Coral reefs not only provide the world with rich, productive ecosystems and photogenic undersea settings, they also contribute an economic boost valued at hundreds of billions of dollars. But their decline in recent years due to a variety of threats—from pollution to climate warming—has lent urgency to the search for new ways to evaluate their health.
The 2014 edition of the U.S. News & World Report’s Best Graduate Schools guidebook, released today, highly ranks the University of California, San Diego’s professional schools in engineering and medicine, as well as its academic Ph.D. programs in the social sciences and humanities.
John Moore, professor of linguistics at the University of California, San Diego, has been appointed the new provost of John Muir College, effective September 1, 2013. Moore, who joined UC San Diego’s faculty in 1992, will be replacing visual arts professor Susan Smith, who is stepping down after seven years of service as provost.
What can green algae do for science if they weren’t, well, green? That’s the question biologists at UC San Diego sought to answer when they engineered a green alga used commonly in laboratories, Chlamydomonas reinhardtii, into a rainbow of different colors by producing six different colored fluorescent proteins in the algae cells.
The Rady School of Management at UC San Diego has been ranked 19th in faculty research in the Financial Times’ Global MBA Rankings 2013. It also ranked 7th in entrepreneurship by alumni surveyed by the Financial Times of London. Among the more than 700 AACSB International accredited business schools worldwide, the Financial Times selected 155 for its full-time MBA ranking.
Perfectly qualified to teach herbology at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, Steve Briggs instead settles for distinguished professor at UC San Diego. Briggs researches plant cell biology and focuses particularly on plant immune systems. Aside from being a main source of food, livestock feed, clothes and building material, plants also “give us medicine and natural beauty,” he says. As chief scientist of the 2013 San Diego Festival of Science & Engineering, Briggs brings a level of excitement and enthusiasm to the event that rivals his passion for botany.
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