Baskin Engineering Communications 
Degree Program: Master of Science, Electrical Engineering (2016)
Undergraduate Institution: UC Santa Cruz
Department: Electrical Engineering
Hometown: Sebastopol, California
“If you had talked to me three years ago, I doubt I would’ve expected I’d end up where I am, but I’d wager most people would say the same about where their career takes them.”
Degree Program: Network and Digital Technology B.A.
Graduate Institution: UC Santa Cruz
Undergraduate Institution: UC Santa Cruz
Department: Computer Science and Engineering
“Being a computer engineer you can have a lot of choices, whether it’s directly related to computers and making them better and programming applications that do necessary things or whether it’s doing biology, chemistry, physics.”
Degree Program: Electrical Engineering, B.S.
Undergraduate Institution: UC Santa Cruz
Department: Electrical Engineering
Hometown: Chico, CA
“[Being in the Army] definitely was an experience that opened my eyes to a lot of different opportunities and experiences that you can’t find anywhere else, I would say. In addition to that, finishing my time there, I was able to go back to UC Santa Cruz, to finish something that I had wanted to do.”
Degree Program: Ph.D., Electrical Engineering
Graduate Institution: UC Santa Cruz
Undergraduate Institution: BSE Duke University, MSEE North Carolina State University
Department: Electrical Engineering
“The most important thing a student needs to learn in their education is not to memorize this or that formula, or do certain calculations at this speed, but really to develop an intuitive understanding and knowledge of what they are learning about.”
Degree Program: P.h.D., Statistics
Graduate Institution: UC Santa Cruz
Undergraduate Institution: Cal-State Bakersfield
Department: Applied Mathematics and Statistics (2014)
Hometown: Buttonwillow, California
“The skills and lessons I learned at UC Santa Cruz have largely influenced the manner in which I approach my current research on a daily basis. The high standards for rigorous statistical analysis have carried forth into all aspects of my work.”
Degree Program: Natural Language Processing M.S.
Undergraduate Institution: University of California, Santa Cruz
Department: Natural Language Processing
Hometown: Atwater, California
“We’re getting real experts who work in the industry to show us how they use the technology and what they do with it. Getting that perspective is really cool.”
Degree Program: Assistant Professor, Technology Management
Graduate Institution: Stanford University
Undergraduate Institution: California Institute of Technology
Department: Computational Media
“I wanted to find a way to organize large numbers of people to support nonprofits. I knew that my research in crowd-sourcing, and in bringing people together to accomplish tasks, could help.”
Graduate Institution: University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Undergraduate Institution: Auburn University
Department: Professor and Department Chair, Statistics
“What I do as a statistician is crunch the numbers. We take data, compare it to what a climatologist’s model predicts, and give them our conclusions and how sure we are of those conclusions.”
Degree Program: Ph.D., Applied Mathematics
Graduate Institution: UC Santa Cruz
Undergraduate Institution: UC Riverside
Department: Applied Mathematics
Hometown: Phillipines
“I’m mentoring an undergrad right now and what I realized over the course of working with him is the importance of giving students support. My professors and older grad students always gave me that support so it feels good for me to pay that forward.”
Degree Program: Ph.D., Technology and Information Management
Graduate Institution: UC Santa Cruz
Undergraduate Institution: NYU
Department: Computer Science and Engineering
Hometown: Seattle
“I’m working on this human trafficking project. The broad question was whether environmental events affect human traffickers. We found an increase in mentions of certain ethnicities after hurricanes in these ads, especially ethnicities from Caribbean countries.”
Degree Program: Natural Language Processing M.S.
Graduate Institution: University of California, Santa Cruz
Undergraduate Institution: University of California, Santa Cruz
Department: Natural Language Processing
Hometown: Sunnyvale, CA
“It’s amazing hearing from people who are working on NLP now — for example the professor teaching my five o’clock class is teaching at five because he’s working with the technology during the rest of the day. I feel lucky to have these people teaching us.”
Karen Miga is a longtime Genomics Institute researcher, named “one to watch” by the journal Nature.