Marine mammals undertake some of the most extraordinary migrations on the planet to eat and avoid being eaten. They make behavioral decisions based on the ecology of their prey and predators, all while keeping within the confines of their physiological limits. By attaching electronic instruments to seals and monitoring their survival and reproductive success with mark-recapture techniques, I will discuss how our lab group explores predator-prey interactions in the open ocean, and their implications for the future of long-lived vertebrates.

Roxanne Beltran is an Assistant Professor in the Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Department at UC Santa Cruz. She is interested in understanding how animal behavior and physiology underlie the ecological and evolutionary patterns we see in nature. At UC Santa Cruz she leads the Beltran Lab, a diverse team of postdocs, graduate students, and 12 undergraduate student researchers. Her lab group uses bio-loggers to produce interdisciplinary insights, such as discovering navigation abilities, describing predator-prey landscapes, unveiling cryptic species distributions, and measuring the impacts of marine ecosystem resource pulses. Most of Roxanne’s research takes place at Año Nuevo Reserve, where she explores how behavior and physiology interact to drive the ecological and evolutionary patterns we see in nature. Roxanne is a National Geographic Young Explorer, a Beckman Young Investigator, and a Packard Fellow in Science and Engineering. She also authored an award-winning children’s book, A Seal Named Patches, which has sold over 15,000 copies worldwide. Finally, Roxanne is passionate about inclusion of marginalized students in scientific research, and co-founded UC Santa Cruz’s Building a Better Fieldwork Future program which is working toward making field settings safer, more equitable, and more welcoming for the next generation of field scientists.

In every form of creative media, what the artist includes and excludes grants the audience insight into the creator’s intent. In games, the actions and freedoms we grant and restrict help tell our stories, designing rules that can both build worlds and betray our biases. Elizabeth Swensen discusses how to critically examine systems and procedures in playful contexts, and how that analysis has shaped her work in both educational and expressive game design.

Elizabeth Swensen is a game designer, paper-tearer, and Assistant Professor of Art & Design: Games & Playable Media at UCSC. She received her M.F.A in Interactive Media from the University of Southern California and her B.A. in Classics from Willamette University. Her research is in designing narrative for interactive experiences, system design for playful learning, and experimental Tabletop RPG design as a part of the UCSC Center for Monster Studies.

Few medieval figures enjoy greater name recognition than Marco Polo. Today, he is a brand whose name connotes exoticism, adventure, and East-West travel; academic critics sometime see him as the precursor to European explorers who cast a colonizing gaze over non-Western parts of the world. The source of all these images is the book usually known in English translation as “The Travels.” In this talk, I return his work to its original title, The Description of the World (in Old French, Le Devisement du monde). Composed by the Venetian merchant in collaboration with an Arthurian romance writer named Rustichello of Pisa in 1298, The Description comes at the midpoint of a remarkable century when the Mongol conquests of Chinggis Khan and his successors, resulting in the largest contiguous empire in history, had produced a world of unprecedented travel, communication, and interaction. Our Slugs & Steins lecture will explore some of the most interesting, curious, and surprising aspects of that world.

For many people, airports may seem like alienating “nonplaces”—as anthropologist Marc Augé put it—where we rush to make connections and spend long, monotonous hours waiting for delayed flights. But airports are fascinating sites that can tell us a lot about the places where they are situated. Among other things, they are complex infrastructures where people, the built and natural environments, and different kinds of networks come together. Airports are also sites of accumulated power in a given region. Looking at the history of an airport, then, can provide a useful lens for examining some of the complex, interconnected forces that have influenced the development of its region over time. Exploring that history can also help us understand how differently positioned people in that place have abided, resisted, and otherwise negotiated the powerful forces that have shaped their lives. In this talk, Eric Porter will discuss San Francisco International Airport (SFO) as a site whose history reveals important perspectives on a wide range of phenomena that have helped to make the Bay Area. Along the way he will read excerpts from his recent book, A People’s History of SFO: The Making of the Bay Area and an Airport.

As climate change continues to present major challenges for agriculture in the coming decades, there is more need than ever for novel agricultural solutions that address key social, environmental, and economic issues. No-till practices have been implemented on millions of hectares worldwide, addressing historic agricultural issues of topsoil erosion, water infiltration, and diversification. However, these systems still present considerable environmental challenges as they rely heavily on herbicides and chemical fertilizers that are prone to off-farm contamination and leaching. Organic tillage-based systems have been able to exclude these products while providing considerable co-benefits. However, the ‘holy-grail’ of organic no-till farming has been slow to develop, with both adoption and research lagging far behind conventional systems in the United States.

This talk from Darryl Wong, Executive Director of the Center for Agroecology, will explore the agroecological challenges facing organic no-till agriculture, with a particular focus on the distinct challenges of California organic vegetable systems. We will review the results of a three-year field trial conducted at the UCSC Center for Agroecology with discussion about the role of formal research and extension in supporting agroecological innovations.

Autonomous systems are prone to errors and failures without knowing why. In critical domains like driving, these autonomous counterparts must be able to recount their actions for safety, liability, and trust. An explanation: a model-dependent reason or justification for the decision of the autonomous agent being assessed, is a key component for post-mortem failure analysis, but also for pre-deployment verification. I will present a framework that uses a model and commonsense knowledge to detect and explain unreasonable vehicle scenarios, even if it has not seen that error before. In the second part of the talk, I will motivate the use of explanations as a testing framework for autonomous systems. I will conclude by discussing new challenges at the intersection of XAI and autonomy toward autonomous vehicles systems that are explainable by design.

The James Webb Space Telescope is an astronomy mission that exceeds all others in capability. The first nine months of science results from JWST have already rewritten the science history books. JWST is astonishingly complex, yet it exceeds its requirements in essentially all areas. Its flawless launch and deployments are a testament to the engineering and management commitment of thousands of people in the US and in our partner nations, the European ESA and Canadian CSA, and of the support of policy-makers who funded this extraordinary mission through all its trials and tribulations. I will give a broad overview of the multi-faceted challenges that JWST faced, and overcame, and of the first results that challenge our understanding of the growth of galaxies in the early universe.

Climate change is a global problem and solving it requires a global effort. Some possible climate solutions are consistent with Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) established by the UN, while other solutions may be at odds with these goals. The lecture will discuss ways of thinking about different climate solutions in the context of global inequality and SDGs. The lecture will also discuss climate-related risks faced by the financial sector and how private investors may be incentivized to invest in climate change mitigation and adaptation.

Have you ever had the experience of not knowing whether someone was being sarcastic? You are not alone. In this talk, Prof. Jean E. Fox Tree will present research findings from her lab on how people produce and understand sarcasm in speech and writing, including studies of how sarcasm is expressed in internet arguments, how reliable tone of voice is in identifying sarcasm, how often people experience gaps between intended and interpreted sarcasm (sarchasm), and whether sarcastic people are more likely to see sarcasm in others.

(This event was not recorded)

Through a range of photographic media Karolina Karlic creates work that addresses the intersection of photography and documentary practices, with a focus on systems of labor and industry, globalization, and their impact on the social and environmental landscapes.

People participate in online communities for a myriad of reasons, including social support, finding and maintaining friendships, and exploring facets of their identity. Additionally, and importantly, these online communities are places for people to spend their leisure time and have fun. In this talk, I explore how different playful communities leverage technology, such as social media or games, as a place for support and care. I present two case studies including a community for autistic youth that uses Minecraft and the musicians BTS’s fandom community, ARMY, that uses a myriad of social media. I will discuss how playfulness on social technology holds a key role in facilitating access to community support and can bridge virtual and physical worlds in everyday life.

Conversational AI virtual assistants (e.g., Alexa, Siri, Google Assistant, chatbots for business etc.) are becoming popular in different channels (social media, text messages, voice, phone, email, in car, physical robots, etc.). They communicate with humans through natural language dialogs to achieve social, informational or task oriented goals. Drawing from her research and industry practice, Yi Zhang will talk about how computers learn to understand human intention and get things done, their current limitations, and how we can better teach those AI systems in the future.

Our lives are intimately linked to Earth’s 24-hour solar cycle via circadian clocks that coordinate our physiology and behavior into rhythms that coincide with the day/night cycle. The Partch lab has been working to identify how dedicated clock proteins interact with one another to establish a deeper understanding of the molecular clock that underlies circadian rhythms in humans. Recent insights into the genetic basis of morning lark and night owl behavior have shed light on key steps in the clock that play a powerful role in determining the intrinsic timing of circadian clocks in humans. Some of these recent advances will be discussed to explore the biochemical basis for circadian timekeeping.

Drawing from her research on solidarity tours in Palestine, Jennifer Kelly shows how solidarity tourism in Palestine functions as a fraught localized political strategy, and an emergent industry, through which Palestinian organizers refashion conventional tourism to the region by extending deliberately truncated invitations to tourists to come to Palestine and witness the effects of Israeli state practice on Palestinian land and lives. She shows how Palestinian organizers both extend and redefine this invitation to witness, as well as intervene in tourist demands for evidence and desire for performances of trauma by asking tourists to instead confront the violence of their own desire in Palestine. She also details the conditions that have led Palestinians to make their case through solidarity tourism in the first place, describing the ways in which tourists travel to Palestine to see the effects of Israeli occupation for themselves despite the volumes of literature Palestinians have produced on their own condition. In this way, Kelly shows how Palestinian organizers, under the constraints of military occupation, and in a context in which they do not control their borders or the historical narrative, wrest both the capacity to invite and, in Edward Said’s words, “the permission to narrate” from Israeli control.

The Algae Society BioArt Design Lab is a global collective of interdisciplinary researchers working together with algae as a non-human international research partner. As a collaborative group of artists, scientists and scholars, they experiment, design, and exhibit with algae, working from a companion and multispecies studies approach. They share their evolving interdisciplinary process, highlighting artistic works from Algae Society members and invited guests while reflecting on each researcher’s aim, process, materiality, and aesthetic considerations. With these works they endeavor to ignite societal behavioral shifts and direct action in response to the challenges that human-algal ecosystems face under climate change.

This talk will assess the impact of the 1916 Easter Rising on a variety of anticolonial movements beyond Ireland and the Irish diaspora, focusing on New York City, long recognized as the overseas capital of Irish nationalist agitation and mobilization. But New York played a similar role for a variety of other descent groups and diasporas as well. After an overview of some of these non-Irish groups in the city (including African Americans and South Asians), this topic will be placed in the context of World War I and post-war efforts to end colonialism and foster self-determination for nations around the world. While some historians have emphasized the role of U.S. President Woodrow Wilson’s ideas in these efforts, this talk will demonstrate the centrality of the Easter Rising and the subsequent Irish Revolution, as understood by both Irish and non-Irish intellectuals and political activists in the increasingly cosmopolitan city of New York.

A complete human genome is around six billion DNA bases in length, half of which is inherited from each parent. In this talk, Associate Professor Benedict Paten will discuss some of the rapidly developing technologies we use to decode a genome will be explained, along with how we can use this knowledge to improve healthcare for many.

Four fifths of the matter in the universe is made of something completely different from the “ordinary matter” we know and love. Professor Stefano Profumo will explain why this “dark matter” is an unavoidable ingredient to explain the universe as we observe it, and will describe what the fundamental, particle nature of the dark matter could possibly consist of. He will then give an overview of strategies to search for dark matter as a particle, describe a few examples of possible hints of discovery, and outline ways forward in this exciting hunt.

Human activities dominate almost all regions of the globe. To persist in these human dominated areas, large carnivores must adjust their physiology, behavior and ecology and similarly, humans must be willing to accommodate these species through changes in business as usual. In this talk presented our research on large carnivores from the past 15 years and discuss some ways in which this balance is and is not being achieved.

In this talk, Professor Mark Amengual will discuss and dispel several myths about bilingualism and bilingual speech, offer an overview of the potential cognitive benefits of being bilingual, and conclude by providing evidence of the resourcefulness of bilinguals and multilinguals to overcome cross-language influence in their speech demonstrating the flexibility of their sound systems.

With a focus on her own creative practice, Art Professor Dee Hibbert-Jones explores the impact and challenges of a creative practice that intends to inform, persuade and examine power and politics.

The act of monsterization is not, at its core, very mysterious. Whenever there is an epistemic break, different elements of society attempt to cope by locating the site of disturbance, identifying it as Other, and then mapping that category upon the bodies of the marginalized. The potential for the monster to play an important role in the envisioning of new and better worlds is one our students are hungry to learn.

From the deadly “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville in 2018, to the role of white nationalists in the U.S. Capitol insurgency, recent events have spotlighted white supremacist groups. To grapple with these forces and broader problems of racism and inequality, we need a deeper understanding of the klan movement—the Ku Klux Klan and loosely aligned white supremacist groups—and its influence on American political development.

Event recording coming soon.

According to the neurodiversity perspective, some neurocognitive differences that are taken to be disorders should instead be understood as forms of human diversity. Proponents of this perspective, as it applies to autism, claim that autism is an ineliminable aspect of an autistic person’s identity and that atypical functioning and modes of experience associated with autism are made disabling by lack of accommodation by society, not by the condition itself. This talk will critically examine conceptual, ethical, and political dimensions of the neurodiversity perspective on autism to explore its significance both within the academy and outside it.

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought about, and will bring about, many permanent changes in college teaching and learning. From technologically-enhanced education to trauma-informed pedagogy, COVID has not only precipitated but also accelerated changes already under way at UCSC and elsewhere. Join UCSC Professor Jody Green in conversation with UCSC alumna and Foothill College Professor Stephanie Chan. Greene and Chan will discuss UCSC’s long history of educational innovation and what teaching and learning might look like post-pandemic. 

In consumer applications like electric automobiles, and especially in the astonishing new field of electric aircraft propulsion, high power storage density is essential. High reliability and fault tolerance are also critical attributes. In addition, global energy and environmental concerns call for more efficient and reliable energy conversion systems. This talk is an overview of these cutting-edge applications of power electronics, electronic converters, and electric motor drives in energy and power delivery systems. We will cover applications ranging from lower power energy harvesting and solid-state lighting, to electrified transportation and renewable energy systems.

George R. Blumenthal is formerly UC Santa Cruz’s 10th chancellor. He joined the campus in 1972 as a faculty member in astronomy and astrophysics and was named chancellor on September 19, 2007.

The Blumenthal era has been marked by a commitment to ensuring that the doors of opportunity at UC Santa Cruz are open to all. The number of undergraduate students from underrepresented minorities has increased by 50 percent since Blumenthal took office. Nearly half of the entering class in 2016 received Pell Grants, the federal financial aid given to the neediest students—exceeding the UC average of 42 percent.
The percentage of entering frosh who are “first-generation” college students—who will be the first in their family to earn a four-year degree—now regularly tops 40 percent.

Research into detection methods for SARS-CoV-2 antibodies in blood has rapidly accelerated during the pandemic in response to global health needs. In this virtual seminar, Dr. DuBois will discuss how her lab applied existing knowledge from their research on antiviral antibodies to contribute to understanding the human antibody response to COVID-19 infection and vaccination. Specifically, she will describe her lab’s development of new technology to quickly measure SARS-CoV-2 antibody levels in blood, with results in less than 20 minutes. Dr. DuBois will describe the utility of this technology for COVID-19 studies, as well as the potential to develop this technology as a diagnostic platform to evaluate immunity to other infectious diseases.

As elementary schools reopen after prolonged physical closure due to COVID-19, attention to healing the school community will be essential. Although there is wide variation in the timing and formats with which schools plan to reopen, it is clear that when students reenter school buildings they will be eager to reconnect with friends and teachers. Because elementary school-aged children learn and grow through play, recess is an ideal time to support healing and to prepare students to return to the classroom ready to learn. When students are allowed to reenter school buildings, providing opportunities for play should be a priority; this talk discusses how schools can safely implement recess and harness the power of play to rebuild the school community and support the well-being of their students.

It might seem that games can address almost any topic. There are versions of Monopoly and Tetris that, alone, seem to address subjects ranging from pop music, bass fishing, and sex to mass murder, slavery, and predatory real estate development. Yet for all but the last of these, the actual play of these games is at odds with the intended theme. So what topics can games meaningfully address? One powerful way that games can address topics is by having playable models that resonate with their intended themes. Monopoly is actually an example of such a game, with a playable model of real estate development ripped off from a game intended as a critique of capitalism’s approach to resources. The foundation of any playable model is a set of operational logics, which combine communication and computation with opportunities for play. Video games depend on a relatively small vocabulary of such logics. This restricts the playable models available, which is a challenge faced by those seeking to meaningfully address personal, cultural, and political topics through games. In this talk, Noah Wardrip-Fruin describes work at UC Santa Cruz that is taking on this challenge directly, expanding the games it is possible to make, everywhere from the introductory undergraduate classroom to the research results in his new book, How Pac-Man Eats.

Whales are the largest animals on the planet and inhabit oceans around the world from the tropics to the poles.  Whales spend nearly all of their lives underwater and out of view of researchers.  While biologging tools have allowed us to track the underwater movement of these ocean giants and describe their behavior, the development of tags that include animal-borne video cameras has opened up a new world to researchers and the general public.  From a whale’s perspective, we can now visualize the environment in which whales live and better understand the decisions they make and the behaviors they employ.  In this talk, we will explore the underwater lives of the largest and the smallest baleen whales in local and the most remote parts of the planet: blue whales from California, humpback whales from South Africa, and minke whales from Antarctica.  Not only does this novel perspective provide information about the whales and their environment, but it also provides insights as to how anthropogenic impacts including climate change are affecting these animals.