Overview
UC Santa Cruz in California's Monterey Bay Area Offers a Beautiful Natural World and Amazing Marine Life
The coastline, the ocean, and the names - Big Sur," "State Route 1," "17-Mile Drive," and "International Longboard Association" - have all helped make the Monterey Bay area world famous. The Monterey Bay area, sometimes called The Bay Area by locals, is an unofficial term that seeks to include as much of the coastal counties of Santa Cruz (to the north) and Monterey (to the south) as possible, with the citizens of the Monterey and Santa Cruz areas seeing themselves as members of the greater "central California" community, by whatever name it is called. Students at the University of California in Santa Cruz (UC Santa Cruz) consider the entire area their "back yard," and the relationships among the local residents and UC Santa Cruz students and faculty members are positive and far-reaching.
Located on the California coast to the south of San Francisco, stretching between the cities of Santa Cruz and Monterey, Monterey Bay is a large natural bay blessed with many species of marine life, including dolphins, harbor seals, migratory gray and humpback whales, and varieties of kelp that become as tall as trees. In the very center of the bay is the Monterey Canyon, one of the largest underwater canyons on the planet. The Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary protects more than 4,000 square nautical miles of the bay and surrounding ocean.
The area's economy is based on tourism, agriculture, education, and high technology. The area enjoys a Mediterranean climate of cool, wet winters and warm, mostly dry summers, tempered by some night and morning fog and overcast skies near the bay. Water sports, such as sailing, diving, and swimming, are popular in the areas around Santa Cruz, as are skateboarding, cycling, camping, hiking, and rock climbing. While both cities are popular as resort communities and places to view sea life, Santa Cruz is noted for its surfing, while Monterey's draw leans more toward its strong arts community.
Other attractions in the Monterey Bay area are the city of Carmel, the Cannery Row area of Monterey, the world-famous Monterey Bay Aquarium, the National Steinbeck Center, Mission Santa Cruz, California's Coastal Redwoods, and numerous parks and beach areas.
Top School's Faculty Offers Multidisciplinary Bioinformatics Program With Cutting-Edge Research and Research Facilities
The Baskin School of Engineering at UC Santa Cruz offers unique opportunities on the frontier of innovative education and research. Baskin School has meet the increasing demand for highly educated engineering graduates and has won praise from industry and government leaders as the "engineering school of the 21st century" as its faculty members perform exciting and pioneering research in the core areas of biotechnology, information technology, and nanotechnology.
The Department of Biomolecular Engineering offers M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in bioinformatics, a multidisciplinary combination of science, mathematics, and engineering, that helps bring understanding to the biological data acquired in such high-throughput experiments as genome sequencing and gene expression chips. The doctoral program in bioinformatics prepares graduates to be cutting-edge researchers who create new tools to answer new questions.
Bioinformatics has risen in importance because the immense growth of biological information stored in computerized databases has led to a critical need for people who can understand the languages, tools, and techniques of mathematics, science, and engineering. Whereas a classically trained scientist may be unfamiliar with the statistical and algorithmic knowledge required in this field, a classically trained engineer may be unfamiliar with the necessary chemistry and biology. Bioinformatics strives for a balance of the two: an engineer focused on the problems of the underlying science, or, conversely, a scientist focused on the use of engineering tools for analysis and discovery.
The program leverages the research and academic strengths of the first-rate faculty in the Center for Biomolecular Science & Engineering (CBSE), which fosters interdisciplinary research and academic programs that address the scientific questions of the post-genomic era. Creative collaborations among faculty members from different engineering disciplines drive various undertakings, and they continue to blaze new and exciting trails in both existing and newly proposed research facilities. One notable result of the ongoing research is that UCSC is a primary release site for the public version of the human genome.
Faculty researchers and staff scientists use CBSE computer clusters (and its web servers) for genome-browser assembly as well as analysis and comparison. Their web servers feed into the UCSC Genome Browser and provide key genomic tools to researchers around the world. The Baskin School of Engineering boasts three national research centers and two California Institutes for Science and Innovation. It also hosts the Institute for Scalable Scientific Data Management, which is sponsored by the Los Alamos National Laboratory. These programs provide research opportunities and deepen the learning experiences of the school's students. UCSC's state-of-the-art research facilities are in a constant "upgrading" mode to stay current in operational abilities as well as interoperational ones, as faculty researchers know the importance of staying on the "cutting edge" in terms of people, research projects, and processing power.
