Baskin Engineering at UC Santa Cruz

Congrats to all UCSC and Baskin Engineering grads! We're so proud of all you've done and all you will continue to do to make our world brighter! 🎓 ✨

A team of first-year UC Santa Cruz students won a global neurotechnology hackathon! 🧠🏆

Competing in the Blue Sky Track at Global NeuroHack in San Francisco—one of the world’s largest neurotechnology hackathons—the team earned a $1,000 prize for developing an AI-powered system to detect teeth grinding.

This year’s event brought together more than 100 participants from over 25 universities, including UC Berkeley, Imperial College London, and the University of Oxford

“Standing alongside teams from around the world was incredibly inspiring,” said student Aya O’Neal. “Coming into this competition as an entirely freshman team, we really had to step up and trust our vision.”

Congratulations to Aya O’Neal (B.S., biomolecular engineering & bioinformatics), Tania Makhija (B.S., computer science), Pournami Prasanth (B.S., technology & information management), Tara Sinha (B.S., biomolecular engineering & bioinformatics; neuroscience), and Sukriti Turaga (B.S., neuroscience).

All five students are members of NeuroTechSC, a Baskin Engineering-affiliated student organization focused on hands-on learning in brain-computer interfaces, neuroscience, and AI.

🔗 Link in comments to read the full story!

Image description: Front row, from left, beginning with the fourth person: Tania Makhija, Aya O’Neal, Pournami Prasanth, Tara Sinha and Sukriti Turaga with Global NeuroHack judges.

🥁 Introducing the 2026 Dean's and UC Santa Cruz Chancellor's Award recipients!

We honored 10 outstanding undergraduate projects that demonstrate excellence in engineering research and innovation across a range of fields, including , health technology, neuroscience, and human-centered computing.

“These projects reflect the bold, socially responsible nature of research at Baskin Engineering,” said Alexander Wolf, Dean of the Baskin School of Engineering. “Our undergraduate students are developing skills and experience that translate directly into the demands of modern engineering roles and purpose-driven careers.”

Award recipients are selected by a committee of Baskin Engineering faculty led by Jim Whitehead, professor of computational media and associate dean for the undergraduate experience.

“We are actively expanding pathways into research for our undergraduates, connecting them with hands-on learning opportunities early in their academic journey,” Whitehead said.

Link in the comments to read more about the award-winning projects and the students behind them. Congrats, all!

Image description: Alexander Wolf, dean of Baskin Engineering and Jim Whitehead, professor of computational media and associate dean for the undergraduate experience with the 2026 Dean’s and Chancellor’s Award recipients.

We’re still buzzing from the NVIDIA Hack-a-Claw hackathon at UC Santa Cruz! 🏆

Fueled by a passion for technology, more than 200 students spent 24 hours building the future of agentic at a hackathon co-hosted by , NVIDIA, and ASUS.

Participants developed innovative applications using cutting-edge AI hardware and software from NVIDIA and ASUS, creating solutions ranging from cybersecurity and robotics to small-business automation and sustainable AgTech.

The event was led by Baskin Engineering undergraduate student Preet Karia—who won NVIDIA's GTC 2026 Agents for Impact Hackathon—and organized in partnership with BE student organization Hack.dev.

Congratulations to the winners, who are all UCSC students unless otherwise noted:

☁️ Cloud Track: ClawForge - A NemoClaw safety-powered tool that helps small businesses create custom AI agents from calls and booking to support daily operations, without needing to code. Team: Animesh Alang, Adithya Pradeep, Paras Gandhi, and Giwin Vincent Edwin Omesh

🤖 Edge Track: FactoryMind - A tool for future optimization of autonomous robots in factories. Team: Dan Pham, Rohan S. (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign), Donovan Thomas, and Raeed Saad

🔐 NemoClaw Track: MonkeyClaw - A cybersecurity tool for probing, patching, and protecting the NVIDIA NemoClaw ecosystem. Team: George Gong, Justin Lee, and Ezzy Rappeport

🌱 Best for UCSC Track: HydroClaw - An autonomous AI agent that manages a hydroponic farm, continuously monitoring growth and taking corrective action in real time. Team: Carmen Tan, Alexander Hamilton, and Lucas Peterson

Thank you to everyone who participated, and to organizers Preet Karia, Parsh Gandhi, Ember Lu, Pranitha Rajaa and Adhya Maddukuri, as well as NVIDIA, ASUS, the mentors, judges, and volunteers who made this incredible event possible.

🔗 Link in comments to more.

Image descriptions:
1 - The Hack.dev. team (left to right): Adhya Maddukuri, Parsh Gandhi, Preet Karia, Pranitha Rajaa, and Ember Lu. Credit: Wei Wang
2 - Edge Track winning team. Credit: Wei Wang
3 - NemoClaw Track winners. Credit: Wei Wang
4 - Best for UCSC Track winners with event organizers. Credit: Wei Wang
5 - Two students work together at a computer. Credit: Griffin Murphy
6 - Two students display ASUS technology. Credit: Griffin Murphy
7 - A group of students collaborate on a project. Credit: Griffin Murphy

What happens when a surfer studies applied mathematics at UC Santa Cruz? 🌊 Meet Rebecca Benjamin, a master's student in scientific computing and applied mathematics who is applying computational fluid dynamics to study how subtle differences in surfboard shape affect performance in the water.

“At Baskin Engineering, I found a smaller applied mathematics department with a collaborative culture, where faculty and students support interdisciplinary and unconventional projects,” Rebecca said.

“This environment helped me bring an unusual research idea—one explored by only a small number of researchers worldwide—into an academic setting and receive meaningful support.”

Rebecca is advised by Adjunct Professor of Applied Mathematics Frank Giraldo and Professor of Applied Mathematics Nic Brummell.

🎓 After graduating this year, she plans to pursue a Ph.D. in applied mathematics at UC Santa Cruz, working with Assistant Professor of Applied Mathematics Nilah Ioannidis on machine learning and genome sequencing to study rare diseases.

Learn more at the link in comments. ⬇️

Where did life on Earth begin? Professor Emeritus of Biomolecular Engineering David Deamer and BME Research Associate Bruce Damer guest edited a new special issue of Astrobiology, “An Origin of Life on Land,” exploring growing evidence that life may have emerged across networks of terrestrial environments on early Earth billions of years ago.

“In this new view, perhaps an entire landscape might be implicated in life’s beginning,” Damer said.

🔎 The collection explores how the origins of life may have come about in volcanic landscapes, freshwater hydrothermal systems like geyser-fed hot springs, evaporative environments, crater and soda lakes, and other concentrating freshwater environments.

Learn more with the link in comments. 🔗

Image credit: Siegfried Poepperl / Pexel

We are celebrating major strides in innovation at UC Santa Cruz! 🎉

🧬 Congratulations to Richard (Ed) Green, professor of biomolecular engineering, who received a UC Santa Cruz Lifetime Achievement Award recognizing a career defined by groundbreaking advances in genomics and computational biology, and for translating fundamental science into lasting societal impact. Methods developed in his lab have been widely applied, licensed, and commercialized across biotechnology, forensics, and genomics—and his technology has served as the foundation for three regionally based startups.

🧠 Another breakthrough innovation, NeuroSWARM3, received the Translation of the Year Award. Developed by the Yanik Lab led by Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering Ali A Yanik, NeuroSWARM3 is a neurophotonic technology enabling wireless, minimally invasive monitoring of brain activity at unprecedented scale and resolution. Over the past year, the innovation has made significant progress toward real-world application and commercialization.

Join us in congratulating Ed Green and Ali A Yanik! Link in comments to learn more. 🔗

Image left to Right: Mike Beck, Richard (Ed) Green, Chancellor Cynthia Larive, Bud Colligan, and Ali Yanik.

Hype yourself up in the mirror. Make your fingers walk around on something. Create a ritual. 👉 People are tasked to carry out these actions in a new extended reality (XR) experience called “Body Proxy”—because they are uniquely human.

Body Proxy is a satirical, speculative fiction piece that follows the narrative of an company recruiting humans to carry out physical actions in the world.

Co-produced by UC Santa Cruz Assistant Teaching Professor of Computational Media Samantha Gorman, at her creative studio Tender Claws, the experience debuted at SXSW 2026 where it won the XR Experience Jury Award! 🎉

“When people are seeing and engaging with this installation, they become more aware of what is possible now,” Gorman said. “The time is here, and it is up to us how we want to shape what our presence is in the world in relation to AI. Things that seem far-futuristic are being done and decided now.”

Read more with the link in comments. 🔗

Image description: At the Flux Festival showing of Body Proxy, a participant performs a uniquely human task on behalf of a fictional AI company. Photo courtesy of Tender Claws.

👏 Congratulations to Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Engineering Yuanchao Xu on receiving a National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award—one of the organization’s most prestigious grants in support of early-career faculty.

With support from the award, Xu will develop protocols to improve the security and efficiency of the software and hardware that power complex data centers.

“Security of the public cloud is more important than ever before, as much of our digital life now depends on it. AI agents, chatbots, and AI-assisted collaboration platforms—all of those applications run on the public cloud,” Xu said.

“As we offload more of our tasks to the public cloud, security is more important than before to guarantee performance.”

🔗 Learn more with the link in comments.

📸 Image description: Baskin Engineering branded graphic with Yuanchao Xu's portrait photo and supporting text that says "National Science Foundation CAREER Award recipient! | Yuanchao Xu, Assistant Professor, Computer Science and Engineering."