News Archive

August 20, 2015 — An international team of scientists headed by biologists at UC San Diego has discovered that an important class of stem cells known as human “induced pluripotent stem cells,” or iPSCs, which are derived from an individual’s own cells, can be differentiated into various types of functional cells with different fates of immune rejection.

August 17, 2015 — UC San Diego is ranked the 14th best university in the world for the third consecutive year, according to the 2015 Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU). The rankings were recently released by the Center for World-Class Universities at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, a public research university located in Shanghai, China, renowned as one of the oldest and most prestigious and selective universities in China. In addition, UC San Diego’s programs in life sciences, engineering, computer science, chemistry, and economics are ranked among the top 20 in the world. Nationally, UC San Diego is listed as the 12th best university.

August 17, 2015 — CSE professor Pavel Pevzner and recent postdoc Phillip Campeau are launching a six-part series of courses as a Specialization mini-degree on Coursera teaching bioinformatics, culminating in a Capstone Project that will prepare students to solve real-world research challenges.

August 11, 2015 — A bioinformatics researcher at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at the University of California, San Diego, has been awarded a three-year National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant worth almost $1.4 million to make biological structures more widely available to scientists, educators, and students.

August 7, 2015 — This year's NASIT will feature lectures and workshops by professors from Stanford, USC, Carnegie Mellon and UC Irvine on a wide range of topics, including managing signal interference, optimizing data analysis and channel models for biological communications.

August 3, 2015 — NSF has awarded Calit2, CITRIS and nearly 20 participating institutions a $5 million, 5-year grant to create the Pacific Research Platform to enable a science-driven data freeway system in the western U.S. with speeds 1,000 times faster that today's traffic between campuses.

July 30, 2015 — When University of California, San Diego alumnus and biotechnology pioneer David Goeddel, ’72, pledged a gift of $400,000 to establish the David V. Goeddel Endowed Graduate Fellowship at UC San Diego, his goal was to support and foster the innovators and scientists of the future. The endowed fund, which will be matched in full by the UC San Diego Division of Biological Sciences, will annually support the research and scholarly activities of outstanding Biological Sciences graduate students. The inaugural Goeddel fellowship recipients will use the funding to bolster leading-edge research focused on topics ranging from finding better treatments for diseases such as Parkinson’s, to understanding the metabolism of cells in tissues and organs, to studying cyanobacteria as a bio-production platform for renewable fuels.

July 22, 2015 — Far from being selfish organisms whose sole purpose is to maximize their own reproduction, bacteria in large communities work for the greater good by resolving a social conflict among individuals to enhance the survival of their entire community.

June 29, 2015 — Laboratories that test chemicals for neurological toxicity could reduce their use of laboratory mice and rats by replacing these animal models with tiny aquatic flatworms known as freshwater planarians, according to study by UC San Diego scientists.

June 22, 2015 — Chemists and biologists at UC San Diego have succeeded in designing and synthesizing an artificial cell membrane capable of sustaining continual growth, just like a living cell.