A new ranking shows @ucsantacruz.bsky.social #BaskinEngineering students are among the top coders in the country! 🎉 We are thrilled to be among top 50 universities nationwide for producing graduates with the skills today’s top employers are hiring for. Read more: bit.ly/4tIFKnM
SlugSat students visiting NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
🚀 #BaskinEngineering students are launching a satellite into space this weekend! SlugSat, a UCSC student org, is part of NASA's CubeSat Launch Initiative which supports the launch of student-built satellites.
You can watch the SpaceX livestream of mission NG-24 and cheer them on!
#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.💡
Read the story 🔗 bit.ly/3Q096iR
A #BaskinEngineering faculty-student team—Assistant Professor of Biomolecular Engineering 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 Singularity Hub: bit.ly/4bG9Mm4
🎉 A @ucsantacruz.bsky.social team placed 3rd at the '26 Mistral AI Worldwide Hackathon for their #AI cybersecurity platform! 🥉 “We were competing against YC founders, Google DeepMind researchers, Meta product managers, & other AI experts," said student Anthony Lamas.
Read on: 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 engineering and J. Xavier Prochaska, prof of astronomy and astrophysics at UCSC.
Via @mercurynews.com: bayareane.ws/4sW5j4q
A team of scientists from #BaskinEngineering successfully trained brain organoids to solve a well-known engineering benchmark — demonstrating the increasing complexity of lab-grown brains.
Via Popular Mechanics: 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 @lookoutsantacruz.bsky.social: bit.ly/47qgkCE
“We’re trying to understand the fundamentals of how neurons can be adaptively tuned to solve problems,” said #BaskinEngineering student Ash Robbins—part of a @ucsantacruz.bsky.social team who taught brain organoids to solve a goal-directed task.
Via @discovermag.bsky.social: bit.ly/4uCeatV
🎉 Congrats to #BaskinEngineering grad student Eren Dogan (Ph.D. ’27, computer science and engineering), who was one of four @uofcalifornia.bsky.social students to receive the inaugural Costas John Spanos Semiconductor Manufacturing Award from CITRIS and the Banatao Institute!
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.com: 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 @khmiga.bsky.social, @benedictpaten.bsky.social, and @russcd.bsky.social.
Via @natmethods.nature.com: go.nature.com/4spcbHb
Researchers at UC Santa Cruz have trained brain organoids—tiny pieces of brain tissue grown in the lab—to solve the "inverted pendulum" or "cart-pole" problem, a fundamental benchmark used in robotics, control theory, and #AI.
Via National Today: bit.ly/4lahyYj
Want to take a break from video games, but still read about them? A new book on #AnimalCrossingNewHorizons by #BaskinEngineering Prof Noah Wardrip-Fruin dives into what made the game so popular during the Covid-19 pandemic.
As seen in @theguardian.com: bit.ly/3OKtc01
A new UC Santa Cruz study shows how visual-language #AI models that help control self-driving cars can be exploited or hijacked with carefully coded real-world commands—led by #BaskinEngineering researchers.
Via The Drive: bit.ly/40csTO2
“If we can figure out ways in which living neural networks compute so efficiently, we would have a big breakthrough in terms of trying to find and develop a better architecture for artificial computing,” said #BaskinEngineering Assistant Professor Tal Sharf.
Via UNDARK: bit.ly/408zE3r
UC Santa Cruz researchers trained brain organoids—lab-grown clusters of human brain cells—to solve a goal-directed task, boosting success rates from 4.5% to 46%. Led by #BaskinEngineering faculty.
Via Gadget Review: bit.ly/4slsSn1
A male and female scientist in lab coats hold a small circular container for growing brain organoids.
A female scientist sits in front of a portable metal shelf that contains three racks of equipment, including multiple screens.
Open Culture Science is a new startup that could transform how labs grow cells and tissues worldwide. Founded by two UCSC Genomics Institute grads, it aims to automate processes that are currently painstakingly manual. 🔬🧠 news.ucsc.edu/Open-C...
Thrilled to see Ash Robbins, a #BaskinEngineering electrical and computer engineering Ph.D. student leading this research—it's the first rigorous demonstration of goal-directed learning in brain #organoids and extends their usefulness for studying brain diseases. 🧠
🎉 Congrats to #BaskinEngineering Assistant Professor of Biomolecular Engineering Vanessa Jonsson who received a UCSC Innovation Catalyst grant! Her team is developing a single single nasal swab test that can detect multiple viral infections and a person's immunity.
Read on: bit.ly/4cHyRxE
Proud to see #BaskinEngineering #ComputerScience alumus Jules Kadher Kabore launch yourUSA.ai, an AI-powered, web-based form-filling assistant designed to make immigration and government paperwork simpler, clearer, and less stressful. 👏
Via Business Insider: bit.ly/4aJH8yL
🌎 #BaskinEngineering Assistant Professor of Applied Mathematics @ashesh6810.bsky.social will build #AI models to project extreme Earth-system events with the support of the highly competitive Sloan Research Fellowship. Learn more: bit.ly/40f0UND
Greenhouses are essential to feeding a growing global population, but often come with real environmental costs. #BaskinEngineering Professor Katia Obraczka is developing tech to monitor greenhouse conditions with precision—reducing water and energy use while improving crop production. bit.ly/3OGkQ9y
CruzHacks participants work together on computers and leadership poses together on UCSC's East Field
🏆 Baskin Engineers made a HUGE splash at CruzHacks 2026, winning in sustainability, justice, and education projects! The event offers students the opportunity to design, build, and present original technology “hacks” for prizes equivalent to $500. Learn more about the projects: bit.ly/4aCET1c
🏆 Congrats to #BaskinEngineering alumna Saumya Bhatnagar (M.S. Computer Science), named a Top 50 Woman Chief Product Officer of 2026! She’s also a Forbes 30 Under 30 alum and one of IBM’s Top 100 Women in Tech. bit.ly/4qpRKs9
“...better and safer bike lanes, pedestrian options, trains, metro systems and the like," said Anne Criss, director of climate & sustainability initiatives at #BaskinEngineering. "There’s a lot that governments can do, both at federal, state and local levels, to facilitate that.” bit.ly/4kmkQYh
Drone flies in the sky, shot from below. UCSC/BE logo and text reads "Misleading text in the real-world environment can hijack the decision-making of embodied AI systems—without hacking their software."
New research led by #BaskinEngineering faculty Alvaro Cardenas and Cihang Xie presents the first academic exploration of environmental indirect prompt injection attacks against embodied #AI systems. Read the full story: bit.ly/3YYAoaN #ArtificialIntelligence #Cybersecurity
🌪️⛈️ Weather #forecasting is computationally demanding—that's why #BaskinEngineering Assistant Professor @ashesh6810.bsky.social aims to use #AI to predict extreme weather using a fraction of the time, energy, and #computing power of today’s methods. Via @uofcalifornia.bsky.social: bit.ly/3ZrNDAU
Artificial intelligence is beginning to have serious real-world impact on a global scale. That’s why #BaskinEngineering experts are developing innovative solutions to steer #AI in the right direction. Learn about their work: bit.ly/4qQ6Vf1 #StandUpForUC @uofcalifornia.bsky.social