Research Highlights Videos
UC Santa Cruz researchers are leading transformative change and developing bold solutions for the challenges of our time. Explore some of the areas of excellence of our award-winning faculty.
Beth Shapiro
Beth Shapiro is an ecology and evolutionary biology professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her research focuses on paleogenomics and ancient DNA collected from bones, tissues, sediment, or other remains post-mortem. The older the DNA, the more degraded that DNA tends to be. But researchers have nonetheless recovered DNA as much as two million years old preserved in arctic sediments. Her work also involves “de-extinction,” which uses ancient DNA to “bring back” species or traits that have gone extinct, like in the movie Jurassic Park. Shapiro is currently on a leave of absence from the university while serving as Chief Scientific Officer at Colossal Biosciences, which aims to bring back recently extinct species like the mammoth and the dodo.
Emily Brodsky
Emily Brodsky is an earth and planetary sciences professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her research focuses on the mechanics underlying earthquakes, addressing questions about the processes that trigger earthquakes and the constraining forces and processes that occur inside a fault zone during slip.
Jenny Reardon
Jenny Reardon is a sociology professor and the founding director of the Science & Justice Research Center at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her research draws into focus questions about identity, justice, and democracy that are often silently embedded in scientific ideas and practices, particularly in modern genomic research.
Learn more about Jenny Reardon’s research
Jenny Reardon participates in Vatican workshop on personalized medicine
Ricardo Sanfelice
Ricardo Sanfelice is a professor and chair of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He currently serves as director of the Cyber-Physical Systems Research Center and the CITRIS Aviation Initiative. His research interests include modeling, stability, robust control, observer design, and simulation of nonlinear and hybrid systems, with applications to power systems, aerospace, and biology.