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Voices of Baskin Engineering

  • David Lee: Faculty

    David Lee: Faculty

    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.”

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  • Robert Lund: Faculty

    Robert Lund: Faculty

    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.”

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  • Kenneth Caluya: Graduate Student

    Kenneth Caluya: Graduate Student

    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.”

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  • Sabina Tomkins: Graduate Student

    Sabina Tomkins: Graduate Student

    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.”

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  • Austin King: Graduate Student

    Austin King: Graduate Student

    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.”

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  • Brenda Betancourt: Alumna

    Brenda Betancourt: Alumna

    Degree Program: Ph.D., Applied Mathematics and Statistics
    Graduate Institution: UC Santa Cruz
    Undergraduate Institution: Universidad Nacional de Colombia
    Department: Applied Mathematics, Statistics
    Hometown: Bogotá, Colombia

    “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.”

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  • Preet Kaur: Alumna

    Preet Kaur: Alumna

    Degree Program: Biomolecular Engineering, B.S. and Bioinformatics, B.S.
    Undergraduate Institution: UC Santa Cruz
    Department: Biomolecular Engineering

    “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.”

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  • Keerthi Krishnan: Alumnus

    Keerthi Krishnan: Alumnus

    Degree Program: B.S., Computer Science, minor in Applied Mathematics
    Graduate Institution: Chapman University
    Undergraduate Institution: UC Santa Cruz
    Department: Computer Science and Engineering

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

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  • Marcela Alfaro-Córdoba: New Faculty

    Marcela Alfaro-Córdoba: New Faculty

    Graduate Institution: Iowa State University, M.S., North Carolina State University, Ph.D.
    Undergraduate Institution: Universidad de Costa Rica
    Department: Statistics

    “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.”

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  • Akhil Dixit: Graduate Student

    Akhil Dixit: Graduate Student

    Degree Program: Computer Science, Ph.D.
    Graduate Institution: UC Santa Cruz
    Undergraduate Institution: University of Pune, India
    Department: Computer Science and Engineering
    Hometown: Pune, India

    “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.”

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  • Manping Jia: Graduate Student

    Manping Jia: Graduate Student

    Degree Program: Electrical and Computer Engineering, Ph.D.
    Graduate Institution: UC Santa Cruz, University of Science and Technology, Beijing (M.S., Materials Science)
    Undergraduate Institution: University of Science and Technology, Beijing
    Department: Electrical and Computer Engineering
    Hometown: Datong, China

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

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  • Ikenna Anigbogu: Alumnus

    Ikenna Anigbogu: Alumnus

    Degree Program: Biomolecular Engineering and Bioinformatics, B.S.
    Undergraduate Institution: UC Santa Cruz
    Department: Biomolecular Engineering
    Hometown: El Cerrito, CA

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

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  • Sidney Robinson: Undergraduate

    Sidney Robinson: Undergraduate

    Degree Program: Computer Science, B.S.
    Undergraduate Institution: University of California, Santa Cruz
    Department: Computer Science

    “Change is coming, and I’m excited for it.”

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  • Evan West: Alumnus

    Evan West: Alumnus

    Degree Program: Computer Science, B.S.
    Graduate Institution: Stony Brook University
    Undergraduate Institution: University of California, Santa Cruz
    Department: Computer Science

    “I’ve had people come up to me and say, “your class is the reason I got an internship or a job offer,” and that is wonderful. It’s definitely one of my prouder moments.”

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  • Fatemeh Mirzaei: Graduate Student

    Fatemeh Mirzaei: Graduate Student

    Degree Program: Ph.D., Computer Science and Engineering
    Graduate Institution: University of California, Santa Cruz
    Undergraduate Institution: Azad University
    Department: Computer Science and Engineering
    Hometown: Tehran, Iran

    “We want to provide greater context around online content for consumers, and reduce the amount of time people have to devote to sorting through information.”

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  • Carmen Robinson: Staff

    Carmen Robinson: Staff

    Graduate Institution: University of Arkansas at Little Rock
    Undergraduate Institution: University of Central Arkansas
    Department: Undergraduate Affairs and MEP
    Hometown: Little Rock, Arkansas

    “It is important to have a community, especially for students of color because it’s easy to feel like you’re erased, that you don’t belong somewhere because historically you’re not a part of that group, but things have to change and things are changing, and it’s so important to have diversity in tech.”

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  • John Felts: Alumnus

    John Felts: Alumnus

    Degree Program: Ph.D., Electrical and Computer Engineering
    Graduate Institution: University of California, Santa Cruz
    Undergraduate Institution: UC Santa Barbara
    Department: Electrical and Computer Engineering
    Hometown: Fresno, California

    “I think for any entrepreneur you just have to be ready that it’s going to be tougher than you think, but at the end of the day, even if you fail, you’re going to learn so much…. it’s going to be so hard, so be ready for that, but it’s, it’s worth the ride.”

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  • Ryan Modlin: Alumnus and Graduate Student

    Ryan Modlin: Alumnus and Graduate Student

    Degree Program: B.S., Bioengineering, M.S., Microbiology and Environmental Toxicology
    Graduate Institution: UC Santa Cruz
    Undergraduate Institution: UC Santa Cruz
    Department: Biomolecular Engineering
    Hometown: Huntington Beach, CA

    “Currently, my project is engineering zymomonas mobilis, a unique organism that has a specific metabolic pathway that helps increase the production of biofuels, specifically ethanol and butanol… Fossil fuels are quickly becoming depleted and are very toxic, so if we were able to find a sustainable synthetic source of fuel, it would be extremely beneficial for overall environmental health.”

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  • Jared Duval: Graduate Student

    Jared Duval: Graduate Student

    Degree Program: Ph.D., Computational Media
    Graduate Institution: UC Santa Cruz
    Undergraduate Institution: Western New England University
    Department: Computational Media
    Hometown: Dudley, Massachusetts

    “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.”

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