Voices of Baskin Engineering

"I am not thinking too far ahead, but instead trying to live in the present. I am more concerned about making meaningful contributions and learning as many things as possible in my postdoc appointment at UC Santa Cruz.”

"It’s been nice to establish a research network at UCSC and outside of the UCSC research community, which has allowed me to secure new project collaborations and expand my research scope."

"One of the things that attracted me to Baskin Engineering was the opportunity to do an interdisciplinary project that blends the topics of security of cyber physical systems and control theory."

"The ACE program is what motivated me to continue my involvement in academia and what encouraged me to pursue a career in education to hopefully become a professor one day."

"Currently, I’m working on discriminating cyber attacks from typical perturbations. I’m using machine learning for data streams to classify power systems events and disturbances in real time."

"So many of our students have the challenge of being the first in their family to go to college, the first to consider graduate school, or of being the first to be in a STEM field. It’s intimidating to leave what is familiar and step into new territory. They embrace that challenge with such heart, commitment, determination, and passion. It’s completely inspiring."

"My two favorite days of the year are the first day of the academic year and commencement. To see students walk across the stage with the world at their fingertips is just rad!"

"I’m really grateful for all the resources I had at Baskin Engineering and the faculty who helped me along the way."

"A big part of my research deals with how I can use statistics to solve global and public health problems."

"Some of my closest friends are from bioengineering and bioinformatics. Seeing my friends succeed and being a part of that success is something I’m really proud of."

"What I am working on now focuses on natural language processing—how natural language machine learning products work, how they fail, and how we can build more robust systems that are resilient to unfair biases."

"Research has given me a lot of academic and industry knowledge. I feel more prepared to take on real-world challenges."

"Baskin [Engineering] gave me that forefront of knowledge that allowed me to excel in my graduate career."

"It’s exciting to introduce the topic of statistics to people that have no prior knowledge or experience with the field. My goal is to motivate students to keep learning about the field of statistics."

"One highlight from the research I’ve done in my Ph.D. program is winning the ACM SIGMOD Student Research Competition in Amsterdam in 2019. It was a very exciting moment for me."

"Getting that first lead-author paper was a big step in my research career. It reassured me that my ideas are valid, and I’m making notable contributions to the field of engineering."

"I was always good at math and science growing up. I found comfort knowing that there is a solution in numbers, formulas, or algorithms."

"The TIM degree program encompassed everything that I was interested in because you get to learn about computer engineering, computer science, and business and information systems."

"My dream job would be one where I could develop wearable bioelectronic devices for health monitoring."

"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."

"Bioengineering really exposed me to the humanitarian side of science, which is something I have always wanted to be involved in."

"[NLP is] a new enough field that there are cool things for students and researchers to get involved with. A degree in NLP will help me focus on what I want to do."

"I would have never thought I would get an internship at NASA! It’s great... I focus on helping to develop the next level of air transportation in the U.S. and other parts of the world through NASA partnerships. If you heard of the concept of an “Air Taxi” then that sums it up."

"Change is coming, and I'm excited for it."