Activity-Based and Accessible Course on Machine Learning for First Year Undergraduates” was one of four accepted UC Santa Cruz undergraduate student-authored presentations at this year’s conference.

Bachelor and Furman designed and taught the Intro to Machine Learning class through Baskin Engineering’s Lead By Design program, which gives undergraduates the opportunity to design and teach a for-credit Early Design Build course on a subject they are passionate about.

“There’s something novel and exciting happening in the Early-Design Build engineering curriculum,” said Tamara Ball, director of experiential learning at Baskin Engineering. “We are figuring out how to scale hands-on interactive learning—something that has eluded leaders in higher education for decades.”

🔗 Learn more about their award-winning project with the link in the comments.

Image description: Kevin Bachelor (left) and Anthony Furman (right) presenting at the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) Annual Conference & Exposition.

Robots, video games, DNA, and a field trip to Google – just another week of summer camp at ! ✨

We welcomed 45 middle school students from across the Santa Cruz and Monterey counties to Girls in Engineering, a free, five-day camp that gives students the opportunity to explore STEM through hands-on learning and begin imagining themselves as future engineers and computer scientists.

“For students who don’t have access to these types of opportunities at their schools or in their local communities, this may be their first time in a lab or working on a coding project,” said Marcella Gomez, associate professor of applied mathematics and associate dean for diversity, equity and inclusion at Baskin Engineering. “It opens up a world of possibilities and introduces students to career pathways they didn’t know existed.”

Students created 2D video games and animations, built computer-controlled robots, and programmed Sphero robots to navigate mazes. They also explored research happening across Baskin Engineering and UC Santa Cruz labs, and learned how to pipette and extract DNA from strawberries. 🍓🔬

And that’s not all: The camp concluded with a field trip to Google headquarters!

“Visiting Google made me realize that kids like me can become people who work at Google or a large company,” said a participant.

Link in comments to learn more.

📸 Image descriptions:
1 - A group of GIE participants wearing lab coats at UCSC.
2 - Two participants hold a robot in a brightly colored workroom.
3 - A student sits on a bike at Google headquarters.

[Girls in Engineering is open to all eligible students consistent with state and federal law, and the UC Nondiscrimination Statement.]

Another incredible example of researchers advancing the frontiers of genomics. 🧬 Congratulations to graduate student Prajna Hebbar and Professor of Biomolecular Engineering Benedict Paten for leading this accomplishment!

📣😮 BIG NEWS: We’ve just completed sequencing the DNA of a common marmoset, and it’s going to be a big win for Alzheimer’s research.

New-world primates like marmosets experience age-related memory loss, which has made them a great model for studying Alzheimer's and other neurological conditions.

Many of the same genes that contribute to cognitive decline in humans are also present in marmosets, but past attempts to sequence the marmoset’s DNA were unable to fully capture these genes. Today, researchers at UC Santa Cruz have filled in the gaps to uncover hundreds of genes, including previously undescribed forms of several important Alzheimer's-linked genes.

The marmoset genome is part of a major release of other telomere-to-telomere (T2T) complete genomes published today in Cell. The collection shows how technology has advanced to enable scientists to routinely fully sequence genomes from end to end, less than 5 years after UC Santa Cruz co-led the publication of a first complete human genome sequence in 2022.

This new ability to fully sequence genomes from telomere to telomere is expected to get easier and more affordable in the next 5 years, and could be a game changer for personalized medicine. Keep following us to see what the next few years will bring!

https://news.ucsc.edu/2026/08/first-complete-marmoset-genome/

Did you know fungal networks can communicate underground through electrical signals? 🍄‍🟫 A team of researchers is exploring what these faint electrical signals can tell us about the health of a forest after wildfires.

The team is developing a new tool that can “listen” to these signals across large areas of soil. By recording this electrical activity, they aim to determine whether a forest’s underground ecosystem is recovering after a fire or remains damaged—providing a powerful new way to monitor forest and soil health in California’s increasingly fire-prone landscapes.

And that’s not all! The tool repurposes technology originally developed by the UC Santa Cruz Genomics Institute Braingeneers group to read electrical signals in neural tissue.

It’s one of nine projects that just received funding from the UCSC Genomics Institute Seed Funding Program, which provides initial support to get bold, interdisciplinary collaborations like this one off the ground.

🔗 Link in comments to learn more.

📸 Image descriptions:
1 - Team member and Baskin Engineering graduate student Ella Ferraz in Henry Cowell Redwoods State Park beside a tree with fungi growing on it. Credit: Ella Ferraz
2 - Close-up of five white fungi growing from moss.
3 - A firefighter puts out flames in a forest.

🏆 Top 10 in North America! Congrats to this talented team of undergraduates for their impressive performance in the Google Developers North America Solution Challenge.

The annual competition invites university students to build real-world applications that address the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals using Google technologies.

The team created Nectar, a high-performance desktop application designed to cut through the noise of online shopping. By combining , natural language processing, and Bayesian logic, Nectar analyzes e-commerce listings to surface meaningful insights and help users make smarter purchasing decisions.

Congratulations to Shivank Virdi, Iyanna Arches, Jaycob Pakingan, Aanya Agarwal, and Kaylana Chuan on this accomplishment! We can’t wait to see what you build next. 👏

📸 Image description: The UC Santa Cruz team from left to right - Aanya Agarwal, Jaycob Pakingan, Kaylana Chuan, Shivank Virdi, and Iyanna Arches.

🚀 The UCSC Rocket Team reached new heights at the 2026 International Rocket Engineering Competition (IREC), earning 1st place in the 10,000-foot Commercial Off-the-Shelf (COTS) division and 4th overall out of 141 teams!

This was UCSC Rocket team's second time ever competing at IREC, the world's largest collegiate rocketry competition.

“Our mission as a team is to foster a love for rocketry and aerospace at UC Santa Cruz,” said Teodor Langan (B.S. ‘27, robotics engineering), president of the UCSC Rocket Team. “By competing in IREC, our goal is to continuously build upon our rocket so we can reach greater heights.”

The entirely student-led team spent the academic year designing, building, and testing its rocket before competing this summer.

A key factor behind the team’s success was manufacturing all the rocket’s structural components in-house at Slugworks, UC Santa Cruz’s creatorspace located in .

Now, the team is aiming even higher, with plans to compete in the more challenging 30,000-foot COTS division next year. The sky's the limit. ✨

🔗 Link in comments to read the story.

A team of researchers at the NASA - National Aeronautics and Space Administration - National Aeronautics and Space Administration-funded COFFIES Science Center has made a major breakthrough in understanding one of the Sun’s biggest mysteries. ☀️

Professor of Applied Mathematics Nic Brummell, postdoctoral scholar Loren Matilsky, and former UC Santa Cruz graduate student Lydia Korre have uncovered new insights into how the Sun’s magnetic field helps maintain an incredibly thin layer deep inside the Sun called the tachocline—a region believed to play a key role in generating the magnetic activity behind solar flares and other space weather events.

Using innovative simulations run on NASA’s most powerful supercomputer, the research team discovered a surprising relationship: the tachocline helps drive the solar magnetic field, while the magnetic field also helps maintain the tachocline’s signature thinness—a newly identified synergy between these processes.

Studying these dynamics is vital for understanding space weather, which can impact astronaut safety, satellite communications, and global navigation systems.

“Everyone wants to know what the environment is like between the Sun and Earth, because it affects our life here,” Brummell said. “But understanding the origin of space weather is important when we are looking for other habitable worlds, too.”

This research was conducted as part of the COFFIES (Consequences Of Fields and Flows in the Interior and Exterior of the Sun) Center, with support from Matilsky’s National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded postdoc fellowship.

🔗 Link in comments to learn more.

📸 Image description: Coiled magnetic field lines of the sun. Credit: NASA/GSFC/Solar Dynamics Observatory.

New UC Santa Cruz research is challenging what we know about aging cells.

Scientists have known for years that the stem cells that go on to become blood cells show significant signs of aging that sometimes lead to leukemia, excessive blood clotting and other diseases.

Research led by Professor of Biomolecular Engineering Camilla Forsberg and UC Santa Cruz Science Biochemistry Ph.D. graduate Jenna Myers found that many blood cells produced by aging stem cells remain remarkably unaffected.

These surprising findings suggest “parent” cells may act as a buffer to protect the blood from the effects of aging.

This work offers new insights into how blood cells are produced and helps confirm the safety of accepting bone marrow transplants from older donors.

Learn more with the link in comments.