The University of California, San Diego is not short on big ideas. Just ask Craig Callender, chair of the Department of Philosophy, who was recently featured in San Diego Magazine’s “Big Ideas” feature for his vision to establish the Institute of Practical Ethics on campus. Callender conceptualizes UC San Diego as a leading center for ethical science; to realize that vision, the philosophy department now offers a new minor program in bioethics, with its first students enrolled this winter quarter.
A 2013 University of California, San Diego M.F.A. graduate in acting, Ngozi Anyanwu, has won the inaugural Humanitas Prize for “Good Grief,” a play about a first-generation Nigerian girl dealing with love and loss in a small Pennsylvania town. Chosen from more than 230 submissions, “Good Grief” will be presented in staged readings Feb. 12-14 at the Humanitas Play Festival in Culver City.
The University of California, San Diego Division of Arts and Humanities recently sponsored, “The Scarlet Stone,” a modern dance/theater retelling of a tragic Persian myth developed by Shahrokh Yadegari, professor of sound design in the Department of Theatre and Dance. The production was performed last summer at UC San Diego’s Mandell Weiss Forum, toured to Toronto—for the Tirgan Festival, the largest Persian arts festival in the western hemisphere—and then to Los Angeles at UCLA's Royce Hall. This production, which involves university faculty and alumni, is now set to reach more than 14 million viewers worldwide through four satellite broadcasts during the week of Feb. 8 on BBC Persian in Iran, Tajikistan and Afghanistan, and online streaming at the time of broadcast.
“I don’t really understand how people who have been active in the university can retire,” said William Fenical, UC San Diego distinguished professor of oceanography and director of the Center for Marine Biotechnology and Biomedicine at Scripps Institution of Oceanography. “We’ve dedicated every waking moment of our lives for 50 years to doing things that are beneficial for folks. How do you just drop that?” At 74, Fenical is still is a full-time professor and still researching drugs from the sea, including compounds that look very promising to fight melanoma, multiple myeloma as well as breast and ovarian cancer.
Scripps Institution of Oceanography’s fleet of research vessels, soon to be augmented with the arrival of the new R/V Sally Ride, has logged hundreds of thousands of nautical miles exploring the world’s oceans—over undersea volcanoes and through monstrous waves—seeking answers to some of the planet’s most daunting environmental challenges.
