Voices of Baskin Engineering

The most exciting thing to me about engineering is that anything is possible. You gain the tools you need to create anything. If you see something wrong with the world around you, you can enact change and make it different.

SpokeIt is a big team project I’m working on. It’s a game with this overarching narrative and within that game there are a bunch of therapeutic mini games that focus on different kinds of speech therapy.

I enjoy being creative but I also have an interest in technical stuff. Computer game design is a nice balance because there’s a technical-based program supplemented by art, so I can pursue both those interests in that major.

I think what makes engineers really special is their tenacity and ability to take on a challenge and make it work because at the end of the day when you finally do that it feels so rewarding.

From learning English to receiving an outstanding formation in Bayesian Statistics, my time at the Baskin School of Engineering was a life-changing experience for me.

Since I was a kid I was interested in computers and really wanted to know how they work from the inside out. The curiosity is what led me to engineering.

If I have any advice that I would give to incoming students about starting something, I would say just start going to a club meeting. Find a community or an organization that you enjoy, that you are passionate about, and just start being a presence.

My research focuses mainly on different applications of machine learning and deep learning in the medical field for diagnosing different diseases. For example, I am working with the UC San Francisco Epilepsy Lab to try to predict the onset of seizures in patients and detect if there is a way to identify factors that have to do with initiation and termination of seizures so that we can kind of control patients between these two.

"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."

"I see myself as a problem solver, and this I owe to my engineering background, because I’m constantly defining a problem, then breaking it down into smaller and smaller pieces until I can solve it with technology.”

My research work is on something that I’m defining as casual creators, which is a genre of creativity software that nobody has identified yet but a lot of examples of these exist. It turns out there’s this entire other genre of software that’s for casual creators, people who are using this thing autotelically, which means for its own purpose.

"Nanopore sequencing was developed here at UC Santa Cruz. They’re one of the big leaders in using this technology. I saw a really interesting opportunity to apply those types of technologies to my research."

"The professors have this work hard/play hard attitude, which sounds cliche, but not a lot of other statistics departments prioritize balance the way our professors do. And that’s what sold me on coming here."

"What I like about the Baskin School of Engineering is the research being done in AI and machine learning and the collaboration happening between departments so they can help build off of each other in ways that they weren’t intuitively familiar with."

"I study genetic ancestry in drosophila, AKA the fruit fly. The goal of this research is mainly to understand how we can incorporate diverse populations into our study."

"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."

"I like that there’s a sense of community here. I also like that it’s very interdisciplinary. Collaborating with biologists keeps me on my toes because I have to learn biology and all these other things."

"The great thing about Baskin School of Engineering is the fact that it provide great mentorship and easy transition to graduate programs."

I work with a method called EVIP, which stands for expression-based variant-impact phenotyping, and basically what that means is we use expression data, like RNA-Seq, to predict the function of different mutations that happen in cancer.

"I’m working on a multifocus microscope that is able to capture 3D images. With most conventional microscopy techniques you can look at the image of only one plane at the same time and you have to move your sample and scan through that sample. But in this case we get all the information at once."

I’m working on large archival storage systems—things like capturing scientific data which you’re going to store for a long time and slowly process it and how to make them cheaper, more reliable, more energy efficient. Currently a lot of scientific institutes capture a lot of data and they slowly go through it, step by step.

I study different animal species both living and extinct by analyzing their genomes. One project, specifically, is studying the genomic health of puma populations.

My interest in engineering kind of came from the mechanical side of things. I was a construction worker and really liked the mechanical aspect. Studying robotics has really given me a chance to learn 3D modeling and 3D printing, and to interface that and actually be able to make something move has been extremely rewarding.

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.