Faced with a downturn in visitors, the San Diego History Center (SDHC) decided to take an innovative approach to boosting museum attendance – let visitors determine how much they wanted to pay for their visit. The museum’s “Give Forward” admissions program launched in October 2016 and, to date, has given it a significant boost in attendance. This fundamental shift in admissions was inspired by the research of Ayelet Gneezy and Uri Gneezy, faculty at the Rady School of Management at UC San Diego, and experts in charitable giving. Working with the Rady School professors, the museum determined the best way to increase admissions was to allow visitors to contribute based on their experience in the museum, instead of paying a set admissions fee. In addition, the museum highlights to visitors that admissions donations help pay for other people to visit in the future.
Genetic mutations that cause cancer also weaken cancer cells, allowing researchers to develop drugs that will selectively kill them. This is called “synthetic lethality” because the drug is only lethal to mutated (synthetic) cells. Researchers at UC San Diego School of Medicine and Jacobs School of Engineering developed a method to search for synthetic-lethal gene combinations. The technique, published March 20 in Nature Methods, uncovered 120 new opportunities for cancer drug development.
Kyoto University of Japan, one of the University of California San Diego’s international partners, will open an office in San Diego in early April, both campuses have announced.
To help promote cooperation between educational institutions in the United States and Mexico, the UC San Diego Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies co-launches the Mexico Studies Chair, hosting a Fulbright-Garcia Robles scholar to research and teach on campus.
The San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at the University of California San Diego and the Simons Foundation’s Flatiron Institute in New York have reached an agreement under which the majority of SDSC’s data-intensive Gordon supercomputer will be used by Simons for ongoing research following completion of the system’s tenure as a National Science Foundation (NSF) resource on March 31.
