UCSC's 2025 Chancellor's Innovation Impact Awards Celebrate Regional Changemakers
UC Santa Cruz has announced the recipients of its 2025 Chancellor's Innovation Impact Awards — and the honorees reflect the breadth and ambition of what's happening in our own backyard. From coastal climate resilience to brain-computer interfaces to forensic genomics, this year's awards make clear that the innovation ecosystem of the Monterey Bay region is producing work with real-world consequences.
The awards span four categories. Mike Beck, director of UCSC's Center for Coastal Climate Resilience, earned Innovator of the Year for his work quantifying how natural ecosystems — mangroves, coral reefs, wetlands — reduce flood and storm risk. By translating ecological science into economic terms that insurers and governments can act on, Beck is helping make nature-based coastal protection a viable alternative to traditional infrastructure. The Translation of the Year went to NeuroSWARM3, a neurophotonic technology from the Yanik Lab that enables wireless, minimally invasive monitoring of brain activity at scale — a platform now advancing toward commercialization through a partnership with neurotechnology company Subsense, Inc.
The Lifetime Achievement Award honored Richard E. Green, a professor of Biomolecular Engineering whose pioneering work in paleogenomics helped establish an entirely new scientific field. His advisor, Svante Pääbo, won the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine — and Green co-authored four of the six key publications cited in the Nobel announcement. Green's work has since spun out multiple Santa Cruz-rooted startups, including Astrea Forensics and Dovetail Genomics.
The Community Changemaker Award went to Bud Colligan, a longtime champion of regional economic vitality whose efforts have touched nearly every corner of the local tech and entrepreneurial landscape. A founding board member of Santa Cruz Works, Colligan has spent years channeling the resources and experience from his Silicon Valley career — including leadership roles at Apple and as CEO of Macromedia — into building a more inclusive and resilient regional economy.
Santa Cruz Works knows something about this award. In 2023, we were honored as the inaugural Community Changemaker — the first recipient in the program's history. Seeing Bud recognized in the same category, two years later, feels fitting. He was there at the founding of SCW, and his vision for what this region can be has shaped our work from the start.
The 2025 honorees will be celebrated at a gathering on May 7, 2026. Congratulations to all.
Related Articles
Santa Cruz Works Awarded UCSC 2023 Community Changemaker — SCW received the inaugural Community Changemaker Award at UCSC's first-ever Chancellor's Innovation Impact Award Program dinner.
UCSC's 2024 Chancellor's Innovation Impact Awards: Sustainable AI, Youth Empowerment, and Personalized Medicine — From sustainable AI to youth empowerment and personalized medicine, the 2024 honorees exemplify innovation with purpose.
UCSC Innovator of the Year Award 2023: Holger Schmidt — A UCSC professor's optofluidic chip technology is enabling earlier, more accurate detection of disease biomarkers like DNA and proteins.
UCSC Innovator of the Year Award 2023: Susana Ruiz — Augmented reality and holographic filmmaking come together in a public memorial experience uncovering the lost history of Santa Cruz's last Chinatown.
UCSC Lifetime Achievement in Innovation 2023: David Haussler — The genomics pioneer who helped assemble the first human genome is now leading the pangenome initiative from his lab at UC Santa Cruz.