UC San Diego’s Office of Research Affairs has launched an aggressive push to boost innovation across all areas of campus and to speed university discoveries and technology to the nation’s marketplaces.
The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded a $5 million grant to support the Simons Array, a new system of three powerful telescopes designed to study the origins of the universe. Led by a team of scientists from UC San Diego, UC Berkeley and the University of Colorado, the Simons Array expands the POLARBEAR project, based in Chile’s Atacama desert, to search for the signature of cosmic inflation—the rapid expansion of the early universe after the Big Bang. The project is one of just four cosmology proposals—out of more than 40 applicants in 2014—to be funded by the NSF.
Leading computational biologist Jill P. Mesirov, PhD, has been appointed associate vice chancellor for computational health sciences and professor of medicine at University of California, San Diego School of Medicine and Moores Cancer Center. Mesirov most recently served as associate director and chief informatics officer at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, where she directed the Computational Biology and Bioinformatics Program.
In Syria during the late Ottoman Empire through the middle of the 20th century, the writing and circulation of petitions was a practice of citizenship used by a diverse range of individuals and groups. Ben Smuin, a doctoral candidate in history at the University of California, San Diego, is researching this practice with the hope that it will contribute to a better understanding of the complex issue of citizenship in today’s Syrian society. This fall, he will travel to the Middle East as one of 10 UC San Diego scholars to receive funding for research abroad through the Fulbright U.S. Student Program and Boren Awards for International Study.
Two biology professors at UC San Diego have been named Pew scholars in the biomedical sciences, an award given by the Pew Charitable Trusts this year to only 22 promising early-career researchers in the nation.
UC San Diego’s Department of Music, founded by composers over 40 years ago, spans the spectrum from classical to contemporary, including jazz, Hindustani, computer and experimental music. The Conrad Prebys Concert Hall, located in the heart of campus, is recognized as one of the greatest small concert halls in the world. The music department’s distinguished faculty have earned Pulitzer, Guggenheim, MacArthur and Grawemeyer awards. And, now, the department, under the Division of Arts and Humanities, also has key tools universities use in recruiting and retaining outstanding scholars: endowed faculty chairs.