Baskin Engineering at UCSC

Baskin Engineering is now on Bluesky! 💙 We’ll still be here 👋 but if you’re on Bluesky, come find us and give us a follow! bsky.app/profile/baskin… #Bluesky #BaskinEngineering

👏 Congrats to #BaskinEngineering Assistant Professor Yuanchao Xu on receiving a @NSF CAREER Award! Xu will develop protocols to improve the security and efficiency of the software and hardware that power complex data centers. Learn more: bit.ly/3ON4koV

🌱🧬 Register now: There is still limited space left at our May 1st symposium on conservation genomics at the UC Santa Cruz campus! Beth Shapiro will be giving a keynote on how (and why) to de-extinct a mammoth 🦣 Details and registration: events.ucsc.edu/event/sequence…

Meet #BaskinEngineering alumna Laura Miller, founder and CEO of TempDev, a specialized healthcare IT consulting firm! Via ValientCEO: bit.ly/4u5LCHT

While the world focuses on the power consumption of massive AI data centers, #BaskinEngineering researchers are looking at a more efficient alternative: the human brain. Via @Inc: bit.ly/4t5nRPy

Clumps of mouse brain cells the size of peppercorns learned to keep a pole upright on a virtual moving cart — the video game equivalent of balancing a ruler vertically on your palm. Led by #BaskinEngineering researchers. Via @ScienceNews: bit.ly/41QflbU

👏CONGRATS to the #BaskinEngineering students and alumni who have been awarded a prestigious @NSF Graduate Research Fellowship! The program has played a key role in developing the talent pipeline that sustains U.S. leadership in science. Learn more: bit.ly/3QE9ofD

🌱🧬 Register now: There is still limited space left at our May 1st symposium on conservation genomics at the UC Santa Cruz campus! Beth Shapiro will be giving a keynote on how (and why) to de-extinct a mammoth 🦣 Details and registration: events.ucsc.edu/event/sequence…

A new @CodeSignalCom ranking shows UCSC #BaskinEngineering students are among the top coders in the country! 🎉 We rank among the top 50 universities nationwide for producing graduates with the skills today’s top employers are hiring for. Read more: bit.ly/4tIFKnM

🚀 #BaskinEngineering students are launching a satellite into space this weekend! UCSC's SlugSat student org is part of @NASA's CubeSat Launch Initiative, which supports the launch of student-built satellites. Watch the @SpaceX livestream of mission NG-24! #NASA #Space

🏆 @nvidia hackathon WINNER!🤯Congrats to #BaskinEngineering student Preet Karia for placing first at the #NVIDIA GTC 2026 Agents for Impact Hackathon! Preet built an #AI -powered tool called Loomin that turns physics notes into 3D visualizations.💡 🔗 bit.ly/3Q096iR

A #BaskinEngineering faculty-student team—Assistant Professor Vanessa Jonsson and Ph.D. student Divya Venkatraman—will build a resource to understand ‘immune visibility’ with support from the W. M. Keck Foundation’s Bridge Funding Initiative. Learn more: bit.ly/3NQYPoH

🧠“We’re trying to understand the fundamentals of how neurons can be adaptively tuned to solve problems,” said #BaskinEngineering Ph.D. student Ash Robbins, who helped train brain organoids to solve a goal-directed task. Via @singularityhub: bit.ly/4bG9Mm4

🎉A #BaskinEngineering team placed 3rd at the '26 @MistralAI Worldwide Hackathon for their cybersecurity platform! “We were competing against YC founders, Google DeepMind researchers, Meta product managers, & other AI experts," said student Anthony Lamas. bit.ly/4bzzY1O

"Both of us have recently moved from denial to contemplation that AI will soon be in a position to replace us," says David Haussler, distinguished prof of biomolecular eng and J. Xavier Prochaska, prof of astronomy and astrophysics at UCSC. Via @mercnews: bayareane.ws/4sW5j4q

A team of scientists from #BaskinEngineering trained brain organoids to solve a well-known engineering benchmark — demonstrating the increasing complexity of lab-grown brains. Via @PopMech: bit.ly/4uo8bse

Goodbye single-use plastics!🌱Wonderfil, a startup by #BaskinEngineering alumna Shiloh Sacks (B.S. ’21, electrical engineering) and co-founder Amelia Eichel, makes it easy to refill soap products with self-serve dispensers. Via @LookoutSCruz: bit.ly/47qgkCE

“We’re trying to understand the fundamentals of how neurons can be adaptively tuned to solve problems,” said #BaskinEngineering grad student @ashashrobbins-part of a team at UCSC who taught brain organoids to solve a goal-directed task. Via @DiscoverMag: bit.ly/4uCeatV

🎉 Congrats to #BaskinEngineering grad student Eren Dogan (Ph.D. ’27, computer science and engineering), who was one of four @UofCalifornia students to receive the inaugural Costas John Spanos Semiconductor Manufacturing Award from the @citrisnews! bit.ly/4u4oNoO

🧠#BaskinEngineering researchers effectively coached organoids, tiny pieces of brain tissue grown in the lab, to solve the “cart-pole” problem—an engineering benchmark to measure how effective systems are at processing information. Via Futurism: bit.ly/4b4srGx

🧬A #pangenome can reveal the spectrum of genome variation within a species. The toolbox for working with pangenomes is filling up, thanks to #BaskinEngineering researchers Karen Miga, Benedict Paten, Russ Corbett-Detig, and more. Via @Nature Methods: go.nature.com/4spcbHb