George R. R. Martin, author of the series “A Song of Ice and Fire,” adapted on HBO as “Game of Thrones,” will visit the University of California San Diego May 1 and 2 to help raise funds for the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop. Martin is a former instructor for the oldest science fiction and fantasy writing program, which resides within the Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination. Considered the most prominent fantasy writer since J.R.R. Tolkien, Martin will engage in conversation about the craft of writing science fiction and fantasy with Kim Stanley Robinson, an esteemed science fiction writer and a UC San Diego Department of Literature alumnus. Their public discussion takes place Tuesday, May 2, 7 p.m., in the Price Center West Ballroom. Tickets are already sold out.
The Leapfrog Group, a nonprofit organization that advocates quality, safety and transparency in the U.S. health care system, has named UC San Diego Health to its biannual list of hospitals with the highest safety standards in the country. UC San Diego Health hospitals in Hillcrest and La Jolla were among just 823 health care facilities nationwide to receive a grade of A for excellence in safety and quality.
The Qualcomm Institute (QI) at UC San Diego is staging a new work, “Still”, on April 20. The multimedia performance work by Music Ph.D. student Kyle Johnson is part of QI’s Initiative for Digital Exploration of Arts and Sciences (IDEAS), a performing arts series now in its fourth season.
UC San Diego’s Office of Innovation and Commercialization (OIC) launched the Entrepreneurs-in-Residence (EIR) program in 2015 to accelerate the creation of new startup companies. The OIC, a Research Affairs unit, will honor the newly appointed 2017 EIR cohort and thank the 2016 cohort for their hard work with a reception, Apr. 17, at Bella Vista Social Club and Caffé in the Sanford Consortium.
Various studies and analyses have revealed that the remains are those of a girl between 15 and 16 years old who lived almost 13,000 years ago in what is now Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula.
Chinese hamster ovary (CHO) cells are the workhorses behind more than half of the top-selling biologics on the market today. Humira, Avastin and Rituxan are a few. Researchers at the UC San Diego CHO Systems Biology Center are developing new tools, such as genome-scale metabolic models, to optimize CHO cell production of biologic drugs in the hope of driving down their costs.
