UC San Diego faculty and staff are on the frontlines of our students' educational experience. They teach and mentor the next generation of innovators and leaders, fostering their intellectual and personal development. Others work day in and day out to advance solutions to our world's most pressing challenges-ranging from climate change to social justice issues-or to deliver exceptional health care to patients in our region and beyond.
Armed with skill, special tools and light, University of California San Diego Associate Professor Neal Devaraj and a group of his chemistry graduate students activated cellular gene expression with unique precision. By modifying messenger RNA (mRNA)—a group of molecules that carries genetic information from DNA to ribosomes where specifications of gene expression occur—the chemists were able to precisely trigger gene expressions at a specific time and place using laser light. This novel technique will ease future studies of individual protein functions in cells or tissues at different stages of biological development.
Philippe Sands has been dedicated to human rights issues throughout his career and has worked on high-profile human rights cases involving abuse. Now, in his book East West Street, Sands explores the creation and development of legal concepts that came about as a result of Hitler's Third Reich which changes our understanding of history and how civilization has tried to cope with mass murder.
Yinan Wang was in his second year of postdoctoral research at the University of California San Diego when he and his wife, Rebecca, tragically died in a car accident while vising Sequoia National Park in August of 2017. To celebrate his life and scientific ambitions, his family has made a gift of $500,000 to the UC San Diego Division of Physical Sciences to create an endowed junior faculty fellowship that will benefit promising researchers in chemistry and biochemistry.
On March 6-7, hundreds of investors, innovators, entrepreneurs, and activators will converge at UC San Diego for the second annual Ignite conference. Launched in 2017, the signature innovation event brings universities across Cali-Baja together with leading community partners to support life-changing entrepreneurship. Now the initiative is expanding to feature programming and competitions spanning across two days.
The War on Drugs has been ongoing for several decades, yet its failure can be felt on both sides of the U.S.-Mexican border. In the last sixteen years, the opioid epidemic has claimed close to 125,000 lives in the U.S., whereas in Mexico the war on drugs has produced an estimated 200,000 deaths and over 30,000 disappearances in the last decade.
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