A new UC Santa Cruz thesis pairs wave-pool experiments with cloud CFD to prove what shapers have felt for decades: bottom contour quietly governs how a surfboard turns — and “feel” is measurable.

A Dutch-California drone exchange lands in Santa Cruz this month — and buried inside the coalition-building and workforce jargon is a genuine economic strategy that most regions are too fragmented, too timid, or too late to pull off.

The UC Santa Cruz Science Division has named three alumni as recipients of its 2026 Distinguished Alumni Awards, celebrating careers that have reshaped medicine, healthcare policy, and our understanding of the cosmos.

UCSC announces their ambitious undergraduate housing project has been approved by the UC Board of Regents, as a part of their plan to increase student housing by 40% within the next ten years.

LaunchPad 2026 brought college and high school founders into the spotlight, with student-built startups winning awards across health tech, AI, social impact, accessibility, civic tools, and more.

If your goal is to bring a new technology to market, the NSF I-Corps Hub Northwest is offering a free, virtual course focused on planetary health — applications CLOSE May 29, 2026!

UC Santa Cruz's Department of Physics invites the public to the Stanley Flatté Memorial Lecture, featuring Stanford professor Stephen Shenker. The talk, titled Chaos, Black Holes, and Quantum Mechanics, takes place at the 418 Project's Large Theater, with refreshments beginning at 5:00 PM and the lecture at 6:00 PM. Admission is free and open to all.

UCSC alumnus Dr. M. Sanjayan steps into a defining role — named CEO of The New York Climate Exchange, leading a first-of-its-kind climate campus on Governors Island to turn bold ideas into global solutions.

KZSC Santa Cruz 88.1 FM broadcasts 20,000 watts reaching over 3.2 million people across Santa Cruz, San Benito, and Monterey counties — now they need your help! KZSC is hosting their Spring Fundraiser and hopes to raise $25,000 to help fund operational costs for the 2026-2027 school year.

Join visionary entrepreneurs, investors, and sustainability experts for an interactive panel exploring the intersection of environmental stewardship and cutting-edge innovation. Stay after for a networking reception to connect with industry leaders and fellow changemakers. Hosted in partnership with the UCSC Innovation & Business Engagement Hub. Virtual attendance available — panel begins at 4:45 PM.

UC Santa Cruz has named its 2025 Chancellor's Innovation Impact Award recipients — honoring breakthroughs in coastal climate resilience, brain-computer interfaces, forensic genomics, and regional entrepreneurship. Among the honorees is Bud Colligan, a founding board member of Santa Cruz Works.

Join us for an afternoon at the cutting edge of conservation genomics as we explore everything from de-extinction to searching water samples for viral genomes, with researchers from the UC Santa Cruz Genomics Institute who are turning DNA into a tool for protecting life on Earth.

UC Santa Cruz is among the world’s leading research institutions identified in Clarivate’s latest analysis of the 70 organizations most frequently home to Highly Cited Researchers for 2025.

UCSC’s presence in the world of entrepreneurship expands day by day. Most recently they have been propelled forward by two students, onto the world stage.

Subsense is a modular brain interface built on two classes of functional nanoparticles and a wearable wireless device. Together, they form a bidirectional bridge between neural activity and computation.

UC Santa Cruz is broadening access to hands-on career experience for humanities students after receiving a $2 million grant from the Mellon Foundation in support of its Employing Humanities initiative.

Flip helps local businesses grow by building simple systems that connect social media, customer data, and automation — turning everyday online attention into steady, trackable revenue without paid ads.

UC Santa Cruz researchers connected lab-grown neural tissue to a Cartpole simulation and showed it can learn through adaptive electrical feedback. Performance improved with targeted stimulation, depended on synaptic signaling, and revealed short-term, circuit-level learning in living systems.

UCSC students, supported by CIED, earned third place at the 2026 VCIC West Regional in Provo on February 7. Their best finish yet reflects a growing, repeatable investor-training pipeline, rigorous selection, coaching, and due diligence.

Santa Cruz County’s 2026 watch list marks a shift from invention to execution. These companies are scaling with real organizational maturity, durable advantages, and clear catalysts, while staying anchored locally. From aviation and fintech to climate systems and biotech delivery, Santa Cruz is proving it can build globally and keep value here.