Baskin Engineering at UC Santa Cruz

09/09/2026

Celebrating another National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award recipient! Congratulations to Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Engineering Dustin Richmond, who will study and design mitigations against potential attacks on analog compute-in-memory systems.

“We’ve operated in the digital domain for the last 40 or 50 years, but the analog domain is an opportunity for us to be more efficient,” Richmond said. “We just don’t yet understand the security implications of that.”

A major component of the NSF CAREER Award is creating educational opportunities for students. Richmond also aims to expand access to introductory computer engineering education for students at schools that lack existing resources through new programs and open-source educational tools.

🔗 Learn more with the link in comments.

Image description: Portrait of Dustin Richmond

09/04/2026

"Life is a journey, live for the people you experience it with." ...

09/04/2026

09/04/2026

At UC Santa Cruz, students from across disciplines are getting hands-on experience designing for virtual reality. 👏

Creative Design in Virtual Reality (VR) is an undergraduate course open to any UCSC student. Through hands-on VR prototyping, students explore the engineering design process while developing skills in creative problem-solving, collaboration, and human-centered design.

The course uses Shapesxr to help students turn their ideas into interactive VR experiences without needing to code, allowing them to prototype and build applications within a single quarter.

“ShapesXR allowed us to build and teach a class around VR design, enabling students to create and prototype their application ideas without any prior exposure,” said Deniz Yaralioglu, a student instructor and computer science student at .

The course is part of Baskin Engineering’s Lead By Design program, which empowers undergraduate students to create more accessible and experiential design-build curricula for their peers.

Learn more: https://bit.ly/4i8eVqF

08/19/2026

🎉 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. 🔗

08/18/2026

Slugs making history! 🛰️ For the first time, a satellite built entirely by UC Santa Cruz students was deployed from the International Space Station.

The effort was led by SlugSat, UC Santa Cruz’s satellite engineering student organization. The team spent years designing, building, and testing the satellite under the leadership of now-Baskin Engineering alumnus David Uniack (B.S. ‘26, robotics engineering).

SlugSat was selected for NASA - National Aeronautics and Space Administration's CubeSat Launch Initiative, a competitive program that provides launch opportunities for student-developed — small satellites commonly used for research and education.

🤝 To accomplish this feat, UC Santa Cruz teamed up with California State Polytechnic University-Pomona, Texas State University, Northeastern University, and Columbia University to develop CubeSats using Cal Poly Pomona’s open-source hardware and software platform.

“Being selected for NASA’s CubeSat Launch Initiative and joining this group of universities was very exciting,” Uniack said. “One of my mantras is to get yourself into situations you can’t easily get yourself out of because it forces you outside of your comfort zone.”

Now orbiting Earth, the satellite is transmitting signals to SlugSat’s ground station. Uniack is monitoring its health, analyzing incoming data and preparing software updates, operating the mission much like a professional satellite operations team.

Link in comments to read the story!

📹 Video description: A 3, 2, 1 countdown plays over footage of a deployer mounted outside the International Space Station as it releases the CubeSat into orbit. Text reads, “UC Santa Cruz’s first student-built satellite was deployed from the International Space Station!”

08/14/2026

📣 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.

08/12/2026

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.]

08/06/2026

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/